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She wants to correct public misperceptions

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

By Lillian Thomas, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Diana Buttu went to the Middle East in the fall of 2000 after suggesting to the Palestine Liberation Organization that it get itself some better legal advice and a more effective public voice -- by hiring her.

The PLO accepted the offer and Buttu arrived in Tel Aviv the day the Palestinian uprising started. She found Ramallah cordoned off, and a few weeks into her stay the Canadian-born, Stanford-trained lawyer listened as the bombs started to fall.

"I remember sitting in my hotel room in Ramallah on Oct. 12, with a bomb dropping about 100 meters away, and making the decision that I had to stay, that it was important to get that voice out there," Buttu said.

	Diana Buttu will speak at 7 p.m. tomorrow in Room 2210, Doherty Hall, Carnegie Mellon University.

She is bringing the voice here, with a stop in Pittsburgh tomorrow as part of a U.S. tour to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the likely effects on the Middle East of a U.S.-led war against Iraq.

Buttu, 31, was born in Toronto. Her parents emigrated from Palestinian villages near Nazareth in Israel in 1967.

"When I was growing up I didn't quite realize what it meant to be Palestinian," she said. "My parents would talk about it all the time, but I didn't understand. This was because I was living in a free society."

That changed, she said, when she went to Israel at 16 with her older sister and visited her relatives in Nazareth.

"For the first time, I could see what it meant to be a refugee, what it meant to be dispossessed.

"When I came back after that trip I instantly became an activist, reading as much as possible, focusing on the community," Buttu said. "When Oslo [peace accord] was signed, like most people, I checked out. I stopped paying attention and was focusing on my law career, my life."

Buttu has a bachelor's and law degrees from Stanford University, bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Toronto, and a law degree from Queen's University in Ontario. She served as legal counsel to the Canadian Department of Justice in Ottawa and developed expertise in international law. She is pursuing a doctorate at Stanford in law and refugee compensation.

When the Camp David talks faltered in July 2000, though, she decided she needed to become involved again.

"A friend of mine was really criticizing the Palestinians for not accepting Camp David. I decided I needed to find out more, I needed to change the discourse," she said. "People were saying, '[Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Barak's generous offer.' Since when could Barak be generous with this land?

"At the end of July, I basically knocked on [the PLO's] door, and said 'I'm looking for work, are you interested?' and they said 'Yes.' "

She got there just as the situation took a drastic turn for the worse.

"Nothing can prepare you for it. We're living under a situation of curfews and sieges. After 6 o'clock at night you cannot open your door, or leave your apartment. You could be shot. You could die. This is enforced with tanks, with F-16s, with armored personnel carriers, through soldiers, every day around the clock. Society has gotten to the point where people are barely surviving," Buttu said.

She regards this as all the more reason to stay and speak for the Palestinians. She is self-confident and passionate. The heart of her work, she said, is correcting misperceptions.

"The biggest misperception I see is that these are two equal parties that are fighting it out," she said. "There is an occupation going on. For me the issue is trying to highlight that there is this power imbalance. The other party, the Palestinians, are the oppressed, the occupied. They have no army, they are a civilian population."

She pulls no punches in her analogies: "People say, 'How can we get the Palestinians to stop the suicide bombings?' That's like saying to a rape victim, 'Make sure not to hurt him, don't scratch his eyes.' It's demanding that the oppressed protect the oppressor."

Only a settlement based on equality will work, she said.

"That's something that's been desperately missing for 35 years, most particularly for the past two years. I see pretty much the same continuing unless the world steps up and tells Israel that it's not above the law and that Palestinians are not beneath the law," she said.

Buttu has stirred up controversy in the last two weeks with the suggestion that the Palestinians might have to abandon the idea of establishing an independent state alongside Israel and instead become part of Israel. This is viewed with suspicion by most supporters of Israel, who see it as a way of planting a population time bomb inside the country to destroy it from within instead of from without.

"That's an interesting proposal," said David Shtulman, Pittsburgh area director of the American Jewish Committee. "It can mean one of two things. It sounds like giving up the two-state solution. It can be heard to mean, 'Israel is not that bad, it's a democratic country, we can all live together.' That's a positive way to hear it. I wish I believed that.

"The other way to hear that is, 'We're not going to get the state we want, and so if we all take Israeli citizenship we will have a demographic majority in a short time and simply make it a Palestinian state.' "

Buttu said the idea "is not a time bomb, it's reality. We've been telling the world that unless a settlement freeze takes place, unless the world steps up and says 'Stop,' this is the reality."