The 2024 Silfen Forum sought out common ground in the Israel–Palestine conflict.
“It’s very difficult to find a compromise for a resolution to international conflicts, but they can be found,” said Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “If you look at the French–German conflict that led to two world wars and almost a century of fighting, today these are two key members of the European Union.”
Rabinovich made those somewhat hopeful remarks at the outset of this year’s David and Lyn Silfen University Forum at the Annenberg Center’s Zellerbach Theatre. He was joined by Salam Fayyad, former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, in a late October panel discussion titled “‘Waging Peace’: Dialogue and Diplomacy in the Middle East,” moderated by NPR diplomatic correspondent Michele Kelemen C’89.
Yet while Rabinovich and Fayyad found common ground in discussing the Israel–Palestine conflict in front of a large crowd of Penn students, staff members, and faculty, hope was often hard to come by.
“There is no peace process, there is animosity, there is conflict, and it burst out in the worst of ways on October 7 with Hamas,” Rabinovich said, after noting that he had taken part in the Oslo peace process negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the more “hopeful” 1990s when he served as Israel’s ambassador to the US. And now, with “Iranian proxies” including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad Movement, and the Houthi movement in Yemen all fighting Israel on many different fronts, the conflict has melded with “a more global effort to confront the United States” by Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea. “So this is local, regional, and global at the same time,” said Rabinovich, professor emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University and the author of several books on the Middle East.
Fayyad, who served as prime minister of the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority from 2007 to 2013, began his remarks by pointing to “the two doctors” at the edge of Zellerbach’s stage and noting that “the first thing you need to do before you operate is to stabilize the patient.” (Those “two doctors,” Penn Interim President J. Larry Jameson and Penn Vice Provost for Global Initiatives Ezekiel Emanuel, introduced the speakers, with Jameson noting that “an all-important tool for waging peace, perhaps the most important tool, is education,” and Emanuel encouraging the audience to “take today as a starting point to go deeper in your exploration of the region and the issues.”)
Calling Gaza “virtually uninhabitable,” Fayyad bleakly admitted that even if a ceasefire is negotiated, it might take “multiple decades” before the “depth of personal trauma and human rights suffering begins to be seen in the rearview mirror.” But the best way forward, he insisted, is through Palestinian unity. That’s why he’d like to see the Palestinian Authority, which has administrative control over the West Bank, “govern both in the West Bank and Gaza for a transitionary period” to stabilize the region before elections are held in the Gaza Strip for the first time since 2006, when the Palestinian Authority lost governing control of Gaza to Hamas.
“I feel terrible that there’s been no major internal Palestinian initiative to move in the direction of adopting this plan, much less implementing it,” Fayyad said. “Securing an arrangement, or a consensus on an arrangement, to run the affairs of Gaza postwar is a key element to ending the war, in my judgment.”
Both Fayyad and Rabinovich cited Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an impediment to any postwar plan for Palestinian sovereignty. Rabinovich criticized Netanyahu’s policy of “support[ing] Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority,” noting that the Israeli prime minister “worked with Qatar to bring money to Hamas to keep them quiet.” Considering that much of that money was spent building the tunnel system and infrastructure used to launch the October 7th attack, it was “a policy that worked until it failed spectacularly, as one senior official told me,” Kelemen said.
As for why Netanyahu propped up Hamas, “the fundamental reason from his point of view, I assert, is that it’s his way to ensure that the Palestinian Authority would be divided, that Gaza and the West Bank would be divided,” Fayyad said. “The problem is that the current government of Israel is not willing to entertain any discussion of Palestinian statehood of any kind, much less a Palestinian state that can rise to be worthy of the aspirations of the Palestinian people.”
Rabinovich also argued that it’s time for a leadership change within the Palestinian Authority, which has been led for almost 20 years by 89-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, who in 2008 “missed” an opportunity to accept a peace proposal with a previous Israeli administration that included a near-total withdrawal from the West Bank (which has been under military occupation by Israel since 1967). “Big mistake,” Rabinovich said. “If you are driven by the will and the necessity of statehood, you take it whenever you can.”
Fayyad noted that “who succeeds Abbas has become an obsession” in the Middle East, even though “there has not really been adequate focus on the process.”
“The overall trajectory is not going to change much, absent a fundamental reorientation that can come about from opening up the political space and having elections,” he added. “But don’t tell me that can happen tomorrow. That’s not realistic either.”
When prodded about a potential one-state solution (Kelemen asked the speakers several pre-submitted questions from Penn faculty and students), Rabinovich said he doesn’t use the term “because it’s not a solution; it’s actually a doorway to a lot of problems.”
“I believe in a two-state solution to be one state that is the Jewish state of Israel, with a 20 percent minority inside the state as we have, and an Arab Palestinian state,” he continued. “If we don’t opt for that, we will become a one-state reality—and a one-state reality is very negative, because Israel will then cease to be Jewish or cease to be democratic. If we control an equal number of Palestinians without giving them full citizenship rights, then we will cease to be a democracy. If we give them citizenship rights, we will cease to be Jewish.”
Rabinovich called one-state plans “rubbish” promoted largely by extreme right-wing members of Netanyahu’s government who believe it’s “realistic or acceptable or even a divine verdict” for Israel to incorporate or resettle the West Bank and Gaza. “Two things need to happen,” he continued. “The Palestinian Authority—I fully agree with Prime Minister Fayyad—needs to rejuvenate in order to control the West Bank and eventually play the same role in Gaza and Israel. And Israel needs to get rid of this fanatical fringe.”
Fayyad stressed that Palestinians need to guide the way forward. “I’m here to tell you that we should be prepared to engage again in a meaningful political process with Israel to negotiate a two-state outcome that begins by squaring the circle that was opened in 1993 with the signing of the declaration of principle that was Oslo,” he said, adding that even if Israel doesn’t entertain the idea, they should push for statehood through the United Nations Security Council, which the US could elect to champion.
“I can relate to how difficult and complex this is, even for some of us who have lived all of our lives there,” Fayyad concluded. “It’s an intractable conflict with many subtleties to it. But getting to understand it better and know more about it is important. It is my core belief that it is really up to us Palestinians to actually turn this into a quest for assuming full agency in the act for our liberation.” —DZ
The Silfen Forum conversation can be watched in its entirety at silfenforum.upenn.edu/webcast.
