fugitive peace

Well, although some Israelis think Israeli television shouldn’t pay any attention to Palestinian suffering, it of course continues to broadcast telephone interviews with Palestinians in Gaza. And yesterday the viewers got more than they bargained for. Dr Izzedine Abu al-Aish, a gynecologist who had trained and worked at Israeli hospitals, had been speaking regularly to Israel’s Channel 10 during the war. They rang him up for another talk just after just after the army, in response (it said) to sniper fire nearby, had bombed his house in the northern Gaza strip. Three of his eight daughters and one niece were killed.  The reporter stayed on the line with him as they went on air. You can watch the broadcast here. It’s all in Hebrew and Arabic, but you don’t need to speak either of them. The sound of raw grief is the same in every language.

For a glimpse of the huge gap between how the world sees Israel’s offensive in Gaza and how Israelis see it, I recommend first Ethan Bronner’s piece today in the New York Times, and then this email that I received and translated from the Hebrew (the emphases are mine). It represents a centre-right viewpoint — which could be said to be the mainstream these days, since Likud is set to win the next election — and makes very clear what this sector of Israeli society thinks of the casualties being inflicted on the Palestinians. (The email’s author says that it was submitted to Ynet, an Israeli news website, but rejected).

[…] There are new images on the screen.
Muhammad from Gaza and Ibrahim from Gaza and also a pediatrician from Shifa Hospital [in Gaza].
Worried interviewers summon up all their motherly feelings in the course of an interview:
Oshrat Kotler [a TV anchor], with a look of pain and a tear welling up in the corner of her eye:
“Muhammad, how are things with you? Is everything all right? How’s the family? What do you do when the power goes out? How are the children coping? What do you tell your kids? Ah… the Israelis are bombing because Hamas is firing missiles at them… and Hamas is firing missiles at the Israelis because the Israelis closed the crossings…”
“Muhammad, we’ll be coming back to you later in the programme, to ask you how you and the family are doing.”
“Muhammad… we hope you get through this.”
And Micky Chaimovitch [another news anchor], in a heart-rending interview with Ibrahim that keeps getting cut off […]
“Ibrahim, how do you feel over there… in the dark… with the bombing… what do you do when they’re bombing? Do you have shelters? Do you have food?”
If it wasn’t real, it would be funny.
We got out of Gaza, we put a border fence between us and them, we’re at war with them, with the people sitting behind that fence. Maybe someone can put a stop to these stupid interviews?
Why do we have to keep humanising them?
I don’t understand these constant attempts to show the other side of the story.
Sometimes you wonder whether these are really Israeli TV stations.
Our suffering is what’s supposed to interest us. We’re not talking about preparatory peace talks where we’re supposed to recognise the other side, to see that they’re just like us.
This attention paid to the suffering of the other side reduces the level of identification with your own people.
A picture of a girl crying in Gaza that’s always flashing on the home page of Ynet [an Israeli news website] instead of a picture of soldiers in combat/a destroyed house/children in Sderot suffering from panic/empty southern restaurants/lines of cars making their way northwards makes one wonder a great deal about whoever put the picture on Ynet’s front page.
We’re at war, our goal is to stop the missile fire, to destroy Hamas’s capabilities.
Of course not all the Gazans are bad people and Hamasniks, but at the moment this really shouldn’t interest us. We’re fighting for our existence.
We have wonderful soldiers who are fighting in Gaza and trying to undo a little of the disaster of the disengagement (by the way, has there yet been one politician who has admitted that the disengagement was a fatal mistake?)
We have a home front that stands with them and is wishing for the victory of the Israel Defence Forces.
So please, stop imitating al-Jazeera and al-Manar.
No more Gazan interviewees on the Israeli state networks, no more pictures on the internet that provoke sympathy but not our sympathy.

Two op-eds of mine today try to explain what’s wrong with Israel’s basic strategy in Gaza - in both military and public-relations terms.

In the New York Times I argue that there’s a basic problem with Israel’s notion of “deterrence”.

In Ha’aretz’s English edition I try to explain to Israelis why they never win the PR war.

