Al-Hayat 16-06-11 I can list the names of a thousand Jews in Israel and around the world, who support the Palestinians in a way that many Arabs and Muslims do not. They seek a Palestinian state, and some wage campaigns to boycott Israel until the independent Palestinian state is established. James Wolfensohn is among those one thousand. If I were to choose the names of the most important one hundred Jewish supporters of Palestine, he would still have been amongst them, and if I were to choose the top ten or five Jewish supporters of Palestine, his name would still be in my list. I write as 90 professors and students at the American University of Beirut signed a petition entitled ‘Not in our name: AUB faculty, staff and students object to honoring James Wolfensohn.' I say, as a graduate of the American University of Beirut, that this petition is ‘not in my name'. It is wrong and unfair, and betrays a decline in the academic level and serious research among the professors and their students since my days in the university four decades ago. I almost cannot believe that the signatories felt that honoring Wolfensohn with an honorary doctorate and letting him give a speech at the students' graduation ceremony on June 25th undermines the university's relationship with Beirut and Palestine. We now know that Wolfensohn cancelled his attendance of the graduation ceremony, out of concern that his presence would distract from the celebratory nature of the event. We also know that the university president Peter Dorman defended Wolfensohn, and cited his efforts to help the Palestinians, saying that the Arab world needs friends like him. I read that he will instead receive an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem next Sunday, and that pro-Israeli Jewish groups now want to honor him in response to the views on him in Beirut. I know James Wolfensohn more than the President of AUB and its faculty and students do. I have seen him more than once, contacted him and followed his work. One account is enough in this regard, of something that took place near the end of January 2001. I have returned to it more than once after that, and the entire material is preserved in my archives: After Abu Ammar delivered a charged speech at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, I followed him to his suite in a hotel along with Sabih Masri to protest the tone of the speech. However, the Palestinian president was with the President of Croatia Stjepan Mesic, and so we sat around them. But no sooner had we done that, that James Wolfensohn entered the room; Abu Ammar then asked us to sit with him and chat with him until he finished his meeting with the Croatian president. We sat in another corner of the spacious suite around a round table. The then-head of the World Bank said that he intended to visit Lebanon after the meeting at Davos, and that although Prime Minister Rafik Hariri promised him that the visit would be private, he found out that there will be 400 invitees to the dinner honoring him. He then spoke about his determination for the World Bank to support Hariri's efforts for reconstruction. Dr. Saeb Erekat came to the suite next, coming from Taba and the last round of negotiation with the Israelis. He talked about a corridor through the Armenian Quarter of West Jerusalem to the Wailing Wall for the Jews to come and perform their prayers there, and Sabih Masri pledged to pay for all the homes that will be demolished to build the corridor. All this was recorded at the time, and I also recorded that we sat with President Arafat, where Wolfensohn began reading from his personal diary about his contacts with Arab and European leaders to help the Palestinians, and advised him on what to tell them when presenting his needs, and how to respond if they refused to help. Do the signatories of the statement know that James Wolfensohn donated one million dollars from his own money to the Palestinians? And do they know that he had the World Bank, while he was its president, offer a 12 million dollar grant to the Palestinians that was the first of its kind in the bank's history? More importantly, after he left the World Bank in 2005, Wolfensohn chose to be the Quartet's representative to the Palestinians. He attempted to build for them an economy that is independent from Israel, and to reduce their reliance on U.S. aid and aid from other countries. However, Condoleezza Rice resisted his efforts, as she believed that if the Palestinians no longer needed American aid, they ‘would stop listening to us' (I urged Wolfensohn at the time to mention this in his memoirs). Wolfensohn slept at the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem with his wife and daughter one night, to teach them about Palestinian heritage. In the end, he left the Quartet out of frustration, because he could not achieve his ambition to build an independent Palestinian economy in the face of opposition from the George W. Bush administration. I know that Wolfensohn is an Australian-American Jew. He must no doubt be sympathetic to Jews around the world and to Israel. However, he remains a prominent supporter of the Palestinians and their cause, and he deserves our gratitude. I thank him on behalf of myself, and apologize on behalf of the university students and faculty, and then ask them to retract their petition and apologize to James Wolfensohn. Admitting and fixing a mistake is a virtue, and if they do not enjoy the virtue of serious academic research that my university was renowned for, then they must at least be fair to a man who has been fair to us, and who put his humanity above his ethnic or religious identity. [email protected]
