fugitive peace

As an internal exercise last week I wrote an imaginary memo for Tony Blair, who made his first public statements as the Quartet’s special envoy yesterday. It didn’t become a leader in The Economist (this did, alongside a piece I wrote on Olmert’s remarkable capacity for survival). So I rewrote it and sent it to foreignpolicy.com, where it’s also up.

Blair’s mandate is to build up Palestinian institutions while nudging Israel to ease impediments to the economy (pdf) in the West Bank, in the hope that this will boost Abbas and weaken support for Hamas. He’s supposed to leave the big political issues to Abbas and Olmert to hash out in advance of the November/December summit—though nobody seriously expects him to stay out of them entirely. But James Wolfensohn, the last Quartet envoy, ultimately failed, and his mandate was limited to trying to get an economic recovery going in Gaza. I don’t envy Blair his task. Here’s why.

1. Don’t underestimate the Palestinian street’s distrust of you. Not because you supported the Iraq war—Palestinians care much more about their own problems. But most of them assume that you are here to recreate a pro-Western Palestinian client state in the best case (which is essentially true), and cooperate with Israel to ensure that an independent Palestine never arises in the worst case.
2. Don’t underestimate the extent to which Palestinian leaders will undermine the national interest to protect their personal ones. Learn all the rivalries—those within Fatah especially—and assume that they take precedence over good sense and decency, unless you see evidence to the contrary.
3. Don’t underestimate the incompetence and backstabbing at senior levels in the Palestinian institutions, including Abbas’s office. Improving equipment for the Palestinian police or training for mid-level bureaucrats is easy. The stumbling blocks to progress will be individual officials with privileges and influence who want to hold on to them.
4. Don’t rely too much on Abbas to make changes. He is timid and non-confrontational. He has got to where he is by making his peace with some of the most corrupt and obstructionist Fatah leaders. His reluctance to remove difficult people, create enemies and upset political balances will be one of your main constraints.
5. Similarly, don’t overestimate Israeli leaders’ ability to deliver on promises. One reason is political: Ehud Olmert’s coalition government looks solid at the moment, but the winds can shift and allies can become opponents with astonishing rapidity. The other reason is operational. Even if the government orders something, its authority can quickly peter out on the ground in the West Bank, where settlement leaders and local army commanders are used to a high degree of autonomy, and sympathetic bureaucrats often help them find ways around the law.
6. At the same time, don’t buy all the Israelis’ excuses. Olmert knows better than anyone how to use coalition politics to his advantage—including to make it look like he’s hemmed in when he isn’t.
7. Be wary of the support of other Arab leaders. Having them on board for the November summit and beyond is essential to this process’s credibility, and yours. But each has his own agenda on the Palestinian question, which depends on how it affects his internal domestic issues. You’ll need to find a balance between having them involved and keeping them at arms’ length.
8. For all these reasons, try to create a clear and public plan with identifiable goals. If you don’t set goals, the street will distrust your motives and the leaders will exploit uncertainties to their own ends. Setting goals may set you up for failure, but at least then you’ll be able to pin blame on those who deserve it.
9. Don’t take your eye off the long term. It’s tempting to focus on what’s immediately achievable—some checkpoints removed here, better policing there, more funding for schools, more ties between Israeli and Palestinian businesses. These are good, but they will make no difference to Palestinians’ opinions of Fatah—or of you—unless they perceive them as stepping stones in a longer-term plan with statehood at the end. Israel wants to keep this timetable vague; you need to find something that can give Palestinians hope.
10. Resist the urge simply to forget about Gaza “for the time being”. It’s a natural temptation; indeed, your mandate pretty much requires it. Hamas is in charge there; it hates Israel; Israel and America hate it; Fatah hates it even more. Surely the best thing is to leave Gaza to fester so Hamas loses popularity. But watch out: The more Hamas weakens, the more Gaza’s clan chieftains will take over. Every clan contain members of both parties, and their clan loyalty comes first. Once Gaza is run by warlords, imposing any sort of political order there will be extremely hard. Even though it’s not part of your mandate, start thinking about the mechanism for the eventual transition, otherwise your efforts will be worthless.

Back when Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, a curious story did the rounds: the Palestinian Taybeh brewery was planning to mark the occasion by releasing a non-alcoholic beer with a label in Hamas green - just in case the Islamists decided to ban booze.