The pieces are below.

January 8, 2009

Fighting to Preserve a Myth

By GIDEON LICHFIELD

Tel Aviv

SUPPOSE Israel manages to prevent its campaign in Gaza from turning into a repeat of its disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. Suppose the army does not get bogged down fighting in the narrow streets of Gaza’s refugee camps and international outrage at the spiraling death toll does not force it to pull out with rockets still falling on Israeli towns. Suppose no soldiers are taken hostage and Hamas suffers enough damage to force it to accept a cease-fire on Israel’s terms. Then what?

Israeli leaders say often that the result will be to “re-establish deterrence” against Hamas, and by extension against Hezbollah and others. This harks back to the glory days when Israel defeated three Arab armies in 1967 and fought off surprise attacks from Egypt and Syria in 1973. The trouble is that “deterrence” does not exist.

The effect of deterring conventional military attacks, as Israel did back then, was that aggression found other channels. For more than three decades the main threat to Israel has been not from conventional armies but from guerrilla movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. And these groups cannot be deterred.

During the 2006 war, the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said that merely surviving an Israeli onslaught would equal victory for his movement. The same is true of Hamas — even more so, in fact, since it is the only real power in Gaza, whereas Hezbollah is in finely balanced competition with other Lebanese parties. (Indeed, though some Israelis say that Hezbollah’s current silence is proof that deterrence works, the real reason it has not intervened on behalf of Hamas is probably that it does not want to upset the political balance just ahead of the Lebanese elections a few months away.) Deterrence has to be equal to the enemy’s fear of defeat; when the only defeat is annihilation, there is no deterrence unless Israel is prepared to reduce all of Gaza to rubble.

Even if Israel now manages to impose a cease-fire on its terms, the calm will be short-lived unless it is willing to reoccupy much of the Gaza Strip indefinitely. Moreover, as long as Israel plays the role of aggressor in Palestinian eyes, Hamas’s support remains high. And each attack has weakened the relative moderates within Hamas and strengthened its most extremist leaders.

Israel needs instead to abandon its military concept of deterrence in favor of a more pragmatic political one. What could deter Hamas is the fear that by using violence it will lose support among its people.

How to create this? It is worth remembering that Israel launched its operation after the breakdown of a cease-fire that had held, reasonably well, for several months. Each side accused the other of breaching it, both with some justification. Instead of trying to re-establish the cease-fire, Israel’s leaders, driven by the need to bolster their ratings ahead of an election in February, decided to try to strike a decisive blow against Hamas.

What Israel should do now is work for a cease-fire on terms that allow both sides to save some face. It should then do something it has done far too little of in the past: improve Gazans’ living conditions significantly. The aim should be to construct a long-lived state of calm in which Hamas has more to lose by breaching the cease-fire than by sticking to it.

In the longer term Israel will have to accept that Hamas is no fringe movement that can be rooted out and destroyed, but a central part of Palestinian society. This will be the hard part, not least because of the opposition from Hamas’s secularist Palestinian rivals, Fatah.

But even though Hamas’s stated goal is Israel’s destruction, it has said many times that it would accept a truce extending decades. Some former Israeli security chiefs argue that such an accommodation — a peace treaty in all but name — would eventually oblige Hamas to accept Israel’s existence, or else lose its own base of support. It is a gamble, certainly. But the alternative is more innocent lives lost, more extremism and ultimately more trouble for Israel.

Gideon Lichfield, a correspondent for The Economist, was the magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 2005 to 2008.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

_{Last update - 02:21 08/01/2009}

Israel’s PR war

_{By Gideon Lichfield}
It had to happen at some point. The army attacks a civilian building identified as a source of fire; dozens of civilians are killed, and what little sympathy Israel enjoyed in whatever war it’s currently fighting evaporates. It happened in Qana during the Second Lebanon War, and yesterday a school in the Jabalya refugee camp became a global symbol of indiscriminate Israeli aggression.

