Washington Report, April 2006, pages 29, 41

Islam and the Near East in the Far East

Arab-Israeli Diplomat Ali Yahya Tapped to Continue Israeli Charm Offensive

By John Gee

AS A Muslim, born in a Palestinian village that became part of Israel in 1948, Ali Yahya is a very unusual Israeli diplomat. In 1995, he was named Israel’s ambassador to Finland, where he served until 1999. He then returned to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where his current status is that of a coordinator for special projects in the Department for Middle East and the Peace Process. He is evidently knowledgeable and a genial conversationalist.

No doubt it was qualities such as these that led to Yahya being deployed as the latest weapon in Israel’s charm offensive in Southeast Asia. As related in previous issues of this magazine, the Israeli government has sought to reap political dividends from its unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, completed in September 2005.

Recently Yahya visited predominantly non-Muslim Singapore and Thailand. His five-day visit to Singapore focused on meetings with local Muslims, including community leaders, journalists and students. The latter included 100 young people attending Aljuneid madrasah, with whom he spoke in Arabic. He urged the importance of dialogue as the means to resolving conflicts, including that between Israel and its neighbors.

While in Thailand on Jan. 23 and 24, Yahya took part in a discussion with academics at Bangkok’s Thammasat University. He was interested in the state of relations between Thai Muslims and the rest of the population of the mainly Buddhist country. Among those he met were Dr. Chaiwat Satha-anand, director of the Peace Information Center and a member of the National Reconciliation Commission that is concerned with the issue of conflict in Thailand’s predominantly Muslim far south. He also had a meeting with members of the Democrat Party, including some of its Muslim MPs.

As an Israeli official, Yahya could not visit Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, but he spoke to Indonesians through an interview published by the Jakarta Post on Jan. 26. In the absence of direct diplomatic ties, Israel is availing itself of media channels to court Indonesian public opinion and explore reactions among Indonesia’s political elite, some of whom are sympathetic to the idea of friendlier relations with Israel.

The Jakarta Post interview drew a riposte from Ribhi Awad, Palestinian ambassador to Indonesia (“Palestine Embassy makes it clear,” Feb. 2, 2006 Jakarta Post). Giving short shrift to Yahya’s “charming pronouncements” against violence and in favor of dialogue, Awad hit out at the selectivity of Yahya’s depiction of current conditions in Palestine, and, in particular, at his anti-Palestinian remarks.

Awad took issue with the Israeli diplomat for placing the blame for the outbreak of the second intifada and its ensuing violence solely on the Palestinians, pointing to its immediate cause as:

“Sharon’s so-called excursion to Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock compound with a large entourage of Israeli security troopers in spite of all Palestinian appeals and protests of what a move like that straight after not so successful peace negotiations could engender.”

Awad challenged Yahya for overlooking the violence inflicted upon the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which had, he wrote, resulted in over 4,000 being killed, a third of whom were women and children.

In his original interview, Yahya depicted the Gaza settlers in language more accurately used to describe Palestinians who were forced from their homes and lands in 1948. He spoke of Jewish families being forced to move “from the place which they called their home,” ignoring the fact that these were armed colonists whose presence was imposed upon the people of the Gaza Strip in defiance of their wishes and of international law.

The Palestinian ambassador described Sharon’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as “undeniably a bold political move based on cold strategic calculation to tactically withdraw” the settlers in order to “enchant and titillate the world to a certain extent and utilizing its distraction by pilfering big chunks of the West Bank and its subterranean water resources in earnest, as this is the real prize Sharon and his government are after, unilaterally dictated fait accompli bearing within it seeds of further conflict, not a fair negotiated settlement as prerequisite for long-lasting peace.”

Awad concluded by affirming that the Palestinians sought “a just, fair and comprehensive peace.”

That was the most confrontational that Yahya’s foray ever got—and it was on paper. Yahya generally did not have to tackle the toughest questions about Israeli policies, and in the abstract his assertions about the importance of dialogue seemed irreproachable: how many of the people he encountered would care to seem stony hearted enough to say that the problems in Palestine can’t be boiled down to a failure of dialogue?

In choosing to work in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Yahya may genuinely believe that he can advance the cause of peace and that he is playing a legitimate role as a citizen of Israel, but he has made himself the prisoner of a situation over which he has no control. Irrespective of his personal views, his Arab and Muslim status will be seen as lending credibility to Israeli policies: what he is may seem to many he meets to count for at least as much as what he says. While Yahya may indicate that he sometimes feels internal conflicts, what many observers will take in is that he is physical evidence of Israeli tolerance and of the possibilities of Palestinian citizens of Israel advancing their position within the Jewish state.

Yahya is unable to avoid the logic of his position; he not only speaks up for the policies of the government he represents, but also blots out inconvenient realities. On his travels, he spoke of the progress made in recent years by “Arab-Israelis.” Some gains are real enough (though slight and won through struggle, not the generous gifts of a benign state), but they have come after decades of loss and repression.

I noted in one newspaper report that Yahya appeared to be from Kafr Qara, not far from Haifa, and that his family had been farmers there for hundreds of years. If so, has he blotted out how it was treated under Israeli rule?

In 1953-54, the Israeli government expropriated 12,964 of Kafr Qara’s 14,543 dunams of land. Its inhabitants had been spared expulsion in 1948-49, but that was because they were in an area that was defended by the Iraqi army and its own fighters in 1948, then handed over to Israel under the terms of the Jordanian-Israeli armistice agreement of 1949. There was the expectation on both sides that Israel would quietly expel most of the villagers of the region, and some were indeed pushed over the armistice line during the next couple of years. The expulsion of Kafr Qara’s population was the subject of a report by Zalman Lifschitz, adviser on land matters in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, delivered to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his foreign and finance ministers on July 3, 1950, but it was not followed up.

How different life would have been for Ali Yahya if it had been. Perhaps his perspective on the failings of the Palestinians, the virtues of Israel and the problems of dialogue would have been very different as well.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel, available from the AET Book Club.

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