Saëb Erakat, Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization, is dead
Text by: Guilhem Delteil Follow
10 mins
Saëb Erakat died on Tuesday, November 10.
Aged 65 in October 2020, he succumbed to respiratory complications after contracting the coronavirus.
For more than twenty-five years, he was the main Palestinian negotiator, one of the architects of the Oslo accords.
With a stalled peace process, he finally took a severe toll on these treaties.
But he still believed in a negotiated two-state solution.
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From our correspondent,
Saëb Erakat comes from a family in Jericho.
At the time, the city was administered by Jordan which, following the first Israeli-Arab war in 1948, took control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
At the age of twelve, Saeb Erakat saw Israeli troops entering his city: the Six Day War in June 1967 pushed Jordanian troops across the Jordan River.
After a West Bank childhood, Saëb Erakat left for his higher education abroad.
First in the United States, then in the United Kingdom.
He studied political science, international relations and obtained a doctorate from the University of Bradford in conflict resolution.
Back in the West Bank, Saëb Erakat began a career as a university professor.
He teaches at An-Najah, the University of Nablus.
And also writes in the Palestinian daily
Al-Quds
, name given to Jerusalem in Arabic.
Madrid
Saëb Erakat made his debut as a negotiator in 1991, during the Madrid conference.
After the Gulf War, the United States and Russia tried to launch a regional peace process: Israelis, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians and Palestinians were invited to the Spanish capital.
Saëb Erakat was one of the Palestinian representatives.
Madrid laid the foundations for a peace process: Saëb Erakat was then part of discussions in Washington in 1992 and 1993. At the same time, secret negotiations were carried out in Norway by another team.
It was these that led to the signing of the Oslo Accords in the gardens of the White House on September 13, 1993. If he was not part of this secret team, Saëb Erakat was appointed the following year. chief negotiator.
Oslo was an interim agreement slated to last up to five years before a final agreement.
It is he who will take up the torch of these discussions with Israel.
He will notably be at Camp David in 2000 when Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak tried to negotiate a new agreement under the aegis of the United States.
Dialogue
When the Palestinian Authority was created in 1994, Saëb Erakat was appointed Minister of Local Government.
Renowned close to Yasser Arafat and loyal among the followers of Mahmoud Abbas, he will not, however, occupy a leading position within this embryonic Palestinian state.
It is within the PLO, the organization which claims to be representative of all Palestinians - those living in the occupied territories, those living in Israel and those in the diaspora - leading the peace negotiations, that Saeb Erakat is needed.
In 2015, he was appointed general secretary of the executive committee, number two in the organization.
He was therefore a candidate for the succession of Mahmoud Abbas who, like Yasser Arafat, combined the functions of president of the Palestinian Authority and president of the PLO.
Saëb Erakat was a supporter of dialogue.
As an academic, he called for exchanges between Israeli and Palestinian professors in the 1980s. He also organized the visit of Israeli students to the campus of Al Najah University in Nablus.
These initiatives had not been to everyone's liking: he had faced calls to boycott his classes and accusations of "betraying the Palestinian cause".
"Peace is doable"
A pioneer, Saëb Erakat accompanied the peace process.
Faced with the stagnation of the situation and the lack of progress, he alternated between affirming his attachment to the discussions and despair.
“
Peace is doable.
Palestinians and Israelis must not despair.
We have not wasted a minute of our time in the past 18 years,
”he told the Israeli daily
Haaretz
in 2009. But in 2003, excluded from a delegation meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he had tendered his resignation. .
Before resuming his duties only a few months later.
Under the Trump administration, anger often marked his interventions.
The US president has shaken up internationally accepted parameters to achieve a two-state peace solution.
In the name of "
reality
" and "
historical truth
", he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, while the Palestinians claim the eastern part of it as the seat of their future state, and considered that Israeli colonization in the West Bank did not is not contrary to international law.
Surrounded by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the American ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, both very close to the Israeli right, he also closed the Palestinian representation in Washington and ceased funding from the United States to the agency. of the United Nations for Palestinian refugees.