It was a time of many jokes - secular Palestinians were going around exchanging formal Islamic salutations and asking how many lashes you get for driving over the speed limit - so I didn’t take it too seriously.

But two weeks ago I went to the Oktoberfest.

Taybeh is the only entirely Christian town in the West Bank, and the only town with a brewery. Three years ago the brewer, Nadim Khoury, decided that what’s good enough for Munich is good enough for Taybeh, and put on a beer festival. True, the only beer you can get is Taybeh beer, and the Oktoberfest was in September so as to avoid clashing with Ramadan and offending the Muslims in a neighbouring town (who launched a nasty attack over an incident of family honour two years ago). Still, it’s wildly popular, especially with foreigners working in Jerusalem and Ramallah; by the time I got there the town centre looked like the parking lot for an international donor conference.

The highlight of the festival, apart from the beer - and I have to admit I don’t like beer - was DAM, a Palestinian rap crew from the town of Ludd/Lod, now part of Israel. In Israel and Palestine they’re very popular, but their lead singer, Tamer Nafar, still lives in a pokey corner bedroom at his parents’ house. And not just because he’s a devoted son. As Israeli citizens, it’s very hard for them to sell their music (let alone get concert tours) in the Arab world, where Palestinian-Israelis are still treated with suspicion.

Which is why they play gigs like Taybeh, where the sound system was cutting out every five minutes and the audience consisted largely of awed 12-year-old local girls and drunken foreign aid workers trying to dance and make gangsta signals.

Still, everyone was having a great time, and at some point a friend introduced me to Mr Khoury. He looked just like a cartoon brewer: short, plump, jolly, wild hair, loose tie, red face, bloated nose and a little unsteady on his feet. Naturally, he had a beer in one hand.

I asked him about the pro-Hamas beer. Ah, he sighed; they were still working on it. There was a religious problem: if you do it the usual way, which is to brew the beer and then remove the alcohol, a bit of alcohol usually remains, and that might be haram. So they were trying to find a way to make beer without fermenting it. It sounded to me like cooking without heat, but he seemed unfazed. “We are trying and trying, and in the end we will get there!” And off he weaved to find someone else to drink with.

You would think the launch party for a big Israeli defence firm would be the perfect place for me to find out exactly what happened during Israel’s raid in Syria. The Mikal Group, the new controlling company for a collection of defence suppliers with its eye on the export market, held a glitzy gathering tonight at the Tel Aviv port. There were hundreds of guests - weapons-business executives, army colonels, brigadier-generals, ex-brigadier-generals (identifiable by their close-cropped greying hair and gimlet-eyed gazes) and journalists. The drinks were free, and the bar staff were pouring them damn strong. Someone had to blab.

Not a chance. While the US and British press continue to dish up scoop after supposed scoop, the Israeli media remain censored and those in the know stay mum. Of course, it’s hard to tell who’s really in the know. All you get is little nuggets here and there - so-and-so’s friend in the air force told him they were preparing for this months ago, such-and-such heard that the pilots weren’t even told what they were going to bomb. I learned nothing. I felt terrible. I felt better after a military-affairs journalist with years of experience told me she had been pumping all her sources and learned nothing either.

I think it’s still OK to say that Israel launched a big raid and had good reasons for doing so. Beyond that, nothing is verifiable. The cheerleaders point to hints of something fishy, such as changes to the port records of a ship that docked in Syria three days before the raid carrying (supposedly) cement. Doubters turn up signs that what Israel hit, if anything, wasn’t nuclear. An Israeli journalist, Yigal Laviv, repeats the argument that if there were proof of nuclear material in Syria, Israel and the US would surely be trumpeting it to the skies (partial translation here). But then again, if there was nothing incriminating in Deir al Zur, surely Syria would be doing the same.

I mentioned to an Israeli acquaintance at the Mikal party how strange it was that, after this barrage of leaks and stories, we still knew basically nothing. “And that’s as it should be,” he said. From Israel’s point of view, the eerie silence at home mixed with tantalising media stories from abroad is working wonders. As I’ve noted before, when there is no hard information, rumours fill the gap, and he who controls the rumours controls the truth (Orwell forgot to include that one). Israelis are starting to believe in their army after its failures during last summer’s Lebanon war. Westerners are beginning to wonder whether there aren’t WMD in the Middle East after all. Arabs are fearful at the thought that Israel can still strike deep in their territory and get away with it. It may all be true; it may all be false; but in terms of the effect on the world, that’s irrelevant. “It’s not what you know,” my interlocutor said, “it’s what you think you know.”

