Deborah Gerner, University of Kansas professor of political science and a specialist on conflict resolution in the Middle East, was one of a dozen European, Arab and American scholars and journalists who met with Yasir Arafat May 18 in his residence in Ramallah. Next week, Gerner will return to the Middle East, this time with a Quaker delegation focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The May 18 meeting was held in the compound room where Arafat lived for the 38 days he was under siege. Those permitted to meet with Arafat, including Gerner, were speakers for an international conference on "The Second Transformation of Palestine" in Ramallah.
Gerner, who had interviewed Arafat in the 1980s, noted that although the Palestinian leader expressed dismay and bewilderment about the U.S. position on Palestine, he repeatedly said that it was essential the United States remain engaged and involved in the peace process.
She left her most recent meeting with Arafat struck with "how very weakened he seemed to be physically from the period when he was under siege. For the first time he seemed to me to be genuinely old."
Gerner, who lived in Ramallah in 1996 and has made about 20 trips to the Middle East since the mid-1980s, said she sensed widespread despair about whether peace is possible in the region. "For both Israelis and Palestinians, the sense of trust and optimism that existed after the Oslo (accords) has completely dissolved, I think," Gerner said. "And the last two years of uprising have merely exacerbated that lack of trust."
She noted, "One issue of particular concern to the international community and to nongovernmental organizations working in the region is a new policy -- to divide the West Bank into eight separate distinct areas. Palestinians will now be forbidden to travel between these areas except with a special permit." Even with the permits, Gerner said, authorities may deny permission to pass through a checkpoint.
"The implication of this for people's ability to move freely is huge," Gerner said. Putting the situation in a local context, she explained, "It would mean that someone who got sick in Baldwin City, Kansas (15 miles southeast of Lawrence), an area which does not have a hospital, would have to be put into a car, driven to a checkpoint, placed on a stretcher, walked half a mile over a gravel area and then put into another ambulance at the other side to be brought to Lawrence Memorial Hospital."
The conference she attended in Ramallah was to have been held at Berzeit University north of the city. But the number of checkpoints required to travel to and from the campus compelled the conference organizers to move the event to Ramallah. The conference honored the late Palestinian-American Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a scholar, author and activist who died May 23, 2001, in Ramallah at the age of 72. Abu-Lughod had been a doctoral adviser to Gerner when he taught at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
Next week Gerner will again travel to the Middle East, this time, with a Quaker working party focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"Quakers have had a sustained involvement with the search for peace between Israelis and Palestinians that dates back to 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel," Gerner said. "The concern that Quakers have for the history of the suffering of both people has repeatedly led Quakers to search for reconciliation between the two communities."
As a political scientist, Gerner has focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict and Palestinian nationalism for more than 20 years. The second edition of her book, "One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict over Palestine," was published in 1994.
RSS