Diana Buttu on Negotiations and Media Framing
Diana Buttu, Palestinian-Canadian lawyer; former legal advisor to the PLO negotiating team and former PLO spokesperson
The idea that people who are living under occupation have to negotiate with their occupier is repugnant.
Diana Buttu is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer who served from 2000 to 2005 in the PLO’s Negotiations Support Unit as a legal and communications advisor, and later as a spokesperson for the PLO. Since leaving the negotiating team she has become one of the most visible Palestinian commentators in English-language media, arguing that the Oslo framework trapped Palestinians in an open-ended “process” while Israeli settlement expansion continued on the ground, and criticizing coverage that presents the conflict as a dispute between two equal parties rather than between an occupier and an occupied people.
In a March 2025 interview with NPR about the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire, she put the structural problem this way:
“The idea that people who are living under occupation have to negotiate with their occupier is repugnant.”
Her interviews consistently return to two themes: that negotiations under heavy asymmetry reward the stronger party’s refusal to implement agreements, and that media framing — demands for Palestinian concessions, silence on the legal baseline of occupation — shapes what Western audiences consider a “reasonable” outcome.
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