All of which may answer my earlier question about why the Israeli media blackout on the event continues - and suggests that it may not be lifted after all.

Update (September 19th): I was wrong on two counts. One is that the official silence has already been broken - albeit by Bibi Netanyahu, who despite not being a member of the government, let alone one of the three ministers reportedly involved in the decision to attack, claims he was “involved… from the first moment”, whatever that means.

The second is that I apparently misheard over the noise at the Mikal party: the phrase was “it’s what they think you know”. I actually liked the wrong version better.

The mystery about Israel’s air strike against Syria on September 6th, which I wrote about in the current issue, continues to deepen. The story taking hold is that Israel hit material or equipment for nuclear weapons supplied by North Korea. But something still smells fishy.

For a start, the way this story has emerged in public is odd in the extreme. Well-connected Israeli journalists hinted from very early on that they knew what was going on but couldn’t say, a sign that censorship was in effect. (That is censored too, but it has become so obvious that they are now saying it openly.) All last week it was the American media - CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times - which dripped out the story, mainly with off-the-record comments from American officials.

But today it’s Britain’s Sunday Times which carries it forward, with a lot of enticing details from unnamed Israeli sources about how an Israeli commando unit on the ground guided the bombers; how the Mossad found “evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea”; how Israel diverted a spy satellite from Iran to Syria; and, interestingly, how the mysterious rise in Israel-Syria sabre-rattling a few weeks ago - which I wrote about in my very first post - was actually the result of Israel’s sending more troops to the Golan “in anticipation of possible retaliation by Damascus in the event of air strikes.”

So, first question: why the Sunday Times? Letting details of the attack leak via Washington last week may have been a way to prevent a flare-up between Israel and Syria or other Arab states. But if Israeli officials have decided that it’s now safe to break silence, why not in the Israeli press?

Second question: is it true? Uzi Mahnaimi, the Sunday Times’s man in Tel Aviv, is a former Mossad man (correction: served in military intelligence) known for having excellent security sources. But as I’ve discussed before, journalists in that position are also susceptible to being fed misinformation and printing it, knowingly or otherwise.

The operational details he reveals are probably accurate. The nukes claim, which seems to have been fed both to Uzi and to his Washington colleague, is more questionable. Newsweek today reports that, yes, Israel showed satellite photographs of northern Syria to officials in Washington, suggesting that they revealed a nuclear project; but that other anonymous US officials “say they’ve seen no credible evidence yet of nuclear ties between North Korea and Syria”.

So the alternative view going around is that this news cycle is all part of a big conspiracy by Washington hardliners - with ex-UN ambassador John Bolton at the fore - and Israel to push the Iran-Syria-North Korea connection, with the media gullibly playing along.

Thus, the Sunday Times cites Bolton saying that “I’ve been worried for some time about North Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programmes,” but Newsweek gets him to admit that he “never saw proof North Korea was sharing nuclear technology with Syria.” Joshua Landis, who has also clipped several other useful pieces on this issue, lists reasons to think that Bolton is “shooting from the hip”, and Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy’s blog argues that quotes Joseph Cirincione saying that

If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.

I’m suspending judgement. Launching an air strike at Syria, especially if there were indeed ground commandos, was risky. It’s hard to imagine Israel would have done it just to lend credibility to a neocon claim about nukes or prevent US-Syria dialogue (if anything, Washington is even more sceptical of Syria’s intentions than Jerusalem is). An alternative hypothesis is that Israel really believed that Syria might have the hot stuff, but only because the neocons led Israel by the nose. But I still can’t figure out why keep the Israeli media muzzled, unless it’s just that they’re less likely than the US press to buy into the spin. At any rate, stay sceptical. Not everything is clear yet.

Israeli parents are furious at the army for letting their sons, new conscripts, sleep in unprotected tents at the Zikim army base, where dozens of them were wounded on Monday night by a rocket from Gaza. The government, for its part, has decided not to hit Gaza hard in retaliation.

