The Palestinian peace negotiator and politician Saeb Erekat, who has died aged 65 after contracting Covid-19, spent much of his life trying – but failing – to resolve his people’s intractable conflict with Israel.
In his last role he served from 2015 as secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and worked closely with both Yasser Arafat and his successor Mahmoud Abbas. In the wake of the first of the Oslo accords in 1993 Erekat became a senior official of the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank town of Ramallah.
Like everything associated with this bitter and divisive issue, his final days aroused political controversy. Reacting to Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to unilaterally annex parts of the West Bank, the PA suspended its security and civil cooperation with Israel, so Erekat was accused by critics – on both sides – of hypocrisy when he was admitted to the Israeli Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem after falling ill at his home in Jericho.
Erekat first rose to prominence during the Madrid peace conference in 1991, when the PLO was still excluded from negotiations by the US and Israel because it was viewed as a terrorist organisation. He was part of what was termed the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and theatrically donned a keffiyeh headdress to draw attention to Arafat’s enforced absence. James Baker, the US secretary of state at the time, judged him a “blowhard”.
Among Israelis and some of his Palestinian colleagues he earned the title “Mr CNN” because of the many times he appeared on the first global cable TV network. After Madrid he went on to take part in inconclusive talks with Israel but was not involved in the secret negotiations in Norway that led to the Oslo deal.
Erekat was widely seen as a moderate and realist. In 2008 he explained his own approach, based on the pre-1967 borders, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, alongside Israel: “That is my … preferred option,” he said. “Number two: one state. This is not my option, but if they insist, then in my town, Jericho, I would want to be a citizen with equal rights. I do not intend to disappear. I intend to stay. I am here and I can tell them that Christian and Muslim Palestinians will not convert to Judaism and become Israelis and neither will Jews convert to Christianity and Islam. Option number three is what they are doing now: the [West Bank separation] wall, settlements. This is the classic recipe for extremism, war, violence and counter-violence.”
He was born in East Jerusalem to a Muslim family from the suburb of Abu Dis when it was under Jordanian rule. His father, Muhammad, was a businessman and resident of the US who founded a bus company on his return to Palestine. A close relative, Kamal, was a Palestinian nationalist during the struggle against the British Mandate and Zionism. In June 1967, aged 12, Erekat recalled his mother, Bahia, hanging white sheets out of the windows of their Jericho home before Israeli forces arrived. He was the sixth of seven children.
He gained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in international relations (1977 and 1979) at San Francisco State University, where he acquired a green card and the fluent American English that was the key to his success. An acquaintance described him as a “Palestinian Abba Eban,” the grandiloquent Israeli foreign minister. On his return home he taught political science at An-Najah University in Nablus (1979-91), along the way taking a PhD in peace studies (1983) at Bradford University in Britain.
He later said that that was when he became convinced that there was no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it would end only through negotiations.
He embodied the rise of Arafat’s Fatah movement and its growing influence over Arabic media in East Jerusalem, writing editorials for the previously pro-Jordanian Al-Quds newspaper. In 1981 he married his wife, Niemeh, another member of the extended Erekat clan. During the first intifada in 1987 he was placed under house arrest and banned by Israel from travelling abroad. He enjoyed little popular support but excelled at cultivating links with Israeli journalists covering the occupied territories.
Erekat resigned as a negotiator when the Oslo accords were made public in 1993 but became the only leading West Banker to join Arafat’s inner circle after the establishment of the PA. He served as both a minister and an MP for Jericho, and took part in the 2000 peace talks at Camp David and those in 2001 at the Egytian resort of Taba, on the Gulf of Aqaba.
In 2011 he suffered embarrassment and offered to resign when leaked documents about Palestinian concessions in secret talks with Israel were published by Al-Jazeera TV and the Guardian. He said he bore personal responsibility for classified papers being “stolen from my office’’ so that they could be “tampered with’’ – in what he described as “the biggest breach in Palestinian national security,” but defended himself against “headlines and spin”.
The “Palestine Papers” also showed that his sardonic sense of humour became more self-deprecating when he was under pressure: “If someone sneezes in Tel Aviv, I get the flu in Jericho,” he was quoted as saying. Erekat told American and Israeli officials that he felt his twin daughters were ashamed of him and his wife saw him as weak because of the Palestinians’ failure to make tangible progress.
As a senior PA official, he was a privileged member of the Palestinian elite, even during the violent days of the second intifada. But reality often proved challenging: in June 2020 his nephew, Ahmed, was shot dead by Israeli police when he drove towards a checkpoint near Bethlehem, leading to accusations that he had intended to carry out a car-ramming attack. However, the victim’s family insisted it was an accident.
In recent months Erekat was angry, along with many other Palestinians, when the UAE and Bahrain agreed to sign the Abraham accords, brokered by Donald Trump, and “normalise” their relations with Israel. He described the move as “a stab in the back”.
There was concern after Erekat was tested positive for Covid-19 as he was vulnerable due to a weakened immune system because he had a heart attack in 2012 and underwent a lung transplant in the US in 2017.
He is survived by Niemeh and their daughters, Salam and Dalal, and sons, Ali and Muhammad.
• Saeb Muhammad Salih Erekat, politician, born 28 April 1955; died 10 November 2020
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