Club Speech Read the transcript of Elizabeth Farnsworth's conversation with Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi. Club Q & A Read the Q & A for this event. Related Links Our guide to the best links related to this event. Purchase Tape Buy the audio of this event on tape.

We are not isolated, separate nation-states or ethnic groups or religions. On the contrary, we are part of a global human community, and whatever happens anywhere in the world has an impact throughout the world. We do have a responsibility to ensure that injustice, lawlessness, violence and terrorism in one place do not go uncontrolled without accountability and do not form a pattern of behavior that could spread throughout the world.

In Palestine, we have had ongoing violence, brutality and the most pervasive and comprehensive form of violations of human rights and liberties. It is a persistent occupation that has been allowed to continue and, as a wound within our region, allowed to fester. It has contributed to ongoing destabilization, to suspension of democracy and human rights, to behavior that can be described mildly as a behavior outside the law – and power politics, militarization and loss of resources.

Each town, city and village is still being strangled by a siege that has totally disrupted every aspect of life – not just freedom of movement and the economy, where we have over 60 percent unemployment and almost that percentage of people living under the poverty line. We have seen systematic destruction of our infrastructure, of our institutions; every aspect of our lives has been disrupted, including education, schools, universities, medical care, hospitals, and health services. Every single Palestinian feels personally targeted with the ongoing shelling and the military incursions by tanks into the hearts of our cities and towns; shelling from the air with Apache gun ships and F-16's; destruction of homes, crops, uprooting of trees, and the tragic loss of over 800 Palestinian lives and the wounding of over 30,000 Palestinian lives.

Israel continues to behave as a country above the law with total immunity and impunity. The problem is that this kind of reality and mentality are not conducive to trust, confidence, or to the launching of a genuine peace process. In 1991, we launched a peace process in Madrid, which we entered with tremendous hope. It was after the Gulf War, when the U.S. administration sponsored this regional and global peace process, saying, "Now is the time to set the record straight, to rectify historical errors, to do justice in the region." There were tremendous promises, hopes and expectations. Unfortunately, the peace process turned into a punitive process for the Palestinians. The mentality of occupation was brought to bear and superimposed on the peace process. It became an end in itself, rather than a means to an end – which is genuine peace with justice, to end the occupation and to bring about the Palestinian sovereign and independent state with Jerusalem as its capital.

As the mentality of occupation continued, there was an ongoing policy of unilateralism – a euphemism for actions by the powerful against the weak, negating the essence of the partnership of peace. The start of unilateralism was expressed in ongoing settlement activities, land confiscation, building bypass roads and fragmenting territorially Palestinian realities. The ongoing mentality of control – economic control, territorial control, the crossing points, the borders – everything was subject to the occupation. Unilateralism was in terms of the imposition of closures, blockades and states of siege. Instead of getting dividends from the peace process, we ended up paying the price of an ongoing and escalating occupation. That undermined, again, people's confidence. Not a single agreement was fully implemented, not a single timetable complied with or fully honored. Every single agreement was reopened for negotiations.

Unilateralism was also seen in the Israeli positions presented at Camp David – the myth of the generous offer, with a typical patronizing mentality of the occupier against the occupied: You have to be grateful for whatever we dish out, including an Israeli view that was never written; it was an oral statement that they had to maintain settlements. We were asked to bestow retroactive legitimacy on free settlement clusters in the West Bank that would continue the fragmentation and division and destroy any territorial contiguity for the West Bank or any viability of a future Palestinian state. They insisted on more land confiscation – up to 20 percent of the West Bank. They took Jerusalem and its environs as taken for granted as belonging under Israeli's illegal sovereignty. They maintained control over the Jordan Valley. They wanted to keep control over our airspace and borders. Finally, they wanted us to relinquish refugees. They were calling this the end of the conflict and stating that there were no further Palestinian claims. To us, this was very clearly a sure recipe for future conflict and for perpetuating injustice that is liable to provoke further violence and conflict throughout the region and to continue destabilization.

Unfortunately, external factors intruded. President Clinton wanted an instant legacy and insisted that we fall into line with the Israeli view, and at the same time, the Palestinian side was blamed for the breakdown in the talks. There was the pressure of elections within Israel, where Barak had lost his coalition – and not for anything having to do with the peace process. He wanted to use the peace process to gain another term in office, and that failed. Negotiations continued in Taba, and there was progress and a change in position, which meant that the "take it or leave it" attitude of Camp David suddenly was not productive and not maintained. There was no time left, and the Israelis decided that they didn't want to sign any agreement because it wouldn't save careers.

