DFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh. Credit: Wikipedia
by james M Dorsey
Five decades ago, Nayef Hawatmeh, an aging left-wing guerrilla leader, created a template for a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinian resistance that has lessons for today’s warring parties.
The leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), Mr. Hawatmeh, sought to break the cycle of Israeli-Palestinian violence by embracing a compromise resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the principle of dialogue.
Tacitly backed by Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat, Mr. Hawatmeh put his money where his mouth was by becoming the first Palestinian leader to offer Israel a two-state solution in an unprecedented direct appeal to the Israeli public.
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Contrary to today’s Israel, Mr. Hawatmeh had a potential dialogue partner in former Israeli Labour Party secretary general Arie Eliav and Yitzhak Ben Aharon, former secretary general of the Histadrut, Israel’s once powerful trade union confederation, as well as an array of Zionist and anti-Zionist groups at a time that Labour was in power.
Engineered by Paul Jacobs, an American activist, journalist, and co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, Mr. Hawatmeh’s appeal to Israelis in March 1974, published by mainstream Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahranot, was intended to kick off a peace process, much like secret talks in Norway almost two decades later between Israelis and Palestinians that led to the flawed 1993 and 1994 Oslo Accords.
Messrs. Jacobs and Hawatmeh secured the agreement of Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, an early Arab proponent of normal relations with Israel, to sponsor a meeting in Tunis between Messrs. Arafat, Hawatmeh, Eliav, and Ben Aharon.
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Israeli troops rescue survivors of DFLP’s Maalot attack: Credit: Wikipedia
The meeting never materialised. It was smothered in blood when three DFLP fighters two months after Mr. Hawatmeh’s public appeal attacked a school in the Israeli town of Maalot, taking 115 people, primarily students, hostage. The fighters threatened to kill their hostages if their demands were not met.
The attack was the first to force Israel to negotiate with Palestinian hostage-takers. A negotiated deal, involving the release of 23 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons, and free passage for the hostage-takers in exchange for the freeing of the hostages, fell apart when the fighters failed to receive an approval code from DFLP headquarters by the time their deadline for killing their captives elapsed.
Twenty-five hostages, including 22 students and the DFLP operatives, were killed when Israeli forces stormed the school once the deadline elapsed without the Palestinians moving to release their captives.
Maalot made dialogue impossible. There was no way Messrs. Eliav and Ben Aharon could engage after the attack.
The DFLP’s Maalot attack is illustrative of the pitfalls of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, including the erstwhile pressures on Palestinian leaders willing to entertain dialogue and Hamas’s current insistence on maintaining the armed struggle during a peace negotiation process until an agreement has been achieved.
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Yasser Arafat meets Israeli pre-conditions in a 1988 United Nations speech in Geneva. Credit: Institute for Palestine Studies
Even so, Mr. Hawatmeh’s failed initiative kick-started a torturous process within the PLO, which 14 years later led to Mr. Arafat’s recognition of all United Nations resolutions calling for a partition of historic Palestine and denunciation of the armed struggle.
Almost four decades later, Hamas, despite the Gaza war, is engaged in a similar process. While the brutality of Hamas’ October 7 attack, the war, Gaza’s devastation at the hands of Israel, and blood-curdling statements on both sides of the divide are hardly conducive to compromise,.
Moreover, getting from A to B in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict confronts other fundamental problems.
Whether it has a seat at the table or not, Hamas, despite Israel’s vow to destroy the group militarily and politically, is likely to be a player in any future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Hamas, like many Palestinians, is convinced that Mr. Arafat’s strategy of accepting Israeli pre-conditions for talks and the resulting Oslo peace process failed to produce an acceptable resolution of the conflict.
As a result, it is only willing to play Palestinian trump cards, a peaceful arrangement between an Israeli and a Palestinian state, and an end to the armed struggle once the parties agree on principles and modalities of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
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Moreover, unlike Mr. Arafat, Hamas is offering a long-term ceasefire rather than de jure recognition of Israel. In addition, Hamas has so far not indicated that it would suspend the armed struggle during negotiations to avoid the fallout of a Maalot-style attack.
Irrespective of one’s attitude towards Hamas, the irony is that the group, like Palestinians at large, envisions future negotiations, not something that is part of the vision of either Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or his ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative coalition partners.
While political change in Israel may be a sine qua non for any future negotiation, change in and of itself will not address fundamental obstacles to a peace process embedded in what is likely a consensus in Israel on what Israel’s negotiating position should be as well as Hamas’ approach to negotiations.
Keeping in mind that Israel operates from a position of dominance, its insistence on pre-conditions is not the only problem.
Israel’s demand for de jure recognition upfront is not that simple. Israel demands more than just recognition of Israel’s existence. It wants Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a state, if not a Jewish state.
In other words, it wants Palestinian recognition of the legitimacy of Jewish claims to at least part of the land without acknowledging that Palestinians have legitimate claims.
Similarly, it wants Palestinians to surrender their claims to the territory controlled by Israel before the 1967 Middle East war in which the Jewish state conquered the West Bank and Gaza without relinquishing Israeli claims to post-1967 Israeli-occupied Palestinian lands.
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Ezer Weizman meets Yasser Arafat in South Africa in 1994. Credit: Israel Government Press Office
Dropping maximalist Israeli and Palestinian claims may not be a necessary prerequisite for negotiations.
Standing in the late 1970s in front of a since abandoned emblem of the Likud Party that showed Jordan and the West Bank as part of Israel, Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman said concerning the PLO charter that at the time called for Israel’s demise: “We can dream, so can they.”
At the time, roughly a year after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic 1977 visit to Jerusalem, Mr. Weizman and other Israeli leaders were contemplating granting Palestinians a degree of autonomy in the occupied territories. The notion of an independent Palestinian state was nowhere on the Israeli horizon.
Nevertheless, the bottom line is that equity has to exist in any attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Equity is the equivalence of both parties’ claims, aspirations, and concerns. It’s an equivalence that neither Palestinians nor Israelis embrace, yet it is the basis for any sustainable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.