When these things happen, Israel is quick to respond on the public-relations front. It didn’t take long before we foreign correspondents started getting text messages from the Israel Defense Forces on our cell phones. One said that the school was targeted because it was “a source of mortar fire.” Another informed us that video footage was available of rockets being fired from another UNRWA school several months earlier. A third told us the names of the Hamas operatives who were killed along with the children and mothers cowering nearby.

I frequently get asked by Israelis, “why aren’t we winning the PR war? Why don’t people understand that this is what we have to do?” Many are convinced that there is something wrong with Israeli hasbara (public advocacy), that the spokespeople aren’t effective enough, or that the Palestinians have a huge and demonically efficient propaganda machine.

When I hear this I have to explain that Israeli hasbara is so sophisticated that there is still no adequate word for it in English; that some of Israel’s spokespeople could talk the hind legs off a donkey and then persuade the donkey to dance the hora, and that the Palestinians barely even know what a spokesman is, let alone be able to provide one who is available when he needs to be and knows anything about what is actually going on. So why isn’t Israel winning the PR war?

Partly, of course, it’s because the numbers are against it. Six hundred Palestinians dead versus nine Israelis, as of today’s figures: There’s just no way to make that proportion look pretty. Retired generals can drone on all they like about what “proportionality” really means in the laws of war, ambassadors can helpfully point out that many more Germans were killed than British in the Second World War, but these are theoretical notions; on television, what looks bad looks bad. (Nor do I really buy the argument that if Israel’s casualties were more visibly bloody - if, say, the media showed the gory pictures of the few people who have been hit by Qassams instead of holding them back to keep the home front from getting agitated - then you could counter the stream of barbaric images from Gaza. There’s just no competition.)

But the deeper reason is this: Israeli hasbara is perpetually trying to answer the wrong question: “Why is this justified?” Of course, it’s natural for either side in a conflict to try to explain why it, and not the other side, has the moral high ground. But, especially in a conflict where both sides have been claiming the moral high ground for decades, nobody in the outside world is all that interested. From a foreign correspondent’s point of view, it makes for boring journalism: “The Israelis said this, but the Palestinians said that.” And since we’re all studiously trying to be “neutral,” we’ll always balance your view against theirs; so the fact that you make more of an effort to explain than they do doesn’t really matter.

The question the foreign media really wants answered is invariably not “who’s in the right?” but “how will this round of fighting improve the overall situation?” And on that point, Israel never has a convincing argument. Given the country’s long history of engaging in wars that kill many more of its enemies than its own citizens but only buy a few months or years of calm, it’s a tough call to explain how this latest escapade will change the strategic balance, bring peace and prevent the need for another such bloodbath further down the line. Often that’s because there is in fact no good reason: Wars are fought for short-term gains. And it doesn’t help that with the constant competition for power within Israeli coalitions, it’s easy to interpret this war, like many others, as a political imperative, not a strategic one.

And so when the question the world is asking is not “who’s right?” but “what works?” the consistent impression Israel leaves is that it kills people because, at best, it simply doesn’t have any better ideas, and at worst, because some Israeli leader is trying to get the upper hand on one of his or her rivals. And no amount of hasbara can make that look good.

Gideon Lichfield, until recently The Economist’s Jerusalem correspondent, will be moving to the weekly’s New York bureau.

© Copyright 2009 Haaretz. All rights reserved

Picture: Hadar Naim

Yesterday the unthinkable happened. I stood in front of a large audience at a conference in Tel Aviv and said that I thought Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was Israel’s best choice for prime minister. (Actually I said “most interesting”, not “best”, but if we’re being honest, what’s the difference.)

If my Palestinian friends find out they will stop talking to me. Maybe most of my Israeli friends too. Politically I’m somewhere to the left of Meretz. Was I out of my mind?

It was the Globes annual business conference, and I was speaking about Israel’s long-term economic prospects. The main problem, I said, was political stability. Governments change so often that it inhibits serious policymaking.

I took the world financial crisis as an example. Israel should not be feeling the pain much. Its markets were hardly exposed to the strange financial instruments that have brought the rest of the developed world to its knees. Its exports will suffer, but that should only produce a mild slowdown. But the banks are panicking and shutting down credit, ignoring the Bank of Israel’s sharp interest-rate cuts, and that is causing the whole economy to shudder. Growth will be around 1.5% next year by the Bank of Israel’s estimate; in per-capita terms, that’s a recession.

