A Conversation with Diana Buttu

Buttu discusses Palestinian life under occupation

You served as a legal advisor to the PLO and Palestinian President Mahoud Abbas.  How did you come to work for the PLO?

It’s a good question and a little bit of a long story.  I grew up in a household that wasn’t very politically active so when I started to learn about the Palestinian cause I was about 16 or 17 years old, quite young, and just immersed myself in the cause of Palestine and the plight of Palestinians.  I’m a Palestinian myself.  And so, I had just continuously been working on the issue of Palestine as a student activist.  In my later years after I was no longer a student, but more along the path of law school, I was still quite active.  I spent my summers in Palestine working at human rights organizations.   And one summer I got a call by one of the organizations I had been interning for saying they were looking for lawyers to work on the Palestinian negotiating team, and would I be willing?  I was taken aback.  I was still quite young, relatively young lawyer, new, so I wasn’t really quite sure if it was something that I was up to.  I declined the first year.  And then a year later, again another call came saying “We’re still looking for some lawyers and you’ve got a lot more experience than you think you do.  Would you be willing to spend a year?”  And after some very long discussions with friends, with family, with some mentors- they said try it. It will be a year of doing good work for your country.  So I left.  I left the United States, moved to the West Bank under the belief that I’d be there for a year.  A year turned into two, turned into three, turned into four.  And by my third year there I was able to get the attention of the now President, he liked me, and asked me to join his staff.  So it was combination of luck, being in the right place at the right time and people believing in me.

Did this work offer you any insights into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that you were not able to learn when studying the conflict in university?

Oh yes, absolutely.  I went there with a great deal of being both humble and a little bit arrogant.  I remember thinking that this whole problem is going to be resolved by lawyers and I know everything there is to know about this conflict.  When I got there it was a very, very different reality from that which I had studied.  Nothing in my Canadian upbringing had prepared me for a life under occupation.  Nothing has and nothing ever will.  As much as I had read about it, I still did not know what it was like not to be free.  I had never experienced check-points.  I had never experienced bombings or military campaigns.  I had never experienced this great disconnect between peoples living on this one small piece of land.  So it was really quite an eye-opener for me.  The other part of it was that when I got there one of the things that I really set out to do was try to educate Israelis.  Because I thought that if I as a Canadian-Palestinian didn’t know about all the things Palestinians were living under, for sure Israelis didn’t.  So I embarked on kind of an outreach program which was unique; it was the only one of its kind at the time to try to educate Israelis about the occupation.  Going  from house to house, anywhere anybody welcomed me, I just explained about the occupation.  So I got much more inside about the entire conflict than I could ever read.  If I spent a year’s time reading every single book, I would have never gotten the same insight I got living there.

Why do you think the peace process is failing today?

The peace process is failing and will continue to fail, unfortunately.  I think that it’s failing because the two sides are negotiating in two very different ways.  Let me back up just a second.  The world has put forward fantastic laws to be able to govern occupation.  So when there’s an occupation there are specific rules and terms in how a country occupying another country is supposed to behave.  Houses are not supposed to be demolished, people aren’t supposed to deported, and settlements are to be established.  All these things are set up under international law.  The problem with international law is that there is no way of actually ending an occupation.  So they’ve never created the rules as to how to end an occupation.  So in comes the peace process. The idea behind the peace process was, given that there is not a body of rules on how to end an occupation, just how to govern an occupation, the best way, it was so thought, was to have negotiations between the two sides.  But the problems with the negotiations - and this is why it’s failed and will continue to fail - is that you’ve got two different standards of negotiations.  You’ve got the Palestinian side, which is the side that I was working for, which is insistent upon international law and the application and adherence of international law.  And then you have the Israeli side which says law doesn’t matter and what should matter instead is power.  And given that we’re the more powerful party, what we say should go.  So you have this disconnect between the way the negotiations are taking place - and it will always be there.  On the one hand, you have Palestinians saying international law, international law, international law and on the other hand, you have the Israelis saying who cares about the law, let’s just be practical, let’s use power negotiations.  Without a third party to balance that out, to balance out that inequality, without a third party to bridge those gaps, the peace process is going to fail.  And this is why we’ve seen it fail all these years.

What are some of the main obstacles that Palestinians are facing in everyday life as a result of the conflict?

Also a very good question.  It’s hard to describe but I guess the best thing to say would be just imagine your life and imagine it not your life, kind of flipped on its head.  It’s hard to describe what it’s like not to live under freedom but I’ll try to do my best.  It’s the inability for some of my students when I was teaching at one of the universities in the West Bank to get to class in a daily basis.  Not because they didn’t want to go to class but because there were check-points.  The insecurity that the house that you live in might be demolished.  The insecurity that your loved ones might be deported.  The insecurity that the land that you own might be confiscated to build a settlement.  The insecurity that you may be killed or your loved ones might be killed or detained; About 20% of the Palestinian population has been at one point imprisoned.  The insecurity that your children are not safe.  So it’s a combination of insecurity and lack of freedom that is really difficult to describe unless you’ve actually lived there, unless you’ve seen people harassed at a check-point with complete immunity for soldiers.  There’s nobody who goes after them, there’s no way of complaining.  There’s no way of ever having a government that cares about your needs or is there to protect you as they should be doing.  So I think that’s the best way that I would describe it.

What drew you to the Belfer Center and how has your experience here impacted your research?

What drew me to the Belfer Center is I wanted to spend a little time away from Palestine.  Living there makes you go crazy after a while.  It is very difficult, especially for someone raised in the West who, as I said, can’t get used to the denial of freedom.  The Belfer Center had a combination of being able to work on public policy issues and on the Middle East, which is something that I had definitely wanted.  And being able to be positioned at Harvard, with all the wonderful resources, faculty, students, and individuals, is really what drew me to the program.  The Dubai Initiative is unique in that it brings together academics, practitioners, people who are more established in their careers, people who are less established in their careers - from a wide array of practices and fields - and brings them together under the Belfer Center which allows for a fantastic exchange of ideas and is quite thought provoking.  It’s changed me because being able to step back and meet people of very different backgrounds, having access to fantastic resources, faculty and otherwise, and being able to really collaborate on a number of different ideas has been very, very helpful to me.  I don’t know where I’ll go back.  I might go back to Palestine, I’m not sure, but if I do I will definitely feel much more enriched.