fugitive peace

Just back from two very busy weeks in the US, hence my lack of recent posts. I have to limit what I can post for now about my trip to Washington, since a piece is due in The Economist about the Annapolis summit and I can’t pre-empt it.

Not that I have a big scoop or something. Both in Washington, and in my interviews in Jerusalem and Ramallah in the couple of days since returning, I’ve found nobody who knows what the substance of the summit will be, when it will take place or even whether it will happen at all. A Palestinian official I saw today confirmed what Abu Alaa, the chief negotiator, said today in a press conference: they want a timeline for a peace accord to be announced at Annapolis. Israel opposes this, and in months of talks the two sides have come no closer on it.

Does Annapolis really matter? What’s the criterion for success? What if it doesn’t succeed, or doesn’t happen at all? The answers depend on the politics of whoever you’re talking to. Broadly speaking, the further to the left/pro-Palestinian people are, the more they think the summit matters and less likely they think it is to succeed. On the right/pro-Israel branch, they think the summit could yield something but its importance has been exaggerated anyway. Those happy few who are most enthusiastic about the summit are therefore in the political centre, at the equilibrium between optimism and importance. It’s just like the equilibrium of supply and demand.

What has this got to do with the French buying Jerusalem? Oh, nothing. It’s just that I returned to find the former site of the Israeli foreign ministry surrounded by billboards (above) advertising a new luxury housing complex. Old-time Jerusalemites have long been griping about how property prices are being driven up by the influx of French buyers - some of them immigrants, some merely investing for a rainy day - but this is the first time I’ve seen houses advertised directly at the French market.

Oddly, the Hebrew and English versions promise “a new lifestyle culture” while the French version offers “a new life and culture”. I’m not sure if that is just a bad translation, or a hint that the targets are existing Hebrew- and English-speaking Israelis but new French immigrants.

The final entry in my correspondent’s diary of reporting from two weeks ago. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending the week in Washington, getting some takes on the upcoming Annapolis summit. I’ll be posting some thoughts on that at the beginning of next week.

Three millennia, one neighbourhood at a time

TODAY is a Jewish holiday, the Rejoicing of the Law, and West Jerusalem is as quiet and bucolic as an English village on a Sunday afternoon. It seems a good morning for a bike ride.

I zoom down the hill towards Yemin Moshe, the first Jewish neighbourhood outside the walls of the Old City. Its builder, a Jewish philanthropist in the late 19th century, set the style for the new city by covering everything—the houses, the streets and the staircases that run down the hillside—in rough-faced, yellow-white Jerusalem stone. He put a windmill there too, only to discover, so legend goes, that there wasn’t enough wind.

I swing past the shuttered old railway station with murals of 1930s Palestine, past the Sultan’s Pool, a rocky valley where cattle and horses took water in the days of the Ottoman rulers, and climb the road that winds around the Old City’s southern walls. Below me snakes a dusty ravine studded with old olive trees. This is the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna—the Bible’s word for hell, possibly because the refuse burned and the corpses dumped there in ancient times released a stink not of this world.

I enter the Old City at the Zion Gate (in Hebrew), David’s Gate in Arabic, passing the alleged site of both King David’s tomb and the Last Supper. Both claims are dubious, but myth often has more power here than scholarship. I rattle over cobbles and down a hill to the Western Wall, the holiest site of Judaism. Since my lycra cycling shorts undeniably constitute immodest dress, I remain outside the security gates, watching a group of American Jewish teenagers doing a festive circle dance.

Out of the Old City through the Dung Gate and down a hill so steep my wheels skid, I head into Silwan. This Palestinian neighbourhood has the misfortune to lie atop Jerusalem’s ancient precursor, the City of (King) David. Right-wing Israelis have stealthily bought up a few houses near the site of the archaeological dig, each of which is now a mini-settlement with barbed wire, electric gates and a threadbare Israeli flag.

On to a dusty track along the Kidron Valley, where I am distracted by a bizarre set of Greco-Egyptian monuments hewn from the rock. A passing tour guide tells me they are the tombs of David’s son Absalom and of “the Pharaoh’s Daughter”. I look them up later. Absalom’s tomb has previously been ascribed to Jehoshapat and to Hezekiah, the Pharaoh’s daughter’s tomb (if indeed it’s her in there) is somewhere else, and what he said was her tomb is actually called the Grotto of St James, and actually contains the mortal remains of a Jewish priestly family. Clearly, Israelis and Palestinians weren’t the first to argue over who owned what here.