What’s needed is a fiscal stimulus plan. But with Israel yet again in an election cycle, it’s impossible to get a serious one passed. There is a package, but frankly, it’s a joke.

When Netanyahu was finance minister he did a lot of good things. He introduced sensible fiscal management, which provided greater economic stability - the month-long war in 2006 hardly caused a blip in the economy - and reformed the financial markets; one effect of those reforms was to separate banking, insurance and asset management, specifically to prevent a crisis in one part of the financial system infecting the rest of it.

He also did a lot of harm to the poor and the middle class because, as is often the case with economic reforms, it was the rich that benefited first. The welfare-to-work “Wisconsin programme” got lots of people into work, but it didn’t make them better off, just increased the numbers of the working poor. The number of mortgages has been falling steadily too, which is a bad sign for the middle class’s health. But I’ve talked to some of Bibi’s policy whizkids over the years I’ve been here, and I think they recognise the mistakes.

So if we’re talking about economic policy, he has a more ambitious and intelligent one than his rivals. And a Likud government will be more stable than either a Kadima or Labour one, and more able to make reforms happen. For Israel, this is better.

For the Palestinians, of course, Likud is a different story.

Bibi says he doesn’t want to reach even a vague final-status agreement with Abbas now, as Olmert has been trying to for the past year. He talks instead about something called “economic peace”. This translates as: we’ll try to boost the West Bank economy enough so that they stop wanting to bomb us, and then, once they’re nice and quiet, we’ll think about talking about negotiating about working towards possible moves that might, in the fullness of time, when the moment is ripe, and without prejudice to Israel’s right to bomb the hell out of anyone it thinks is a threat, lead, eventually and in the long run, to Palestinian independence. Oh, and let’s not even mention Gaza.

You can guess what I think of that.

However, the fact is that neither Kadima nor Labour is offering the Palestinians anything better. Olmert’s offer of a “shelf agreement”, along with half-baked measures to boost the West Bank’s economy while strangling Gaza in an attempt to get the Palestinians living there to turn on Hamas, amounts to pretty much the same thing, just dressed up more nicely.

In fact, it’s better for the Palestinians to have an Israeli prime minister who doesn’t even pretend he wants to give them a state than one who claims to be working on it very hard while indefinitely stringing the process along because s/he has nothing else to offer as a policy platform. It may not be better for Abbas himself; his political survival depends on stringing out the process just as much as Olmert’s did and Livni’s will. But if that’s the best he can offer his people, he should go too.

Furthermore: if Olmert were, by some already thankfully remote chance, to reach a shelf agreement with Abbas before the election in February, it would be a disaster for the Palestinians, and for Abbas personally. Armed with that agreement, Bibi would be in an even stronger position to say that there is nothing more to talk about.

(I don’t, by the way, set much store by the argument, typical of certain hopeful leftists, that Israel’s biggest peace concessions have been made by Likud leaders. Netanyahu handed over most of Hebron to Palestinian control signed the Wye River Memorandum when he was prime minister in 1988, but under duress, not because, like Ariel Sharon with Gaza or Menachem Begin with the Sinai, he suddenly woke up and decided that it was the right thing to do.)

The other main thing to give one pause is that Bibi, to whom we owe the immortal fear-mongering line “It is 1938, and Iran is Nazi Germany”, is the man most likely to send Israeli fighters to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and possibly start another war to bring the entire Middle East down in even more flames than are engulfing it already. But I think if Israel had any window for bombing Iran, it ends when Barack Obama is sworn in. Without at least tacit support from the United States, he can’t do it.

So I say Bibi for prime minister. And by as many seats as possible. The Israeli left needs a total defeat if it’s to rise as a serious political force again.

I just outlined this reasoning to one of my Meretz-voting Israeli friends. He said, “Wow. You’re thinking like an Israeli.”

(And, just to make it clear, this is not the official position of The Economist.)

