How does a Wall Street lawyer defend suicide bombings in Israel? Gingerly. "We've got to ask why they are happening," says Michael Tarazi, who abandoned a corporate-law career two years ago to become a legal adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the West Bank. "Some Palestinians say we have no choice, that [terrorism] is the only thing that works. We have to give these people an alternative."
Jews should just peaceably abandon the whole of Israel. Great.
Born in Kuwait, raised in America and educated at Andover and Harvard, the 34-year-old U.S. citizen is emerging as the most articulate and sophisticated Palestinian advocate to come along in years. A rising star on the cable-news channels, Mr. Tarazi is everything most Palestinian spokespeople are not: young, witty, fluent in American English, knowledgeable about international law and steeped in Western liberal ideals.
His graceful speeches and sound bites, and sharp, well-researched legal papers, borrow a page from Israel's playbook: statesmanlike spin, in perfect English.
"Abba Eban comes to mind," says Rabbi Joshua Stampfer of Portland, Ore., after having lunch with Mr. Tarazi last month. Mr. Eban, South African-born and silver-tongued, helped win international support for the founding of Israel in 1948. "Tarazi is closer than anything the Palestinians have had before," Rabbi Stampfer says.
But he isn't there yet. On a recent speaking tour of several U.S. cities, Mr. Tarazi told civic groups and private gatherings that Palestinians are misunderstood. He called suicide attacks on Israelis desperate acts by desperate people -- acts he personally opposes "point blank," he said. Yet many listeners, after hearing him, said he comes across as almost too forceful, sometimes flippant and condescending.
Speaking at the World Affairs Council chapter in San Francisco, for example, Mr. Tarazi outlined a range of options that Palestinians are willing to explore for compensating or resettling their refugees. He was a study in open-mindedness, until this: "We'll ask Israel how many non-Jews can you take in your ethnically pure state, as racist as that is," he said.
Hmm, almost a cue to my Jewish state question of yesterday. And yet, no. Jews are not specifically a race or ethnicity, thank you very much.
As a child growing up in Pennsylvania and Colorado, Mr. Tarazi had no idea he was Palestinian. Then, one day when he was a 15-year-old sophomore at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., he called home to find his mother in tears over the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon. "That's when she told me, 'We are Palestinian; those are our people,' " Mr. Tarazi recalls.
He went on to college and law school at Harvard, then worked in corporate law for seven years in New York and Europe, starting with the law firm White & Case and then becoming European general counsel for software-maker Euronet Services Inc. of Leawood, Kan. "I knew more Jews connected to Israel than Arabs," he says. "That gives me a unique place in this conflict."
Weary of corporate law, he resigned from Euronet two years ago and moved to the West Bank government seat of Ramallah. It was Mr. Tarazi's first direct contact with Palestinian politics. He eventually landed a job with the Palestinian Authority and was put to work on a new team of lawyers assembled to advise the PLO's peace-talks unit. But, increasingly since the deepening of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities this spring, his main task has been communications.
After lunch with some rabbis in Portland,
Mr. Tarazi was grilled by the editorial board of the Portland Oregonian -- "the most hostile reception I've ever had," he said afterward. Oddly, he says, Israeli audiences tend to be much more receptive to his maps and "myths" than do Americans, who give him a harder time.
Bob Caldwell, editor of the Oregonian's editorial page, complains that Mr. Tarazi "parses history" to fit Palestinian claims. For example, when asked about Israel's claims that Mr. Arafat financed terrorism, Mr. Tarazi dismissed the evidence in a technical "lawyerly" way more suited to a criminal trial than a search for truth, Mr. Caldwell says.
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