ADDRESS BY FATAH REPRESENTATIVE,

ON THE OCCASION OF THE INTERNATIONAL DAY OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE,

Pretoria, November 29, 1999

 Mr Acting President,

Excellencies,

Brothers and Sisters, Comrades, Distinguished guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Allow me, first of all, to express my pleasure and emotion at being here with you, in this country which has emerged from the long night of injustice and oppression into the light of Democracy. A country long associated with the epitome of barbarity, and which is now embarked on an experience which places it at the head of mankind’s aspiration to a world free of racism, oppression, and the humiliation of Man by Man.

On the occasion of this celebration, which derives from the will of the international community to face its historical responsibility in the continued tragedy and suffering of our Palestinian people, I would like to make a few remarks concerning the present situation in our area.

The first one is that we have been engaged, for several years now, in a long and difficult peace process, but that we have not yet achieved Peace. Interim agreements signed between us and successive Israeli governments still have not been fully implemented, and we are only now starting to open the major files of the historical conflict: the illegal Israeli occupation of Arab Jerusalem, the plight of Palestinian refugees and their right to Return, the future of the colonial settlements which the Israeli occupying Power has erected, and continues to erect on our Land in defiance of international Law and in contradiction to its own formal commitments, and the exercise of our inalienable right to independence and statehood. This will be a complex process, which threatens to be longer than the ambitious time-frame agreed upon, and we need your support, and that of the international community as a whole, to move towards the just and durable peace which will pave the way to historical reconciliation between all the peoples of our region.

The agreements signed so far, from the Declaration of Principles of September 1993 - the famous Oslo Accords - to the recent Sharm-El-Sheikh Memorandum, were all interim arrangements. As such, they gave some semblance of provisional legitimacy to basically illegal situations and facts, because they represented a momentary compromise between Law and Force, between Right and Might. But as we engage in a bold attempt to put an end to a century-old conflict, we need to recall our Israeli partners and the whole world that only a just peace can endure the test of time. The present imbalance of power on the ground cannot shape the future relations between Palestinians and Israelis. It must be counterbalanced by the insistence of the international community to introduce the parameters of justice and legality into the equation of Peace. Only thus will we be able to move from conflict and confrontation to coexistence and cooperation, and enter the third millenium as free men and women.

The second remark is that there will be no stable and enduring Israeli-Palestinian peace unless there is a global Israeli-Arab peace, which implies, first and foremost, the end of the Israeli occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territory. On the other hand, it must be clear that there will be no stable and effective Arab-Israeli peace unless Palestinian rights are recognized and exercised.

Finally, let me share with you our worries: in spite of positive and reassuring statements issued by Israeli officials, and by the Israeli Prime Minister in particular, about his determination to achieve peace, we cannot fail to notice the accumulation of negative signals. The pursuit of Israeli settlement expansion and continued confiscation of Palestinian lands; the destruction of Palestinian Homes in Arab Jerusalem within the framework of an official policy of ethnic cleansing in the Holy City; the assurances given to settlers and generally speaking to the Israeli extremists; the refusal to recognize the right of Refugees to return to their homeland, after more than fifty years of a cruel exile; the justification of denial of free circulation for Palerstinians under the constant recourse to the dubious concept of Separation – which, if I am not mistaken, is the litteral translation for Apartheid; all those do not indicate that the psychological and cultural transformation required to turn a new page has been achieved.

Hence the need for your support. The late Yitzhak Rabin, who had been our arch-enemy before becoming our partner and dying as a hero and martyr of Peace, had once said that the Intifada, the Palestinian popular upheaval of the late eighties had “convinced” him of the non-viability of occupation. Let us hope the present Prime minister of Israel, who flatters himself with being Rabin’s heir, can understand the significance of his late mentor’s capacity to acknowledge the moral and political power of the materially weaker party, and abandon the logic of force and the temptation to impose unfair, illegal and ultimately doomed solutions. The sooner the better it will be for all the peoples of our region, including the Israeli people.

Thank you for your attention.

IlanHalevi                 

Fatah Representative