But please spare a thought for another unintended victim of the rocket attack. This morning I got this email from a friend in Gaza who, after months of struggle to get the necessary visa, exit permit and who knows what else, was due to leave yesterday to realise a long-awaited dream of studying abroad. His words express eloquently one of the things that one can so rarely learn from media reports: the misery of being an ordinary Gazan trapped between the forces of Israel’s occupation on the one hand and Palestinian extremism on the other:

I set out of here on time Tuesday 4:00 am. I got on the bus with the other travelers and we moved on to Erez crossing, passed it after we had done all the checking procedures on the Israeli side so swiftly and smoothly. Every thing seemd fine and good. We got on other buses and were supposed to head to Egypt. We waited and waited and waited to move, time of waiting on the buses almost 4 hours. We did not move to Egypt though :-( . Then we were told we have to return to Gaza for security reasons. We heard later that it was because some Palestinian stupid group fired a rocket against Israel and hit a group of Israeli soldiers, one was killed [NB: according to reports today he is critically injured but still alive - Gideon] and 60 others were injured…. On the way back, I saw the women and kids traveling back bursting into tears feeling so disappointed, grievous and upset. All of them were of course stuck in Gaza and this was their only chance to reunite with their families, fathers and husbands… It is so sad and agonizing to know that we ,the Palestinian, do this to ourselves and call this “resistance” of the occupation… The Israelis did not do this to us… quite the opposite they were so helpful at the crossing and let us pass so quickly…. I do not know.. I am beginning to hate my own country and people.. not all of them but those utilitarians blood traders who use the Palestinian cause merely for personal and party interests without caring about the people’s well being… I want to know… why why why… they would fire rockets only when they know people are traveling through Erez crossing… it was not a coincidence, It was known to every body in Gaza that we were traveling today earlier…. It is all because the Palestinian “blood traders” cant travel through Israel, they are screwing this way up…. though more than 80% of the Palestinian people can benefit from this crossing to go after their business, education and to reunite with their families out of Gaza…. It is so fuckin stupid and ungly…. Excuse my words.. I am so upset right now….

This year, in a rare coincidence, the Jewish and Muslim festivals begin together. To everyone, wherever you are, and especially to my Gazan friend,

On Friday a colleague and I visited Bil’in, a Palestinian village that has become famous for its weekly protests against the anti-terror fence/separation barrier/apartheid wall. (NB: when I learn Javascript, I’ll add a “delete as appropriate” feature so you can read the version of this blog that corresponds to your politics.) This week the villagers were celebrating an Israeli High Court decision to reroute the barrier, restoring to the village about half of the farmland that the existing route cuts off.

By the time we arrived the festivities had ended so the village could gear up for a wedding celebration, and handfuls of foreign sympathisers were loitering around trying to hitch rides back home. We drove out to the site of the protests next to the fence itself, where the ground is littered with the packaging from tear gas grenades.

As we stood taking pictures we heard a gunshot, and a minute later another. A group of boys in the distance had evidently strayed too near to another part of the fence, and the soldiers on the other side were firing warning shots and gunning the engine of their jeep. We decided not to make them any more jumpy by hanging around too close to the fence ourselves, and started driving back.

On the way I stopped the car to take a leak in an olive grove. From there I could hear the boys and the soldiers cursing each other in a fluid mix of Hebrew and Arabic. We walked closer, and it became clear that this was part of an established and mutually enjoyed tradition:

Boy: Fuck your sister!
Soldier: Your sister is a whore!
Boy: Your mother and your sister are whores!
Soldiers: [uproarious laughter]
Boy, mockingly: Where is Sharon? Sharon is dead!!
Soldier: [more laughter] You’re not a man!

That was true. The kids were barely into their teens, but they were hurling stones and insults at the troops with an air of long practice. From time to time a stone would hit the fence with a clang, which only seemed to amuse the soldiers even more. As we got closer the boys welcomed us in Hebrew; then, when we replied in Arabic, began badgering us to take pictures of them and give them money. One of them showed us the scab of what he said was a rubber bullet wound on the back of his head. It could have been, though his claim that it had been inflicted earlier that afternoon was clearly preposterous.

We took the pictures, but held back the money, citing as an excuse our wish to maintain the purity of the muqawame, the resistance. They pressed spent rubber bullets and a live round used for firing them (the cartridge of an ordinary round but without a bullet in the tip) into our hands as souvenirs. As we took our leave they returned to yelling and launching stones from their slingshots, though the army jeep had by now retreated well out of range…

Human Rights Watch is making no friends these days. Last week it had to scrap the Beirut launch of its report accusing Hizbullah leaders of possible war crimes over last summer’s Lebanon war, after Hizbullah goons threatened to break up the event. Today HRW published the sister report about why Israel killed so many Lebanese civilians. It makes chilling reading. Besides listing each one of the 1109 confirmed victims (mostly civilian) by name, it investigates 97 incidents in painstaking detail, analysing who died, how, and whether they were collateral casualties of a legitimate action under the laws of war, or - more often - victims of an attack that should never have been carried out.

