Mohamed Herzallah* celebrates the principled life of recently deceased Palestinian leader Haider Abdul-Shafi Sixteen years ago, a Palestinian leader challenged Israel and the United States to live up to the ideals of equality and human dignity. "In all honesty," he said in his address to the Madrid peace conference in 1991, "we, the Palestinian delegation, came here to present you with a challenge -- to lay our humanity before you and to recognise yours, to transcend the confines of the past, and to set the tone for a peace process within the framework of mutuality, expansiveness, and acknowledgment." Haider Abdul- Shafi, Palestinian intellectual and leader par excellence, to whom Palestinians of all political and factional creeds often turned when in trouble, passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. It was said that Abdul-Shafi was offered the choice of medical treatment in Israel or abroad. Unlike other Palestinian leaders who found in foreign capitals an acceptable deathbed, this legend of a man was adamant that he could not possibly find a more peaceful conclusion to his life's journey than in the vociferous boulevards of his hometown in the Gaza Strip. Palestinians would not have expected anything less from Abdul-Shafi. This man's last wish was but a testament to the kind of raw and taxing struggles he relished most. Born in Gaza in 1919, and trained as a physician at the American University in Beirut, he spent the bulk of his 88 years caring for his people and at the same time broadcasting their message and desire for independence and self- determination to the world. Abdul-Shafi's principled diligence made him an unforgettable figure in Palestinian collective memory. It was in the early 1950s that Abdul-Shafi's political activism captured international attention, and his renown never ceased since. Neither exile nor imprisonment succeeded in placating his restlessness and rigorous zeal for the Palestinian cause. He was a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's first Executive Committee, founder of the Palestinian Red Crescent, and head of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid peace conference, to name but a few of his many critical contributions to Palestine. Abdul-Shafi's recalcitrant philosophy did not look up to power holders for inspiration; it rather looked "sideways" to the people, in whose name revolutions and uprisings were carried out. His intellectual and moral proclivities made him a target of authoritarian discontent and ire. The most remarkable of his positions was his rejection of the Oslo Accords. He argued relentlessly at the time that the fact that Israel was expanding its settlement activities in the West Bank was a sign of insincerity that will eventually lead to a momentous political calamity. He warned that peace, if betrayed, could not be invariably restored, and thus a process like the one outlined in Oslo could not possibly be sustained if carried out in a disingenuous frame of mind. Later in 1997 he resigned from the Palestinian Legislative Council over the pathogenic and unrestrained corruption that was debilitating progress towards statehood and was eroding Palestinian unity. The Palestinians' only regret was that he was old and struggling with sickness when they needed him most during the past few years. Today's political discourse in the occupied territories scarcely affords Palestinians the kind of leadership that has the capacity to lift unitary national sentiments above parochial considerations. Pressed on all sides and constantly preoccupied in finding ways to stay ahead, the establishment elites -- the so-called heirs of the historic Palestinian revolution -- and the Islamists -- the self-appointed guardians of all that is sacrosanct -- con themselves into believing that the political conflict that pits them against each other is a legitimate affair in which they are called to play out fully their rivalries, leading them to lose sight of their people. For the Palestinian "leadership" exigency to be placed in truer perspective, a broad evaluation of what the Palestinian cause truly needs must be undertaken. What Palestinians need is not another charismatic figure who can compromise and accommodate himself to Western and Israeli whims and impulses, not a natural political survivor or a pragmatic reform-minded technocrat, and certainly not a bloody-minded religious fanatic who cannot see beyond the edge of his sword. What the Palestinians need at the moment is the unconquerable type of leadership that would rather break than forfeit national unity and consensus, the kind that knowing full well that it could be reduced to dust will rise to the occasion every day and every minute to challenge humanity to treat Palestinians as equals, proclaiming over and over again -- to borrow Abdul-Shafi's own words -- that this conflict is about "land, and what is at stake here is the survival of the Palestinian people on what is left of our olive groves and orchards, our terraced hills and peaceful valleys, our ancestral homes, villages and cities." * The writer is a junior research fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former president of the Palestine Solidarity Committee at Harvard University.