With that and the ongoing Palestinian victimization, the intifada that broke out in September wasn't planned, and it wasn't gratuitous violence. Sharon succeeded in provoking Palestinian public opinion, entering Al Haram Sharif with military troops and sending a clear message that legality and justice had nothing to do with facts on the ground. With pent-up emotions and erosion of confidence, that led to massive Palestinian protests. It was okay to protest an injustice. However, the immediate Israeli response was use of lethal force and the killing of eight Palestinians the first day and seven Palestinians the second day. This escalated, leading to use of firearms on the part of some individual Palestinians. Barak clamped down with a brutal siege and started shelling and destruction across the board. This was picked up by Sharon.

The government that we see is definitely anti-peace. It wants, as Sharon said, to continue Israel's war of independence, which to the Palestinians means more ethnic cleansing, taking our land to complete the occupation of all of Palestine. We offered the two-state solution, and we are committed to the two-state solution. We've accepted, as part of our historic compromise, 22 percent of historical Palestine, provided we have it clean as the minimal requirement for a viable Palestinian state, with territorial contiguity and without settlements and Israeli incursions, without an apartheid system, and without Israeli control.

Sharon's policy is a combination of extreme right-wing ideological components with extreme fundamentalist religious components, the most strident military components within Israeli society, and with some participation of labor as a thin veneer of civilized behavior, as the public apologist for the most uncivilized policy on the ground. The policies continue with the erroneous assumption that escalation, punitive measures, cruelty, and military subjugation can produce security for the Israelis. The fact is that the more you threaten, undermine, and attack the Palestinians and undermine their security, the less security there is for anybody. The occupation itself is the source of insecurity for everybody, including the Israelis. Sharon still thinks that massacres, gratuitous cruelty and killing can produce results. He has not learned that armies may defeat other armies, but armies can never defeat a nation or a people's will to be free and independent on their own land and to live in dignity equal to other nations.

The new American administration's approach was in the beginning hands-off – interpreted by the Israeli government as a green light to do whatever they wanted and to persist in these policies without accountability and intervention. We asked for protection. We went to the UN Security Council and were vetoed repeatedly. The Mitchell Report involved a period of calm and resumption of negotiations, but said clearly that no security arrangements can succeed outside a political context. Still, we don't have a political context.

The issue of security and violence remains separate from any type of political commitment or process, and Israel hijacked that agenda and decided that it has to be conditional and sequential, and set itself up as the one party to decide. We asked the U.S. to intervene again. The Tenet Report came out as a means of implementation. So far, what we've seen is lip service. Actions on the ground continued to have no relationship to any type of agreement, proposal or political process. The Palestinians have accepted every initiative – from the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative to the Mitchell Report to the Tenet plan – and yet we haven't seen any motion. It seems that the definition of "quieting down" is to give Israel a free hand to continue using military violence, provoking the Palestinians beyond endurance and, at the same time, holding the victims accountable and responsible, not just for quieting down, but for the safety of their occupiers.

Now, there has been a change. With the September 11 tragedy, it became clear that there is a relationship of interdependence. Israel's behavior of utter lawlessness has become a serious liability to the U.S. in the short term in terms of its efforts to maintain a coalition against terrorism, with Israel inflaming Arab and Islamic public opinion and creating havoc in the region. At the same time, it is also important, in terms of a long-term strategy in the region, to reassess what went wrong and to be able to formulate a new policy that is not based on the adoption of Israeli interests as the determining factor for American policy throughout the Arab world and the region. Israel has to be treated as a country subject to the global rule of law and not as a country above the law.

President Bush articulated a clear message: that it has always been part of the American foreign policy vision that a Palestinian state will emerge. We are trying very hard now to translate this vision into a policy and a concrete reality. It's not going to happen by default, and it certainly won't happen if Israel continues with its plans and policies to undermine our very existence. President Arafat has expressed a willingness to start negotiations unconditionally and immediately. He has invited Sharon to do that, with no response. Our message to the American administration is how do we move beyond the pain of the moment? How do we translate this vision into an American policy that is constructive in terms of rectifying a historical injustice and one of the major causes of instability and extremism throughout the world? If we want an end to terrorism and lawlessness, we have to solve long-standing grievances, injustices, and unsolved conflicts.

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