A friend recently bombarded me with the following questions:

- “Why is it”, he said, “that not one single writer in any Arab country has tried to envisage an alternative scenario to the one that transpired in 1948, to speculate on what would have happened if the Arabs had accepted the UN Partition Plan to divide Palestine into two separate states, one Arab (Palestine), the other Jewish (Israel)? How would events have played out if that had been the case? Has the choice our leaders made at the time fulfilled the prophecy of Ismail Sidki in 1947, when he warned that we would lose what was attainable while striving for the unattainable?”

- No waiting for an answer, he proceeded to the next question: “The Muslim Brothers have always been ardent proponents of armed resistance and were at the forefront of the call to arms in 1948. Why is it that eminent historians like Dr. Abdul Azeem Ramadan and Dr. Yunan Labib Rizk have never analyzed the armed movement launched by the Brothers in 1948 and the results it produced? Why are we not given access to the facts that must be taken into account when we hear them using the same logic today, why are we not told of the devastation their zeal has rained on our heads?

- Before I could reply, he was already on his next question: “Do you realize that if we succeed in restituting the Golan Heights , the Shaba Farms, the West Bank and Jerusalem we would only be recouping losses we suffered in the space of six dark days in June 1967? And even if we do manage to get our lost territories back, will we ever be able to undo the harmful effects these thirty-seven years have had on our region of the world?” Again he did not give me a chance to answer before firing yet another question at me: “Why has no writer or intellectual tried to explain what would have happened if the Palestinians and Syrians had accepted President Sadat’s invitation to join him in negotiating with Israel a quarter of a century ago? Or what would have happened if the results achieved in Taba forty months ago had been accepted by Arafat and the Palestinian leadership? Which is more advantageous, what Arafat refused at the time or the roadmap? And if what was on offer in Taba is better than what is now on offer under the roadmap, who should be held accountable for the lives lost, the losses incurred and the time wasted? Or is accountability a concept that is alien to the Arab world?”

- Taking a deep breath, I prepared to launch myself into the murky waters his questions had stirred up but before I could formulate a response he was ready with his fifth question. “What do you think, he said, of the following phased plan of action?

First: Convince Arafat to appoint Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as his Prime Minister and to delegate most of his powers to him.

Second: Have Arafat denounce the random use of violence by both Israelis and Palestinians, that is, the targeting of civilians by the two sides, explain to his people that the suicide bombings have led to a severe decline in the conditions and quality of life of both Israelis and Palestinians, and call on Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to halt attacks on civilians.

Third: Two or three weeks after these steps are implemented, have Arafat announce that he must go to Cairo for health reasons and name Abu Mazen as acting president during his absence, which could extend for as long as the treatment of his many ailments requires.

Fourth: Abu Mazen then resumes negotiations with the Israelis in the aim of implementing the roadmap and possibly even the agreements reached in Taba during the final days of Clinton ’s presidency.

Fifth: Egypt would coordinate and supervise the plan and apprise Washington of all developments so that the US and Israel come to recognize not just that the peace plan is a purely Egyptian initiative but that only Egypt can push it through.

Sixth: As Palestinian-Israeli talks progress, Egypt announces that as soon as an agreement acceptable to both parties is achieved, it will use all the cultural and media tools at its disposal to lead the region towards a culture of peace.”

As I was organizing my thoughts to comment on his proposed plan, he reminded me of an article I had written a few years ago on the culture of peace. “You were attacked at the time”, he said, “by the noted intellectual S.Y., but when the political leadership in Egypt had the foresight and wisdom to set up an organization for the express purpose of disseminating a culture of peace, the same intellectual remained prudently silent! Who knows, he might even become one of the main exponents of a culture of peace; after all, this would be quite in character for the breed of ‘bureaucratic intellectuals’ to which he belongs!

Can you conceive of a greater contradiction, in both philosophical and linguistic terms”, he asked bitterly, than the one between the notion of ‘intellectual’ on the one hand and that of ‘bureaucrat’ on the other? Sartre summed up the role of the intelligentsia when he said that an intellectual must never become a ‘supporter’, that is, he must never become a bureaucrat.” My friend ended his impassioned tirade with a statement he never tires of repeating: “Questions have eyes … answers are blind!”

Mr. Arafat is obviously better qualified than I am to respond to my friend’s questions. I would therefore hope that he gets to read this article and that he will graciously agree to reply to as many of these simple (!) questions as possible, as well as to yet another question my friend put to me a few days ago: “The first Palestinian Intifada won the sympathy and admiration of the whole world because it did not resort to random violence against civilians. As to the present Intifada, while it does have its supporters it also has many detractors who deplore its use of violence against civilians. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the current Intifada will produce better results than those which could have been achieved in January 2001, what will Arafat do with the strongmen who are flexing the muscles they developed in the period between September 2000 and the present day, and who are becoming increasingly ready to assert their political will over his, as they did at the Cairo meetings? What will Arafat do (after his big victory) with the genie he let out of the bottle, a genie as dangerous as the one Sadat released, with disastrous consequences, in the seventies of the last century? Or is this his legacy to the coming generations in Palestine and throughout the region?”