Palestinian Professor: Normalization with Israel is the Path to Peace

Palestinians must seek normalization with Israel in order to achieve independence, a Palestinian professor who has been ostracized in his community for arranging trips to Auschwitz said in an interview on Tuesday.

Mohammed S. Dajani was targeted by the Palestinian anti-normalization movement for his efforts to achieve mutual understanding—he was denounced as a “traitor” by his fellow professors at al-Quds University in Jerusalem and his car was set on fire.

The failure of the movement, Dajani said in an interview with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is that it “it fails to see that the Palestinian cause must be won inside of Israel and that normalization is an essential step in the process to end the conflict.” By ostracizing Israel, Palestinians threaten to alienate the Israeli people from the “cause of peace,” making peace “improbable, if not impossible.” He also noted that the anti-normalization campaign violates the terms of the Oslo Accords because it “called for the end of incitement and encourages the process of normalization….Anti-normalization undermines the peace process, blocking the possibility of reconciliation and conflict resolution.”

Dajani pointed out that he has not been alone in being targeted by anti-normalization activists. Earlier this year, when an Israeli leftist group traveled to the West Bank to celebrate an Iftar meal during Ramadan, they had stones thrown at them and their car was torched. “These intimidation tactics aim to shut down interpersonal reconciliation, weakening Palestinian civil society and NGOs,” Dajani said.

Dajani blamed the anti-normalization campaign on both Fatah and Hamas, who “weaken the role of civil society organizations in order to remain in control of the political agenda” and become the exclusive representatives of the Palestinians.

http://www.thetower.org/3932-palestinian-professor-normalization-with-israel-is-the-path-to-peace/