Palestinian leader fears unreasonable expectations

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GAZA CITY, Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip — Since he accepted the responsibility of leading the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace conference in Madrid next week, Dr. Haider Abdel Shafi has been something of a haunted man. He is not worried about himself, despite threats to his life.

Rather, the 72-year-old Gazan physician, a man of self-deprecating sophistication and impeccable English, said Wednesday that his concerns are with the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Desperate for a new dawn, he says, they are building up unreasonable expectations for the Oct. 30 meeting. “I am haunted by this.

People have totally unjustified hopes that through this conference they will be able to have their children out of prison. This certainly is mortifying me,” he told five foreign journalists in his spacious but modest office of the Red Crescent Society, of which he is president. “Many people are looking at this conference as the salvation that they are waiting for.”

Abdel Shafi says he did not want to go to a peace conference. For weeks, he told those who asked that if chosen he would refuse. He would say: “I am an old man. I prefer to rest. This could be a very time-consuming and tedious matter,” he said.

But after Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chief, appealed personally, Abdel Shafi said, he was left with no choice. “I was told I must not shirk this responsibility,” he said. Then, with the briefest of smiles, he added: “Really, I was cornered.”

Abdel Shafi’s thick, gray-and-white eyebrows moved up toward his bald pate, his shoulders hunched slightly and he gave a look that was at once game and world-weary.

Abdel Shafi believes firmly in coexistence with Israel — as he has since 1947 — and says his speech for the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid conference will concentrate not so much on grievances as on a vision for the future. “There is no way to establish peace except based on the value of coexistence,” he said.

Abdel Shafi plans to call for a freeze of Israeli settlements and says that if that is turned down, he will appeal to the U.S. and Soviet sponsors of the conference. If Israel accedes to the requested gesture, “the intifadah will stop,” he said, using the Arabic word for the uprising of the past four years.

A Gazan by birth whose family goes back about 500 years on this seaside strip, packed since 1948 with hundreds of thousands of refugees, Abdel Shafi has had a remarkable political career. Through years of tumultuous involvement with the Palestinian cause, he has skillfully avoided being pinned down. He has remained independent while gaining respect.

In 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into one Jewish and one Arab state, the Zionists accepted it but the Arabs rejected it. Abdel Shafi was one of the rare Palestinians who urged acceptance.

“Palestinians were caught at the time in a strong and deep sense of grievance,” he said, seeking to explain the fateful rejection of partition that he feels led to so much more suffering. “People are surprised at how much anger that produces. Judgment is thwarted by anger. We should have accepted the partition plan. I was of that opinion then.

But I understand the strong drive within oneself not to accept it.” Abdel Shafi says he has always been a reluctant politician. “I have been drawn into politics against my inclination,” he said. “I am a doctor and a doctor sees the troubles of his people. You start to be moved by the suffering of those around you.”

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Cite this clipping

"Palestinian leader fears unreasonable expectations," Anchorage Daily News, 27 October 1991, p. G6. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1991-032. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1991-032