I ride past the garden of Gethsemane, where Judas betrayed Jesus. Christian pilgrims cheer me on as I struggle, but eventually walk, up the steep hill towards the Mount of Olives cemetery. By Jewish tradition this is the world’s best place to be dead, for when the Messiah comes, those buried here will be the first to rise and follow him.

I recall a cold November night when I came here with the scion of an illustrious rabbinical family and we stumbled around tombs looking for his ancestors, stopping spellbound as the unearthly dawn call of the first muezzins echoed off the Old City walls below us.

Puffing, I ride along the ridge at the top of the Mount of Olives and stop to look over the Judean desert to the east. On these barren slopes Israel plans to build 3,500 homes to connect the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim—on a hilltop in the distance in front of me—to Jerusalem, thus taking a large bite out of the West Bank. To Palestinians it has come to symbolise Israel’s refusal to take peace seriously.

I carry on to the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, which was a Jewish enclave in Jordanian territory between Israel’s birth in 1948 and its capture of the West Bank in 1967. The dividing line between the slightly ramshackle Palestinian neighbourhood and the neat, aloof university precinct is as sharp as the day the border fence came down.

Back into town, past the elegant, orientalist American Colony hotel where I and other journalists meet aid workers and diplomats to share overpriced meals and cynical stories. Past St George’s cathedral, where Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli convicted of treason for leaking his country’s nuclear secrets to the press in 1986, often hangs out—stateless, forlorn and, say those who know him, now slightly unhinged.

I cross the former border with Jordan, now a highway, and swerve past black-coated ultra-Orthodox hasidim as I cut through Mea Shearim, then up to the Russian Compound, where a notorious prison for Palestinian detainees sits in the shadow of the magnificent Holy Trinity church.

My home stretch takes me past my local watering-hole, the Restobar. Some locals still know it as Moment—the name it had when a suicide bomber entered it and killed himself and 11 others in 2002. I slalom through security gates into the quiet little street where the prime minister’s house is, and race past a tall, strapping security guard who watches me from behind impenetrable sunglasses, assessing whether I have a weapon concealed in my lycra shorts. Past the Belgian consul’s house, a superb neo-classical mansion whose Palestinian owner leased it to the Belgians in 1948 to keep it out of Israel’s hands. And home.

Every stone in Jerusalem has a history—or several, and often contradictory. Many outsiders find it an oppressive place. But where else can you cover over three thousand years by bicycle in less than an hour and a half?

The fourth in this week’s series of postings on The Economist’s correspondent’s diary

Why Hamas is here to stay

WHAT I’ve heard these past three days is much like what I’ve heard before. The Israeli checkpoints inside the West Bank divide it into several separate mini-enclaves, crippling it economically. It’s been made worse by the recent restrictions on trade in and out of Gaza, where many firms used to sell a goodly proportion of their wares.

Moreover, this isn’t likely to change much. Israel can get rid of some of the less important checkpoints, but not the big fixed ones surrounding the main cities: they’re too crucial to its security. And if just one suicide bomber slips through the net, all the old checkpoints will go back up, and more besides.

So there’s no point in hoping for a miraculous economic revival in the West Bank—the first plank of the plan for strengthening Mr Abbas.

A second way to strengthen Mr Abbas would be to give Palestinians hope that he can really get a peace deal with Israel. But Israel won’t talk timetables for peace, because it says Mr Abbas isn’t strong enough to deliver on his promises. It’s a catch-22.

As for the third aspect of the plan—shutting Hamas down—it has a terrible feeling of déjà vu. This all happened a decade ago. Israel told the PA, then as now run by Fatah, to go after Hamas, which opposed the Oslo peace accords.

The PA arrested and tortured hundreds of Islamists. Some died in jail. Fatah stayed in power and grew used to being in charge. It became ever more corrupt. The peace talks failed. The intifada exploded. Ten years later Hamas won the elections by a landslide.

Indeed, some of the Islamists I’ve spoken to say this is worse than a decade ago: that the PA is now going after Hamas’s institutions and charities, trying to wipe it out completely. This is bad news. Hamas is the main reason that the real extremists, the al-Qaeda jihadist types, have hardly made inroads in Palestine. It gives Palestinians who are sick of Fatah a mainstream Islamist alternative. If it is suppressed, more of those people will end up with the jihadists.

