Palestinian Views On The Peace Process - Prominent Palestinians

Prominent Palestinians

When Sari Nusseibeh was the representative of the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem (circa 2000), he called for historic compromises by both Palestinians and Israelis, to secure a permanent and lasting peace. For example, he stated that Palestinians must give up their claim of a right of return. With this concession, he argued, a true and lasting peace could emerge.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said on August 5, 2000, "Palestinians are no strangers to compromise. In the 1993 Oslo Accords, we agreed to recognize Israeli sovereignty over 78 percent of historic Palestine and to establish a Palestinian state on only 22 percent." Rashid Abu Shbak, a senior PA security official declared, "The light which has shone over Gaza and Jericho will also reach the Negev and the Galilee ."

The PA's Voice of Palestine radio station broadcast a Friday prayer sermon by Yusuf Abu Sneineh, official preacher at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, over the radio. In it, he asserted, "The struggle we are waging is an ideological struggle and the question is: where has the Islamic land of Palestine gone? Where Haifa and Jaffa, Lod and Ramle, Acre, Safed and Tiberias? Where is Hebron and Jerusalem?"

PA cabinet minister Abdul Aziz Shaheen told the official PA newspaper, Al-Havat Al-Jadida, on January 4, 1998, "The Oslo accord was a preface for the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Authority will be a preface for the Palestinian state which, in its turn, will be a preface for the liberation of the entire Palestinian land."

Faisal Husseini, former Palestinian Authority Minister for Jerusalem, compared the al-Aqsa intifada following the Oslo peace process to the tactic of coming out of the Trojan Horse used by the Greeks in the myth of the Trojan War.