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JUDY WOODRUFF: This morning in Jerusalem, senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat died after a month-long battle with COVID-19. Long a fixture of Palestinian politics, Erekat led peace talks with the Israelis for nearly three decades. Nick Schifrin has this look at his life.
NICK SCHIFRIN: For decades, Saeb Erekat embodied Palestinian diplomacy and Palestinian hopes.
SAEB EREKAT, Chief Palestinian Negotiator: The only way to have peace in this region is to solve the Palestinian question, is to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is to end the Israeli occupation.
NICK SCHIFRIN: His career was defined by the negotiations he helped lead, in the '90s, for the Oslo accords that removed Israeli soldiers from parts of the West Bank.
SAEB EREKAT: Once they leave our towns, villages and refugee camps in the first stage, there is no way back.
NICK SCHIFRIN: In 2000, next to former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat at Camp David, and, in 2014, during the last round of peace talks. In 2007, he spoke to Gwen Ifill.
SAEB EREKAT: What needs to be restored in the minds of Palestinians and Israelis today is the hope.
AARON DAVID MILLER, Public Policy Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center For Scholars: He played the role that he was given, believed in it deeply, and thought about peace and the possibility of a better future as more than just a thought experiment. It was something he devoted his life to.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Aaron David Miller worked on Middle East peace across six administrations. He says Erekat was constrained by Arafat and, more recently, by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, but Erekat always believed in a negotiated solution.
AARON DAVID MILLER: He never surrendered to the forces of history, which, of course, if they could speak to us, would basically say there'll never be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He deeply believed, I think, in the forces of diplomacy.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Erekat was a longtime proponent of two states and a longtime critic of Israeli occupation.
NOUR ODEH, Former Palestinian Government Spokesperson: Saeb's name has been synonymous with negotiations and all that comes with it, the trials, the tribulations, the failings.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Nour Odeh is a political analyst in Ramallah. She praises Erekat, but says young Palestinians question the diplomacy he was committed to.
NOUR ODEH: After a certain point, there was an obsession with the process, rather than the end results of what that process should have delivered. And the sentiment is that that process ended up being a cover for everything that was happening on the ground, which was literally undoing the possibility of two states.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Most recently, Erekat executed Abbas' decision to cut off negotiations with the Trump administration after the U.S. moved its embassy to Jerusalem, and he rejected the administration's peace plan, unveiled last year.
SAEB EREKAT: This is not a plan of peace. This is a scandal and the fraud of the century.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Erekat never backed down from advocating what Palestinians believed they deserved. Some Israelis found him obstructionist. Many respected his intelligence.
He never stopped working with, and befriending, Israelis he negotiated against, including longtime negotiator Yossi Beilin.
YOSSI BEILIN, Former Israeli Negotiator: He proved to all of us, and I believe that also to the world, that the myth that we don't have partners is totally, totally wrong.
NICK SCHIFRIN: Erekat contracted COVID last month, and died this morning in this Jerusalem hospital, his diplomacy and his dreams unfulfilled. Saeb Erekat was 65 years old. For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Nick Schifrin.
