By: Michael Morris, iol.co.za

MOHAMMED Dajani has no illusions about the essential injustices of Palestinian life – whether in Ramallah, Gaza or Jerusalem – or of a reactionary Israeli government’s self-interested perpetuation, in his view, of a conflict-riven status quo.

On the face of it, this knowledge lends a discomforting piquancy to the fact of the Palestinian scholar’s sitting down for an interview in Cape Town at the – by South African standards – high-security complex in Hatfield Street that is home to, among others, the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Western Province Zionist Council, the Holocaust Foundation and the Jewish National Fund.

Yet, it turns out, this is entirely fitting; engaging the other – and not as a stranger, but an intimate, a fellow, another, human – is the 70-year-old Jerusalem-born political scientist’s lodestar.

And it is, he argues with quiet conviction, the only answer to the seemingly intractable fury of a long and bedevilling Middle East conflict between the claims of Palestine and Israel.

Mohammed S Dajani Daoudi has deep and complex bonds with the geography of the Middle East past. Born in 1946 – two years before what he calls the Nakbar (catastrophe) of Israel’s inaugural statehood – he is a descendant of what Wikipedia describes as one of Jerusalem’s historic Arab families, the honorific “Daoudi” having been added to the family name in 1529 when Suleiman the Magnificent designated an ancestor as keeper of the Tomb of King David on Mount Zion.

Dajani’s slightly shambling gait, his easy-going casualness of speech and demeanour, belie the tensions of his life that arise from his intellectual moderacy, his liberalism, in an environment of fear, denial, detestation and nihilism.

He learnt his lessons, he said, from his grandfather Mohammed, after whom he is named, who was “a man of steel”.

Dajani was too young to remember it, but was told the story later of his family returning to Jerusalem from a brief exile in Egypt in 1948 to discover that they had “lost everything”, not least their home in West Jerusalem. And, as dispossessed Palestinians, they were consigned to the “Arab quarter” of East Jerusalem.

“One day, my grandmother went to the UN bureau, signed up as a refugee, and came back with sugar, rice, clothes, bedding. But when my grandfather came home, he was furious. He tore up the refugee papers and told her to take everything back.

“He said: ‘I am not a refugee.’ And what he taught me is that being a refugee is a mindset.”

The old man taught his grandson another lesson: “‘Put the past behind you and move on.’ That’s what he believed, and this was very important for me.

“And, looking at what’s happened in the Middle East, the question is, what should we do with the past? For me, it’s best to put it in a museum, where you can visit it, where the children can visit it, as a reminder, but when you walk out, you leave it behind you.”

Intellectually, but personally too, this is a pivotal aspect of Dajani’s being. The scholar started out as an engineering student at the American University in Beirut, joined Fatah and eventually worked in the public relations department of the PLO. On being deported from Lebanon in 1975 – and banned from both Israel and Jordan for his Fatah activities – he went to the US to continue studying, emerging with doctorates, from the universities of Texas and South Carolina. He was later pardoned by Jordan, and regained the right to return to Jerusalem in 1993, where, a decade later, he founded the American Studies Institute at the city’s al-Quds University.

What stayed with him over all these years was the example of his mother Abla, “a great woman, open, with a liberal mentality”, who had insisted on her children going to a Quaker school where sermons, focusing on values and ethics, drew from the teachings of the Talmud, the Qu’ran and the Bible.

Repulsed by the competing – yet mutually intensifying – extremism of the most vocal of Palestinian and Israeli leaders, Dajani, with his brother Munther, founded the Wasatia (from the Arabic word wasat, or “moderation”) Movement in 2007 to promote the Islamic values of non-violence and compromise.

He said the initial optimism in the prospect of multi-party politics that greeted the election of Hamas in 2006 gave way to despair when the party fell back on pre-Oslo Accords (1993) positions – non-recognition of Israel, non-negotiation, armed struggle.

“Many have criticised the accords, but one of its main contributions is that before Oslo, we had conflict in which Palestinians were against Israelis; afterwards, we had Palestinians and Israelis for peace, and Palestinians and Israelis against peace.”

His Wasatia Movement sought to embolden people on both sides who remained optimistic about mutual solutions.

“For many Israelis, the ‘big dream’ is waking one morning and finding there are no Palestinians and the future is all theirs. For many Palestinians, it is waking up and finding the Jews have gone. Neither of these is moral; both necessitate exclusion, holocaust. The ‘small hope’, the moral option, is for both of them to wake up and find there are two states – or whatever the form of statehood may be – and Jews and Palestinians are living in peace and harmony as two peoples.”

Moderation and tolerance were necessary.

“If the Israeli in Tel Aviv hears and sees people who want peace, who don’t want to kill him or throw him in the sea, his attitude will be totally different. It would be the same in Nablus or Ramallah for a Palestinian no longer hearing that there is no such thing as Palestine, or that he doesn’t belong and must be thrown out.

“We have to build empathy, putting the Israeli in the Palestinian’s shoes, and the Palestinian in the Israeli’s shoes, to try to see things from the other perspective.”

Just two years ago, Dajani put this theory into practice, taking 30 Israeli students through the checkpoint to Bethlehem’s Dheisheh refugee camp and taking 27 Palestinians to Poland, and the death camps of the Holocaust.

This “Heart of Flesh, Not Stone” project generated mounting controversy for Dajani. Where, beyond political considerations, he saw it as an essential element of his intellectual mission as a scholar, it did not sit well for Palestinians for whom the Holocaust – linked as it is with the Nakbar – is “taboo”, and even, among some, a “Zionist fabrication”.

His university, as he sees it, lost courage and failed to back him. He was left with little choice but to resign.

For now, Dajani is a Weston Fellow at The Washington Institute, but remains as committed as ever to forging a middle way in the Middle East.