Back in the 1970s and 1980s the Colosseum was a legendary Tel Aviv nightclub. Its only concession to Rome’s Colosseum was that it was round; other than that it looked like a 1970s airport lounge plonked down on a concrete promenade overlooking the beach. I dimly remember trying to get in there once, as a teenager on a visit to Israel, and standing no chance against the tides of other teenagers who were trying to do the same thing and were older, more beautiful and much better practiced with their elbows.

Then it fell into disrepair and stood empty and tattered next to the field of giant concrete mushrooms that are also a Tel Aviv landmark and whose purpose has always remained mysterious. Now at last it’s been bought up by an entrepreneur and revamped.

And vamped is the really the operative word.

A friend took me to the first of a series of preview nights a couple of days ago. After passing through a squadron of black-clad security guards, greeters and hostesses, we were shown into a space that reminded me of the black ship in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where “when you try an’ operate one of these weird black controls which are labelled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to tell you you’ve done it.”

The furniture was black. The fittings were black. The floors and ceilings were black. The bars and the walls behind the bars were faced in so much black marble that it was a wonder the whole construction didn’t just sink through the promenade into the sand. About the only thing that wasn’t black was the house cocktail, which was a watermelon mojito (I recommend sticking to the regular kind) and the bottles on the bar. The picture I took above, with my mobile phone, doesn’t really do it justice, but it didn’t look all that different in real life.

I haven’t seen this level of post-gothic excess since I left Russia, and there they stopped building these kinds of things years ago - the place has gone all designery and minimalist. In Israel they seem to be just catching up.

Membership will cost 500 shekels a month, which amounts to a little under $2,000 a year. Private members’ clubs have never really worked in Israel before, so some of my friends were a little sceptical that this one would. But maybe there is now a class of nouveau-riche wanna-be oligarchs who want to shell out for exclusivity, obsequious (ie, un-Israeli) service and a colour scheme that makes anything you wear look good.

There were not as many people as I expected at Mahmoud Darwish’s funeral today in Ramallah. My uneducated guess is not much more than 10,000, and some of the friends I was with thought even fewer.

It was rather low-key, too. A handful of people had tears in their eyes, but for the most part the air was a curious mix of sombre and festive.

I was glad I’d been to see his last public recital a few weeks earlier. Anything else I could say is superfluous, so here are some pictures. (Anyone who wants to use them is welcome, but please credit me.)

It started off at the Muqata’a, the presidential compound in Ramallah, where Darwish’s body had been flown in from Amman. Only senior officials, diplomats and the press were allowed in, and only with prior coordination. We had no coordination and my friends weren’t even press. We got in anyway. You just keep pushing gently until the security guards get tired of blocking you.

After some speeches, his coffin was carried out and loaded on to a pickup truck.

The cortege left, followed by a few mourners, including this boy on his father’s shoulders.

Down by the Palace of Culture (a huge conference centre at the other end of town), the Palestinian scouts waited to form an honour guard.

Others carried a Palestinian flag about 50 yards long.

Boys played hide-and-seek under it.

The cortege arrived.

Darwish was buried. There was a 21-gun salute. (Seven guns, three times. Rather ragged.)

And everyone went home. As we left we saw a squad of the elite presidential guard jogging up the road singing marching songs in Arabic to the tune of “I don’t know but I’ve been told…” Seems the American security training is having an effect.

Very intrigued by the reports of the latest fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah. Intrigued because it looks as if parts of Fatah are using it to undermine other parts of Fatah — which ultimately of course means undermining the whole of Fatah.

The fighting is between the Hillis clan, whose head is also Fatah’s secretary-general in Gaza. I interviewed Ahmed Hillis a few times before the Hamas takeover in July last year.

He didn’t really seem to hate Hamas. He did really seem to hate Mohammed Dahlan, who had been Arafat’s chief enforcer in Gaza, and whom Hillis accused of every kind of corruption and malpractice. Hillis was also one of the leaders of the talks between Hamas and Fatah when they were negotiating the Mecca agreement last year.

