Dec. 13 — Palestinian elections, which had been scheduled for Jan. 20, appear to be the latest casualty of Israeli-Arab fighting. Palestinian officials said this week the vote would not be held on schedule. Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian minister for planning and international cooperation, blamed the delay on Israel’s ongoing occupation of West Bank cities.

SHAATH, WHO SERVED for years as a key negotiator with Israel, criticizes the Jewish state for what he says are its harsh measures against Palestinian civilians, but also has tough words for his own people. In an interview with NEWSWEEK’s Dan Ephron, Shaath described Palestinian suicide attacks as both immoral and destructive to the Palestinian cause. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: One of the significant changes we’ve seen in the last year has been Washington’s attitude toward the Palestinian leadership. It’s become almost conventional wisdom for many Americans that Yasir Arafat must be replaced in order for peacemaking to resume. How do you view that statement?
Nabil Shaath: This is really a goofy attempt to escape responsibility for a solution. If there is any real sense of justice and pragmatism, one should have laid responsibility on both sides. It’s a cop-out and of course it serves [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon’s purposes. Sure, the Palestinian Authority has problems, and one could levy criticism at many aspects of its activities and achievements, but any attempt to lay blame on the Palestinian Authority and ignore the responsibility of Israel really misses the point. Trying to oust the leadership is like changing the rules of the game when you realize you can’t win.

But under this leadership the suicide bombings continue unabated. How vocal have you been against the attacks and why?
This issue lands me in trouble with Hamas [the militant Islamic group behind many of the bombings] all the time. I’m insulted in mosques and on their Web sites. I consistently believed and continue to believe that the two sides, despite their fighting, have to think of what happens after the confrontation. The confrontation has its reasons, and there is an important reason behind the intifada and behind Israeli security. But hitting civilians on both sides is really a sign of bankruptcy because it fails to see that at the end of the conflict there has to be reconciliation. It just creates new wounds.

Your critics in Hamas and elsewhere would point out that Israel has planes and tanks, while Palestinians have very little in the way of armaments.
This is true. And what the Israeli Army is doing, destroying homes, imposing curfews, destroying fields, making it impossible to pick olives, is also a form of terrorism against civilians. It creates deep wounds. But in our case the suicide bombings or the haphazard shelling by mortars, all of these indiscriminate methods of resistance that target noncombatants are really nonproductive from a moral point of view, but also from a practical point of view.

There are deep wounds on both sides, and deep distrust. How long it will take to heal, God knows. But you have to remember that Israelis and Palestinians have been engaged in confrontation for a very long time, long before 1948, and yet they were able to really reconcile and go forward into peacemaking when they signed the Oslo agreement. And the polls on both sides still show a majority of Israelis and Palestinians want to go back to reconciliation.

Arafat promised to hold elections for the Palestinian Authority on Jan. 20, but the idea has been abandoned for now. Why?
For the Palestinians, Jan. 20 was written in stone. That was the date of the first election in 1996, and we wanted it to happen on that date. We formed an election committee. Our statistics department updated registration. But with the present restrictions on movement in the West Bank imposed by Israel, it’s impossible to hold.

Does that mean Palestinians will not get a chance to vote on a new leadership as long as Israel occupies West Bank cities?
Once there is an Israeli willingness to pull out we can have an election. Without it, there is really no possibility.

How much worse can the economic situation become in the West Bank and Gaza before the infrastructure collapses?
In the last two months, we had a very hard time paying salaries to 130,000 civil servants. These people account for about 65 percent of the employed labor force today. So if they don’t get their wages, it could be a major catastrophe. What would be the effect? God knows. Major chaos. People have run out of savings, they’ve sold whatever family jewelry they had to get by, and consumer credit has been used up. Everyone is in debt to the butcher and the grocer. It’s a bad situation. (© 2002 Newsweek, Inc. 12/13/02)