The report’s bottom line: Israel’s claim that most civilians died because Hizbullah fighters were hiding and fighting in their midst is true only to a limited extent. Instead, says HRW, Israel bombed too widely and indiscriminately (including its infamous use of cluster bombs); assumed that all civilians had left their villages after it warned them to; and - most troubling for Israel itself - had to rely on inadequate and old intelligence. After the first few days of aerial bombing it ran out of known targets, and had to identify new ones to keep the campaign going. This led to mistakes such as bombing the civil defence offices in Tyre (killing 14 innocents) in the belief that they were the local Hizbullah headquarters.

There is, however, a moment of light relief in the HRW researchers’ investigation of Israel’s most famous and surreal mistake, when its troops raided a neighbourhood in Baalbek:

The object of the raid remains unclear. However, it appears that the Israeli commandos were looking for someone named Hassan Nasrallah, the same name as the secretary-general of Hezbollah. But the Hassan Nasrallah they found was a 54-year-old local shopkeeper who was not related to the leader of Hezbollah. As soon as they entered the home, they asked the shopkeeper in broken Arabic, “Are you Hassan Nasrallah?”

They took him, his son and three other men back to Israel, where

…Israeli officials repeatedly interrogated the men and accused them of being Hezbollah members. They repeatedly accused Hassan Deeb Nasrallah’s son, Bilal Nasrallah, of being the son of the Hezbollah Secretary-General, even though his father was with him. [my emphasis]

After three weeks Israel, with no official apology or explanation, returned the men to Lebanon. There, a HRW researcher tells me, they promptly came under suspicion of having been turned into Israeli spies, and had to endure a grilling from Lebanese military intelligence. Hizbullah’s reaction is not recorded.

When I was in Russia, where hard information was like gold dust, people would occasionally start rumours for a bet. You won a prize if the rumour made it into the press. It’s a risky game. Doing some interviews in Ramallah yesterday, I - through a simple misunderstanding - accidentally started the rumour that a prestigious charity led by a very important Palestinian personage was among the NGOs being investigated for administrative irregularities. I got the rumour quashed, but not before the important personage had called up the chief of staff of the interior ministry demanding to know what was going on.

But another rumour I heard yesterday seems to be gaining credibility, though I haven’t yet seen it reported outside the Arabic and Israeli media. This is that Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians’ long-time chief negotiator and one of their most public spokesmen, is about to lose his job - even as Olmert and Abbas negotiate an agreement of principles for the peace conference due in November.

Why Erekat would go now is unclear (I haven’t yet gotten hold of him myself to ask), but that hasn’t stopped le tout Ramallah from speculating. Some say it’s because he’s been ineffective in setting the Palestinian agenda for the current talks. Others think maybe he’s been leaking to the press too much about the talks - which he may have done, but I doubt it’s a firing offence. Or perhaps it’s because he and Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, don’t get on too well; but would Abbas really let Fayyad meddle in negotiations to that extent? Finally and most conspiratorially, it’s that Erekat is being cleared aside for the ex-prime minister and chief negotiator of the Oslo Accords, Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa).

My sources are silent on this, and Abu Alaa’s office reportedly denied it. Why would he be put into such a job? A friend reminds me that Abu Alaa and Shimon Peres came up with a peace plan in 2001, after the intifada broke out, which called for creating a Palestinian state in stages. In their original version, Israel would recognise a Palestinian state in the areas already under Palestinian Authority control, and the final borders and other issues would be dealt with later. Could they be planning a re-run, in which Israel recognises a Palestinian state in the West Bank, and leaves Gaza until later?

Perhaps - though if that were the intention, you surely wouldn’t need Abu Alaa and Peres themselves to make it happen. In any case, it’s far from clear that Abu Alaa is taking over. But if Erekat is indeed leaving, it may signal some kind of shift in the Olmert-Abbas talks, which seem to have produced little progress up to now.

(And if anyone bet a bottle of champagne that the rumour about Abu Alaa would get published: congratulations, and please would you save me a glass?)