Mahmood Abbas is a much more reserved person. He embraces and kisses too, but it does not come quite as naturally as with Arafat. He is more withdrawn. He looks more like a high-school principal.
I have a lot of respect for Mahmood Abbas. He needs tremendous courage to do his job -- the leader of a people under brutal military occupation, compelled to cooperate with the occupation in some matters, endeavoring to resist in others. The aim of his people is to endure and survive. He is good at that.
When I complimented him on his courage, he laughed and said that it was more courageous of me to enter Beirut during the siege of 1982. Thanks.
The Israeli government succeeded, even before Netanyahu, in splitting the Palestinians in the country into two. By the simple device of refusing to honor their solemn pledge under Oslo to create four "safe passages" between The West Bank and Gaza, they made a split almost inevitable.
Now, while officially treating the moderate Abbas as a friend and the extremist Hamas in Gaza as an enemy, our government behaves exactly the other way. Hamas is tolerated, Abbas is considered an enemy. That seems perverse but is really quite logical: Abbas can sway public opinion throughout the world in favor of a Palestinian state, Hamas cannot.
AFTER THE Ramallah meeting, in a private session, I submitted to Abbas a plan for consideration.
It is based on the appreciation that Netanyahu will never agree to real peace negotiations, since these will lead inevitably to the Two-State Solution, tut-tut-tut.
I propose to convene a "Popular Peace Conference," which will meet, say, once a month inside the country. In each session, the conference will deal with one of the paragraphs of the future peace agreement, such as the final location of the borders, the character of the borders (open?), Jerusalem, Gaza, water resources, security arrangements, refugees, and so on.
An equal number of experts and activists from each side will deliberate, put everything on the table and thrash it all out. If agreement can be reached, wonderful. If not, the proposals of both sides will be clearly defined and the item left for later.
In the end, after, say, half a year, the final "popular peace agreement" will be published, even with defined disagreements, for the guidance of the peace movements on both sides. Deliberations on the disagreements will continue until agreement is found.
Abbas listened attentively, as is his wont, and in the end I promised to send him a written memorandum. I just did so, after consulting with some of my colleagues, like Adam Keller, the Gush Shalom spokesman.
Mahmood Abbas is now preparing to attend the Paris conference, the official aim of which is to mobilize the world for the Two-State Solution.
SOMETIMES I WONDER how I do not get infected with megalomania. (Some of my friends believe that this cannot happen to me, since I already am a megalomaniac.)
A few weeks after the end of the 1948 war, a tiny group of young people in the new State of Israel met in Haifa to debate a path to peace based on what is now called the Two-State solution. One was a Jew (me), one a Muslim and one a Druze. I, just released from hospital, was still wearing my army uniform.
The group was completely ignored by everybody. No takers.
Some 10 years later, when I was already a member of the Knesset (as, by the way, were the other two), I went abroad to see who could be convinced. I wandered around Washington DC, met with important people in the White House, the State Department and the UN delegations in New York. On the way home I was received in the Foreign Offices in London, Paris and Berlin.
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