fugitive peace

Bringing Arabs and Jews together for peacemaking events isn’t always an edifying experience. Last year, at a small nightclub in Jerusalem, I spent a few minutes backstage with the Jewish and Arab hip-hop artists at a fundraiser for victims (on both sides) of the Lebanon war. At the time, the Jewish public still overwhelmingly supported the war, and the stuff coming out of some of the rappers’ mouths was definitely not the message of peace and tolerance they were meant to be projecting onstage.

But my cynicism about “co-existence” projects is mainly because too often they bring together people who are already like-minded. Sometimes it’s people who think group hugs and mantras can achieve reconciliation (actually, there is someone who argues quite seriously that yogic flying measurably reduces the level of violence). Or it’s Palestinians joining up with radical-left Israeli Jews who would happily abolish their own country.

Worst - because most seductive - are the meetings of cosmopolitan intellectuals who have more in common with each other than with their compatriots. They talk such fine, eloquent sense. Peace is so close. We all know what it will look like. A little push and we’ll get there. Everyone in the audience nods and beams. A warm glow suffuses my being. I leave with a spring in my step, wishing that they ruled their societies. Then I realise they would also need to be their societies.

But in the course of writing this week’s story I’ve gained more respect for the people who work at the coalface of co-existence, year in, year out. It’s a huge field, and there wasn’t room even to mention some of the most established projects. But I ultimately understood that my question, “what effect have you had on broader public opinion?” might not be the right one. What matters is sometimes not what they do but what they prevent.

My favourite tale of this kind came from Aziz Abu Sarah of the Bereaved Families Forum, which is run by people on both sides who have lost relatives to the conflict. At one of his talks at an Israeli Jewish school, he had met a 17-year-old who was full of anger. Eventually the boy revealed that his uncle had been killed a few months earlier in a suicide bombing, and he was just waiting to be drafted into the army so he could “kill as many Palestinians as possible”. After a long discussion, he apologised and said he had changed his mind. “I saved him from being a killer,” says Abu Sarah, “and I saved all the people he would have killed.” I had to agree with him: that alone was worth all the years of work.

Kadesh Barnea is literally the last stop before Egypt. About 50 yards after the turn-off to the moshav is a decrepit military observation tower and a sign saying “Official Vehicles Only”. The border fence runs alongside the road. We didn’t think it could be the border fence, until I switched off the car engine and we heard Egyptian music issuing from a tinny radio in a hut on the other side. The Egyptians helpfully waved their torches at the Israeli soldiers patrolling somewhere down the road to warn them that someone might be trying to trespass.

It is an incongruous part of the country. As you drive down from Jerusalem, the towns give way to sprawling Bedouin villages that are fighting a losing battle for recognition and state services. Then the encampments thin out, and for a while there is nothing but army bases, prisons and war memorials, whose very remoteness seems itself a form of mourning. There are also some really weird road signs. As we approached the border, with the sun about to set, the slight background claustrophobia that accompanies wherever I go in this tiny country fell away, and I became suddenly aware of the immensity of the Sinai desert opening up ahead.

The incongruity did not end there. Avishai Pinchas, the hero of this week’s story, brought some 50 Sudanese refugees to stay in a series of huts in his back yard. Why does he have a series of huts in his back yard? Because Avishai, who seems at first to be just what you would expect of a third-generation Israeli Jew from a Yemenite family - practical, unassuming, right-of-centre - is actually a messianic Jew (meaning that he believes Jesus was the son of God but not in all the subsequent paraphernalia of Christianity, though the details of messianic Jewish belief vary considerably). His wife, Yolanda, was raised a Protestant in Holland. The huts are for other messianic Jews who come to the moshav for retreats, to meditate surrounded by the harsh beauty of the desert.

As Yolanda tells it, Avishai woke up one Saturday morning with a feeling that God had spoken to him and told him to help the Sudanese “because we too were refugees from Egypt”. (A campaign for Amnesty International against the deportations employed a similar tug on the heartstrings: images of refugees with a song in an African language to the tune of the Israeli national anthem). That same evening a friend called to tell him that some refugees staying at a hotel in Beersheva were in danger of being sent back to Egypt unless they found more steady accommodation. The next morning he hired a bus and brought the biggest families back to the ranch. At least one other messianic family in Israel is hosting Sudanese too.

The women have hair-raising stories of the treatment they got in Egypt, but as the night set in they sat outside under the kind of star-field that only the desert can display, talking and shrieking with laughter as the extended Pinchas family and friends tried to teach them Hebrew. The children seemed healthy and boisterous, and the Pinchas children seem to have adopted them all as siblings, at least when it comes to watching TV…

(Note added September 4th: in the original I mistakenly referred to Kadesh Barnea as a kibbutz. It is actually a moshav, a communal settlement. Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the tip-off.)

