Hebron Mukhtar Speaks Out Against Oslo

by Mahmoud Abu Ghosh


[Editor: This article was originally published in August, 2011. It is included here because it is still relevant and it reinforces the ideas presented in Dr. Mordechai Kedar's recent article, The End of Oslo.]

The Mukhtar of Hebron, Sheikh Abu Hader Jaabri, told an Israeli journalist this week that Israel made a terrible mistake when it chose dialogue with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority instead of the local tribal leadership.

The Mukhtar criticized successive Israeli governments for negotiating with the Fatah-led PA, arguing that political organizations like Fatah, Hamas and the PFLP represent no more than five percent of the Palestinian population and that the organic leadership of the people are the clan heads who had peacefully led their people prior to the Oslo Accords.

Sheikh Jaabri’s exclusive interview with Israel National News, in which the Mukhtar said he missed the days that preceded Oslo, was conducted at his Hebron home in the presence of Deputy Minister Ayoub Kara (Likud).

“I wish we had remained in the pre-Oslo period,” Jaabri said. “The situation was much better, at least economically. Today we have over 40% unemployment. Most of the factories have closed down and drug trafficking within the populace has grown. People find themselves in a vacuum. They look for their path…”

 

Speaking emotionally and with conviction, Jaabri said that there is no way to achieve the two-state solution being promoted by the Western powers. The solution, he said, is not to divide the land between Jews and Arabs but to establish a single country in which Jews and Arabs will have equal rights.

In response to the fear-mongering by Western diplomats and some Israeli politicians that Israel must cede territory to the PA to avoid Arabs eventually gaining a majority in the country, Jaabri said: “You [Israelis] have a fear of demography. But I think the Arabs are going down demographically and the Jews are only going up. Our women have begun to work and they are content with one or two children.”

 

Deputy Minister Ayoub Kara, himself an ethnic Druze, floated an idea to the Mukhtar that Palestinian Arabs could receive full civil rights in Israel but would not be able to vote for the Knesset. Sheikh Jaabri answered that he would agree to this arrangement as a temporary solution until stronger trust could be established between the Arabs and Jewish native populations.

Kara also brought up the claim that Palestinian Arabs are essentially Jordanians and do not require an additional state.

The Mukhtar agreed that most people in Jordan are Palestinians and that many of the Arabs in the territories won by Israel from Jordan in 1967 are Jordanian citizens. He added, however, that once Jordan submitted to pressure from United States President George H.W. Bush and announced its disengagement from those territories in 1988, the option of “Jordan as Palestine” became almost impossible to implement.

Sheikh Jaabri suggested that a confederation of some sort with Jordan or Israel may still be possible but that this has become very difficult to achieve after the Western-imposed Oslo process, because now “everyone wants to be a part of the leadership and if there is no state there is no leadership.”

Mahmoud Abu Ghosh

Source: http://www.indynewsisrael.com/hebron-mukhtar-speaks-out-against-oslo

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