Haydar Abd al-Shafi at Madrid: We Come to You From a Tortured Land

On 31 October 1991 a physician from Gaza stood at the Madrid Peace Conference and delivered the opening address of the Palestinian delegation. Haydar Abd al-Shafi had been speaker of the Egyptian-era Gaza legislative council, had sat on the PLO’s first Executive Committee in 1964, had founded the Red Crescent Society in the Strip as a volunteer doctor at Shifa’ Hospital after the 1967 occupation, and had been exiled twice by the occupation authorities for his nationalist activity — three months in the Sinai desert in 1969, then deportation to Lebanon in September 1970, reversed by Israel’s own Supreme Court. He began in Arabic, thanked Spain, and then — as he told the hall — switched to English to speak on behalf of “the sons of the Palestinian people who are still struggling for freedom and independence.”

The speech does not plead. Its opening move is to take back the description of who is speaking:

“We, the people of Palestine, stand before you in the fullness of our pain, our pride, and our anticipation, for we long harbored a yearning for peace and a dream of justice and freedom. For too long, the Palestinian people have gone unheeded, silenced and denied. Our identity negated by political expediency; our right for struggle against injustice maligned; and our present existence subdued by the past tragedy of another people.”

He names the founding fiction directly — “for the greater part of this century we have been victimized by the myth of a land without a people and described with impunity as the invisible Palestinians” — and then states the delegation’s purpose in a sentence that has outlived the conference: “It is time for us to narrate our own story, to stand witness as advocates of truth which has long lain buried in the consciousness and conscience of the world. We do not stand before you as supplicants, but rather as the torchbearers.”

On Jerusalem, excluded from the agenda and from the delegation, he refused to accept the exclusion as a fact: “Palestinian Jerusalem, the capital of our homeland and future state, defines Palestinian existence, past, present, and future, but itself has been denied a voice and an identity.”

And then the passage that has been quoted ever since, in which he places the delegation’s mandate not with the sponsors of the conference but with the people who were not in the room:

“We come to you from a tortured land and a proud, though captive people, having been asked to negotiate with our occupiers, but leaving behind the children of the intifada, and a people under occupation and under curfew who enjoined us not to surrender or forget.”

What follows that paragraph is the part usually cut: the itemised demand. Thousands in Israeli prisons and detention camps, “most detained without evidence, charge, or trial” — set them free. The wounded and permanently disabled — let peace heal their wounds. Refugees, deportees and displaced persons since 1967 — bring them home, “they have the right to return.” Demolished homes — we must rebuild in our free state. “For one out of three Palestinian children under occupation has been killed, injured, or detained in the past four years.”

He led the Palestinian side in the Washington rounds that followed, and resigned the leadership in April 1993 in protest at Israel’s refusal to stop building settlements; persuaded back, he twice called that May for Palestinian participation to be suspended. In July 1993 he denied knowledge of the secret Oslo channel, and he stayed away from the White House signing of the Declaration of Principles on 13 September. In January 1996 he stood for the Palestinian Legislative Council and won the highest number of votes of any candidate; he resigned in 1998 over what he called the Authority’s failure to end corruption in its own institutions and the absence of any separation of powers. He died in Gaza in 2007.

Sources

• Speech of Haydar Abd al-Shafi at the Madrid Conference, 31 October 1991 — full text, Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest), Institute for Palestine Studies
• Haydar Abd al-Shafi — biography, Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)