Just back from seeing “Jerusalem - The East Side Story”, which was being screened to a selection of Ramallah’s great and good, among them Rafiq Husseini, Mahmoud Abbas’s chief of staff. Unlike “West Bank Story“, an Oscar-winning musical comedy about rival Israeli and Palestinian falafel families, this is a worthy but relentless litany of the injustices Israel has visited on the Palestinians of East Jerusalem in its attempts to create a unified Jewish capital.

The film is largely (and tragically) accurate, but like most propaganda in this conflict, makes too few nods to the other side’s narrative to win over many viewers who don’t already sympathise with its message. For 70 minutes the narrator pummels us in the doom-laden tone that wildlife presenters usually reserve for the moment when a nestful of cute goslings is about to be devoured by a feral cat. You come out wanting to slit your veins, or preferably the narrator’s. Still, it has two good moments.

One is an interview with Husseini’s boss, the president of Palestine, recounting one of his favourite to-camera stories: how he showed the map of Israel’s separation barrier to George Bush in 2003. According to Abbas (though it varies slightly with each telling), Bush was furious and told Dick Cheney, “this is not a state”. Abbas looks proud and self-satisfied. The audience, until then respectfully transfixed, started laughing and jeering. They jeered even more when Bush appeared, awkwardly telling the press, “This wall is… uh… a problem.” I wished I could have seen Husseini’s face at that point.

The second is of an elderly Palestinian woman, with title deeds and old photos in hand, coming to see the house in West Jerusalem that she fled as a child. The camera follows her as a group of Israelis strolls past. She watches them recede, then sums up the whole conflict as well and as succinctly as anyone I’ve ever heard. “We live in fantasy,” she sighs, “and they live in denial.”

The EU has some serious egg on its face this week after the Gaza power fiasco.

The European Commission pays an Israeli company (Dor Alon) to provide fuel to Gaza’s only power station. The fuel is turned into electricity; the electricity gets distributed; Gazans pay the electric company; the electric company pays taxes to the PA. Someone whispered in the commission’s ear that Hamas, being in charge of Gaza, was somehow getting hold of these taxes instead.

Panic. Hamas is on the EU’s terrorist list. The EU cannot give money to Hamas. And providing money to an Israeli firm that provides fuel to a Palestinian firm that collects money from Palestinians that then goes to Hamas is of course practically the same thing. It has to stop at once. And stop it did: The commission suspended payments to Dor Alon - so fast that senior commission officials only learned about it from the media. And the power plant, which provides about a third of Gaza’s electricity, shut down, leaving hundreds of thousands of people suffering blackouts at the height of summer.

Except that it seems nobody checked whether the allegations were true before throwing the switch. By today the money was flowing again and the power was back on. There has been a show of setting up “joint Commission/PA audits to ensure that fuel aid in Gaza remains properly managed,” according to the commission’s press release. This is a rather thin fig-leaf (note the “remains”) for the fact that actually, no improper management was found.

Hamas accused Fatah of cooking up the story, which they suggest was based on the fact that Hamas men have been going door to door trying to make people pay their bills and investigating what they allege is corruption at the power company. I haven’t been able to ascertain exactly where the Europeans got their information. But it’s clearly the latest in many cases where the fact that foreign governments will not talk to Hamas has made them reliant on partisan and dubious sources for their knowledge of what is actually going on in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s story is about the likelihood of an Israeli war with Syria, and in part about the role of the media in hyping it up. Israel has some terrific journalists, whose reporting is cynical, spin-conscious and explicit about political agendas in a way that is rare in many other countries. Yet when it comes to what they hear from intelligence sources, quite a few are happy to sprinkle it liberally into their stories without making it clear where it comes from, let alone analysing their sources’ motives.

Intelligence sources are always dubious: spies know that journalists find anything with a whiff of secrecy very tempting, and what they tell you is, by its nature (and on purpose), very hard to check. There’s been a lot in the Israeli media over the past months about what they’re really thinking in Damascus and Teheran–stories like this and this, where it is hard to see how the information can have come from anywhere but the Israeli security establishment. I don’t think the establishment’s agenda is to provoke a war, but rather to cover its backside against accusations that it didn’t foresee one. But as the rash of pronouncements about “we don’t want a war and nor do they” this week showed, it realised that the media spin had started to take on a life of its own.