When Hamas took over Gaza, several of Hillis’s allies pointed the finger at Dahlan for stirring up the trouble. Hillis himself, though, squarely blamed Hamas. And his clan had already got into a feud, which has since continued, with members of Hamas’s Executive Force (its alternative to the PA security services), over the killing of a Hillis clan member. Nor is only the Hillis clan a target — Hamas has been trying to curtail the power of the clans in general.

So when a bomb went off at a cafe last week and killed half a dozen Hamas people, Hamas blamed the Hillis clan. The Hillis people denied it. There was a tit-for-tat round of arrests of Fatah and Hamas people in Gaza and the West Bank.

Then yesterday morning more fighting broke out. Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad both begged Israel to give refuge to Ahmed Hillis and some of his people who had fled the fighting and crowded up near the Gaza-Israel border fence.

Extraordinarily, Ehud Barak, who has been consistently blocking Abbas and Fayyad’s requests to remove checkpoints and do other things to make life easier for ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank, agreed to let 180 people including a good number of fighters (albeit unarmed) enter from Gaza, which they did late last night.

But then, strangest of all, Abbas and Fayyad withdrew their request. Israel started sending refugees back to Gaza, where Hamas immediately rounded them up. The Ha’aretz article says that it is “likely that Fayyad and Abbas’ backtracking is connected to power struggles within Fatah”. That looks like a coded way of saying that maybe Dahlan has found a way to use the fighting to screw over his old rival. A seasoned Gazan conspiracy theorist — which of course I am not — would go further and accuse him of ordering last week’s cafe bombing that set this all off in the first place.

At any rate, bad tactical mistake by Abbas to backtrack. His most reliable ally in Gaza, the Hillis clan, must now feel like it has no backing from him. This makes Fatah’s foothold in the strip even weaker than before, and it makes Abbas more dependent on Dahlan.

Dahlan is still powerful in Gaza despite not having been back there (reportedly at least) in over a year - he did well in the local elections that Fatah held earlier this year for delegates for its congress. But he doesn’t have the armed presence that the big clans do, plus he has a poor reputation in general and is believed to have had a hand in provoking the Hamas “coup” which proved such a disaster for Fatah. Depending on him as an agent for anti-Hamas change is not a good gamble.

Photo: Antônio Milena/ABr

Just when I leave, it gets exciting.

I finished my posting for The Economist in Jerusalem nearly three weeks ago (am now taking six months off, most of it in Israel). I went to the UK for two weeks and missed the Hizbullah prisoner swap and the Obama visit.

And now Olmert’s quitting.

After his announcement that he won’t stand in the Kadima primary in September, lots of opposition politicians are predictably predicting the party’s imminent demise. Neither Tsipi Livni nor Shaul Mofaz will be able to hold it together, they say. There’ll have to be elections anyway.

True, it’ll be hard. But the survival instinct is a wonderful thing. Kadima has something to work towards: the “framework interim outline shelf agreement” or whatever the hell it is they’ve been negotiating with Mahmoud Abbas. (Sorry, I can’t help being cynical, even though I hear in occasional conversations with people “close to the negotiations” that they’re actually going pretty well.) As long as they have that, they justify their existence — if not directly to the Israeli public, then at least to the Bush administration, whose backing can help prop up the government.

And the administration doesn’t want anything to stop this agreement being signed. A source of mine confirms that the report by Jim Jones, the American security coordinator, which says very harsh things about Israeli policy in the occupied territories, is going to be suppressed despite strenuous efforts by Jones himself to get it published. Presumably they’re afraid the Israelis are even less likely to make concessions to Abbas if it looks like they’re doing it under pressure.

What the agreement will actually say if Tsipi Livni takes over from Olmert is harder to guess; while he and Abbas get on just fine, she’s apparently a much tougher cookie in her branch of the negotiations. Even more doubtful is whether the Syria track will continue. But as long as peace talks themselves continue she can look like she is doing something, at least until a new US president takes office and gets his bearings, which could be a while.