Threat of annexation
In his interventions in front of the media, Saëb Erakat did not mince his words with regard to the leaders of the main world power.
“
They are the largest mercenary empire
,” he told RFI in May 2020. The peace plan presented by the American administration, which Donald Trump had pompously called “
the agreement of the century
”, has been renamed “
the shame of the century
”by the Palestinian chief negotiator.
Donald Trump's son-in-law found himself decked out with the ironic adjective of “
Kushner genius
”.
"
It looks like Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have taken my position as chief negotiator and said, 'We're going to make peace by giving Netanyahu what he wants. We won't sit around the same table as them.
' , said Saëb Erakat.
During the election campaign for the Israeli legislative elections in March 2020, Benyamin Netanyahu promised to annex part of the West Bank.
The coalition agreement signed with Benny Gantz, his centrist rival, allowed him to move forward on the issue from the following July 1.
Benjamin Netanyahu said he wanted to implement the Trump plan which grants Israel to keep control of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
But for the Palestinian leaders, this territory must be part of the future state they are calling for.
And they pointed out that an annexation was contrary to the Oslo accords.
Suspension of coordination
“
I told the Palestinians that once we recognize Israel, we will move towards our own state.
And now I see a map where they annex the Jordan Valley.
I should have no shame to look the Palestinians in the eye now,
”Saeb Erakat said in May 2020. At that time, the Palestinian leadership said it no longer felt bound by the agreements it had signed and Mahmoud Abbas announced the end of all cooperation with Israel.
But these speeches, threats and announcements had difficulty convincing.
“
Saeb Erakat has said many times that Oslo is dead.
He resigned several times, but he always stayed or returned very quickly.
This is one of the reasons why it became unpopular: the Palestinians no longer took it seriously,
”Judge Omar Chabane, director of the think tank PalThink for Strategic Studies.
And like the president of the Palestinian Authority, Saeb Erakat hardly appeared in public.
"
He did not invite representatives of civil society to discuss, to exchange,
" recalls Omar Chabane.
“
He appeared cut off from society.
"
Lack of strategy
Faced with threats of annexation, the Palestinian leadership felt the urgent need to relaunch a stalled peace process.
“
We want a new train that will take us from the status of Authority to that of State.
We don't want the
status quo
anymore
»Saëb Erakat said.
But the paths recommended by the chief negotiator seemed very confused at the time.
“
If Israel sees the Palestinian Authority as a way to maintain the occupation, this will not happen.
They must be prepared to assume again their obligations as occupying power
”, he declared on one side, while affirming in the following sentence:“
I am not threatening to dissolve the Palestinian Authority
”.
Stunned by the punches of the Trump administration, the Palestinian leadership has been unable to put in place a new strategy.
She called for a resumption of dialogue through an international conference, under the aegis of partners other than the United States alone.
But she never got an invitation to go out.
And some of its traditional allies have strayed from their historic position: the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recognized Israel and established diplomatic relations with it, in contradiction to the peace initiative adopted by the Arab League in 2002 which provided for normalization relations between member states and Israel in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state.
These agreements have been called a "
betrayal of Jerusalem and the Palestinian cause
" by the Palestinian presidency.
"
They are killing the two-state solution
", judged Saeb Erakat for his part.
“
People like Netanyahu believe that the two-state solution is no longer relevant now.
If the Emirates are talking to Israel, why would Israel talk to me now?
"
Difficult succession
In a context where it needs international support, the Palestinian leadership will quickly have to designate a successor to Saëb Erakat.
But the task will not be easy: in office for twenty-five years, Saëb Erakat has forged professional relations, but also personal relations with foreign leaders or their emissaries.
He embodied Palestinian diplomacy.
“
Anyone who wanted to come into contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization had to go through it.
He was the contact person.
And President Mahmoud Abbas trusted him.
But the question is who will take over when you leave the stage,
”notes Omar Chabane.
Saëb Erakat never handed over or trained a successor, even when he had to undergo a heavy and delicate surgery, a lung transplant, in the summer of 2017.
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