Following The 'Road Map' to Freedom

Following The 'Road Map' to Freedom
By Ghaleb Darabya
Saturday, May 3, 2003

Growing up as a Palestinian in the Gaza Strip under Israeli occupation, I never imagined that I would find myself in Washington speaking directly to the American people about my people's experiences, hopes and dreams. Having heard of the United States, of its love for freedom and of its own struggle as a young nation to overcome the yoke of colonial suppression, I felt that there was no better audience than the American people to understand the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

We have waited more than 35 years for the attainment of our rights, equality and self-determination. We are the only people on the face of the earth who continue to live under a foreign colonial occupation. We have tried every possible means to achieve our human and national aspirations. From the first intifada to the Madrid conference to the Oslo peace process to the Wye River memorandum to the Sharm el-Sheikh conference to the Camp David talks, Palestinians have pursued every possible avenue to live in peace and provide the children of our region a promising future.

The "road map" marks the international community's clearest effort to date to end the 31-month-old cycle of violence and to move toward final Palestinian-Israeli peace. The road map envisions a series of steps to be taken in parallel by both parties, with the result being the creation of a Palestinian state on the 22 percent of our historical homeland occupied by Israel since 1967. These steps are to be completed in three phases.

For our part, we Palestinians have begun fulfilling our commitments under Phase I of the road map. First, the Palestinian finance minister, Salam Fayyad, brought transparency to our budgetary process, placing it online and in the public domain. All government accounts and funds were consolidated into a single Finance Ministry account. When he presented the first-ever full budget to the Palestinian parliament in December, International Monetary Fund officials called it "the most transparent
budget in the world."

Second, in consultation with a wide variety of international legal experts, we drafted a constitution that is acknowledged by American legal scholars to be the most democratic in the region, including Israel, which to this day lacks a constitution. We are considering how to introduce our constitution for public debate and eventual ratification, so that it will be ready once we achieve statehood.

Third, on March 10, the Palestinian parliament approved an amendment to the Palestinian Basic Law creating the position of prime minister for the first time in our history. On March 19, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, accepted President Yasser Arafat's nomination to fill this position. The international community, including the United States, welcomed these moves. Finally, on Tuesday, 51 of the 85 members of the Palestinian parliament voted confidence in an empowered and credible prime minister and approved his cabinet.

In his first speech as prime minister, Abbas reaffirmed the Palestinian position toward Israel, saying: "We want a lasting peace with you, achieved through negotiations. We denounce terrorism by any party and in all its forms both because of our religious and moral traditions and because we are convinced that such methods do not support a just cause like ours, but rather destroy it. We do not ignore the sufferings of Jews throughout history. And in exchange, we hope that the Israelis will not turn their backs on the sufferings of the Palestinians." He also said that his government will take steps to disarm all militias.

Palestinians have enacted these reforms and maintained their commitment to peace while living under full military occupation, with Israeli tanks in our streets, with continued closures denying movement of people, with 163 Israeli checkpoints slicing the West Bank into 300 separate clusters and with 31 checkpoints separating Gaza into three separate Bantustans. Our economy has been devastated by the violence. According to the World Bank, 67 percent of Palestinians live under the poverty line, 60 percent of Palestinians are unemployed and 22 percent of Palestinian children are chronically malnourished for purely manmade reasons. The foregoing political reforms under these dire conditions are nothing short of an extraordinary achievement and highlight for the world what creative and vibrant institutions Palestinians can build as free people.

Palestine has the potential to become the role model for democratization in the Middle East. We are and will be responding to President Bush's vision and challenges. The question now is whether Israel will do the same. This is a historic moment not only for Israel and for Palestine, but for the United States as well. The Bush administration must take the lead once and for all and, in the tradition of the U.S. commitment to freedom and democracy, lead Israel and Palestine to two states living side by side in peace and security.

The writer is counselor for political and congressional affairs at the PLO Mission to the United States in Washington.