Longtime Palestinian peace negotiator and spokesman dies from coronavirus
SAEB EREKAT | 1955- 2020
JERUSALEM — Saeb Erekat, a veteran peace negotiator and prominent international spokesman for the Palestinians for more than three decades, died on Tuesday, weeks after being infected by the coronavirus. He was 65.
The American- educated Erekat was involved in nearly every round of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians going back to the landmark Madrid conference in 1991. Over the years, he was a constant media presence. He tirelessly argued for a negotiated two- state solution to the decades- old conflict, defended the Palestinian leadership and blamed Israel — particularly hard- line leader Benjamin Netanyahu — for the failure to reach an agreement.
As a loyal aide to Palestinian leaders — first Yasser Arafat and then Mahmoud Abbas — Erekat clung to this strategy until his death, even as hopes for Palestinian statehood sank to new lows.
Erekat earned a BA and MA in international relations from San Francisco State University and later completed a doctorate at the University of Bradford in the U. K., where he focused on conflict resolution. Erekat also held U. S. citizenship.
When he returned to the West Bank he became a professor at An- Najah University in Nablus and an editor at the Al- Quds newspaper. A self- described pragmatist, he invited Israeli students to visit the university in the late 1980s and condemned violence on all sides.
He was nevertheless convicted of incitement by an Israeli military court in 1987 after troops raided the university and found an English- language newsletter he had authored in which he wrote that Palestinians must “reject and resist all forms of occupation.
The first intifada, or Palestinian uprising, erupted later that year in the form of mass protests, general strikes and clashes with Israeli troops. That uprising, along with U. S. pressure on Israel, culminated in the Madrid conference, widely seen as the start of the Mideast peace process.
Erekat was a prominent representative of Palestinians living inside the occupied territories at the time, but became a close aide to Arafat when the exiled Palestine Liberation Organization returned to the territories following the 1993 Oslo accords.
In subsequent years he routinely served as Arafat’s translator, and was sometimes accused of editing his remarks to soften the rough edges of the guerrilla leader- turnedaspiring statesman.
Erekat was part of the Palestinian delegation at Camp David in 2000, when President Bill Clinton brought the two sides together for marathon talks aimed at reaching a final agreement. The talks ended inconclusively, and a few months later a second and far more violent intifada erupted.
By then Erekat had become a senior Palestinian official and was seen as a possible successor to Arafat, who died in a French hospital in 2004. He continued as a top aide to Abbas and served as a senior negotiator in sporadic peace efforts in the late 2000s.
“I am the most disadvantaged negotiator in the history of man,” he told a reporter in 2007, the year that the Islamic militant group Hamas seized control of Gaza from Abbas’ forces. “I have no army, no navy, no economy, my society is fragmented.”
Erekat resigned as chief negotiator in 2011 after a trove of documents was leaked to the pan- Arab broadcaster Al- Jazeera showing the Palestinian leadership had offered major concessions in past peace talks. But Erekat remained a senior Palestinian official and a close adviser to Abbas, who later appointed him secretary- general of the PLO.