Moreover, without corruption scandals exploding every other day, this coalition could be relatively stable. Neither Kadima nor Labour wants an election because they will lose seats in one. And Shas, which could bring the government down if it quits, probably figures it has more leverage and can get more subsidies out of the current arrangement than if it joins a new coalition led by a powerful Likud — especially with Netanyahu, the arch-enemy of subsidies, at the helm.

It’s ironic and sad that the only way to make an Israeli prime minister (and, while we’re at it, a Palestinian president) take peace talks seriously is to make his or her political survival hang by a thread. Which is why I’m kinda glad I don’t have to write about this stuff any more. And yet I can’t help doing it anyway…

Yesterday MediaCentral had a session for some journalists with Giora Eiland (above) and Shlomo Brom, two retired generals, at the INSS, a security thinktank in Tel Aviv. Their topic: “Alternatives to the two-state solution”.

As an inherent pessimist who tends to believe it’s already too late for the two-state solution, I was curious. Eiland, who used to be the national security adviser as well, presented two alternatives.

One was the so-called “Jordan option”, a long-held Israeli wet dream whereby Jordan takes back responsibility for the West Bank (Israel is already edging closer to throwing Gaza back in Egypt’s lap). Jordan washed its hands of the West Bank 20 years ago, which was what led to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But Eiland thinks it would sooner take it back than have a Hamas-run Palestinian state emerge on its borders.

Brom, as he made fairly plain, thinks Eiland is nuts.

Eiland also outlined his land-swap plan (which at least one other person I know has independently laid claim to) whereby Egypt gives Gaza an extra 700 sq km, Israel gives Egypt a chunk of the Negev desert and a corridor to Jordan, and the West Bank surrenders a slice with most of the settlements to Israel (see the map above). Eiland thinks Egypt would gladly surrender a bit of the Sinai to Gaza in return for various inducements.

Brom thinks Eiland is nuts on this score too.

Each of them cited various Arab officials (unnamed, of course) as supporting their arguments. Brom rather snidely commented that “every Israeli has his pet Jordanian who tells him what he likes to hear”, but then implied that his own pet Jordanians were both more numerous and more in touch with reality.

For me it was less a sign that one or the other was nuts than an example of just how sensitive one’s ideas about this conflict are to small differences in temperament. Eiland is slightly more rightist and more willing to imagine a scenario in which Palestinian public opinion doesn’t matter that much. Brom’s suggestion - not an alternative to the two-state solution so much as an alternative way to bring it about - was to hold talks with Hamas.

And neither of them was nearly as nuts as some of the audience. One journalist whose affiliation I didn’t catch demanded of Brom how he could claim that the Palestinians are politically divided when they “were all dancing in the streets” to celebrate the downing of the twin towers on 9/11. Maybe she’s been asleep for the past two and a half years.

Another turned out to be Ted Belman of Israpundit, who demanded of Brom why, if Egypt could give up some of the Sinai to Gaza, it shouldn’t just give up a bigger chunk so Israel could keep all the West Bank. This is clearly someone who takes the claim that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” quite literally.

He notes on his blog, apparently without irony, that keeping the West Bank “was two (sic) absurd to even discuss.”

Still, I can be as huffy as I like from my lofty position of “neutrality”. People like Belman are the future. After the presentation I popped in to see an Israeli journalist friend and we talked about how the bottom is falling out of the newspaper business. In three or four years, he said, the paid newspaper columnist in Israel will be almost gone as a profession. Bloggers do the job just as well, and for free. And to a lot of their readers, the more outrageously biased they are, the better.

The night before last I went to a public reading in Ramallah by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet.

To get a ticket was remarkably lucky, but I couldn’t understand more than about ten words of the whole evening. I had been hoping he would read “From now on you are not yourself“, the poem he wrote after the Hamas takeover of Gaza last year, which I quoted in The Economist; that, at least, I would have recognised.

Still, just to sit and listen to it wash over me was enough. The poems sound as if they were written to be read aloud, and without meaning, the words become pure objects of sound. Sometimes they are percussive attacks, sometimes ascending spirals of rhyme, sometimes rich velvet cushions, sometimes curling thorns.

The day after, I learned that they had been giving out English translations at the door. Maybe I was better off not having one.