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October 6, 2004
This post returns to Hanan Ashrawi's 2003 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture entitled Peace in the Middle East.
I want to locate the lecture within the context of the Ashwrai affair in my first post on this lecture. I do so to highlight what is said in the lecture and the arguments to justify the attempts to prevent granting Hanan Ashwrai the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize.
Here is a sample of agument of the attack on Ashwrai. It is by Barry Ruben, who says:
"By giving Hanan Ashrawi a peace prize someone has made a bad mistake. The problem is not that she's a radical or relatively hardline. It is simply that she has done virtually nothing to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace.
But from this mistake we can learn a great deal about the problems of the Middle East conflict and why it is so often remarkably misperceived by outsiders. The simple truth is this: Ashrawi is a woman and a Christian. She speaks English well and knows how to talk to Westerners. She does not shout (though her tone is usually icily sarcastic) or voice slogans.
The assumption is, then, that she must be a moderate. ... Like everything else about Ashrawi and this applies to other Palestinian leaders as well it is all a matter of appearance and never of substance. And that has been a major reason why there is no peace.
She does not analyse issues or make any contribution to understanding them but simply repeats the line of a leadership that is dictatorial and extremist.
She formally condemns terrorism but then explains it away so that the listener concludes that it is all Israel's fault."
Ruben says that Hanan Ashwrai is not in favour of peace since she has staunchly defended the Palestinian's "right" to "resist" Israeli "occupation", which includes the use of violence. So her emphasis is on image-building rather than peace-making.
That lipservice to peace is not what is happening in the lecture. If you recall she had argued that the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination was "just", meaning it was justifiable, defensible or, perhaps, morally necessary, given the alternatives of colonial oppression by Israel.
But more than that is happening in the lecture.
The conflict between Palesinians and Israeli's is placed in an international context. Hanan's key claim is that in the aftermath of September 11 the logic of peace that had been formulated:
"....as the substance of Palestinian-Israeli encounters and dialogues, even long before negotiations, is currently being drowned by the din of war drums and the frenzied mutual infliction of pain over the last three years. Such tragic and unprecedented pervasive violence is not only eradicating previous achievements and agreements, but is also destroying the prospects of any future reconciliation."
Hanan Ashrawi's perspective is that the fallacies and assumptions of those who bang the wr drums must be confronted. What then is a fallacy? She says:
"The notion that a whole nation can be brought to its knees by the use of unbridled violence, or that the will of a people can be defeated by military means must be discarded once and for all. Armies may be able to defeat other armies, but the limits of power are most apparent when used against civilians and non-combatants. Along with that, the fallacy that there is or can be a military solution to the conflict must be completely and irrevocably discarded."
A military solution cannot resolve a political problem. That would apply to both Palestinian and Israeli attempts to use violence against civilians and non-combatants.
She argues that the situation in the Middle East is one that reinforces the irrational and immoral killing of civilians and the victimisation of the innocent. She says:
"The drive for revenge, like the escalation of military brutality, has generated the most tragic and futile momentum for escalation and self-destruction. On both sides, the “no holds barred” mindset has taken over as a mindless, visceral, repetitive response with horrific ramifications."
That is is what the Middle East appears to be from Australia: a prevailing dynamic of death and destruction.
An assumption Hanan highlights here, and questions, says that greater pain and punishment would lead to success or surrender of one side to the other.
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