This is something I’ve been trying to get across in the paper. I’ve felt from early on the West and Israel had the wrong approach to Hamas—a mixture of head-in-the-sand reluctance to acknowledge its popularity, and simple-minded attempts to make it go away.

The boost-Abbas plan is the latest example. The plan assumes that if Hamas gets weak enough, it will magically disappear and Fatah will take over. But though Hamas is losing popularity, it’s too powerful in Gaza: nothing can eject it short of a full-scale civil war, and even then it could well win.

Of course, the West (America in particular) wants to stop political Islamism from gaining a foothold. It fears a communist-style domino effect across the Middle East, and with good reason. But the West hardly managed to stop communism, which took control of countries mainly by means of coups, and political Islamism, as a ground-up popular movement, is even more resilient. It’s been building up over years of despotism and misrule in the Middle East.

It may burn out one day, like many other trends, but all the rest of the world can influence for now is whether it develops in a more or less extreme direction. There’s no shortage of ideas for a more creative approach that would encourage the moderates in Hamas instead, but everything up to now has strengthened the extremists.

The trouble is, it may be too late. When Hamas was in power it refused to recognise Israel, but offered it a 50-year peace deal. Israel could have gambled that after 50 years of peace no Palestinian would support a leadership that wanted to go back to war. The time for that is past.

The problem is no longer just American and Israeli resistance. The brutality of the fighting in Gaza made something in Fatah snap. What I’ve been hearing from once-conciliatory Fatah leaders is a visceral hatred of Hamas. “They are a different culture,” one told me recently, with the tone I imagine a British Empire official using about African “savages”. If nobody works on making these two patch up their differences, there isn’t going to be a Palestinian state.

Day three of my correspondent’s diary

Signs of life—and death—in Jenin

JENIN is jinxed. During the intifada it was known as the suicide bombers’ capital. Israeli tanks flattened part of the refugee camp in a bloody (for both sides) battle in 2002. As the most northerly West Bank city, it’s the one that you have to cross the most checkpoints to get to.

It’s been jinxed for me, too: each time I’ve tried to go, something has forced me to turn back on the way. So I’ve never been there in nearly three years.

To avoid the checkpoints, we drive around the West Bank instead of through it. In some places the Israeli highway runs right beneath the walls, fences and watchtowers of the separation barrier. One town, Qalqilya, is almost completely encased by it, with just one road out.

The most poignant complaint you hear there is not that people can’t get to their fields or visit neighbouring villages, but that the nine-metre-high concrete wall on the western side blocks out their view of the sun sinking into the Mediterranean, a few miles away across the dusky coastal plain.

The highway itself bears another eerie hint of the separation. Its junctions are signposted with the names of Israeli towns and settlements, but not the Palestinian ones next to them. More than once I’ve gotten lost here, trying to find a place that the map says is right next to me but, as far as Israel is concerned, might as well not exist.

After a depressing talk with the head of the chamber of commerce and a fruitless one with a wary former head of the city’s awqaf, the Islamic authorities, we drive into Jenin’s refugee camp.

Expecting unredeemed squalor, I’m surprised. There are the usual slum houses, but also winding alleyways with new, pastel-coloured houses that, if I half close my eyes, make it look like a sleepy Mediterranean village. The mosque is grand, new and gleaming. Someone clearly made the best of the tanks’ destruction.

Ibrahim Jaber takes us into one of the houses. It’s his daughter’s. We sit in the huge, ornately ugly armchairs that seem to be a fixture of sitting rooms all over the Middle East and the Caucasus. Above him hangs a photograph of his 15-year-old son Musab, killed (or as they say it here, istashhad, “martyred”) when the tanks rolled in.

When his son died, Jaber was in an Israeli jail for owning a weapon, and also for being a Hamas member (“I never admitted it”, he says coyly). After being freed five years later, he worked on Hamas-Fatah dialogue. But after Hamas took over Gaza this summer, the PA came looking for him. He fled the few hundred metres from his own house at the edge of the camp to the centre, where he says even the PA forces do not dare enter. He has been hiding out ever since.

He is an engaging, gentle man, who holds my gaze calmly as I glance back and forth between him and the picture of his son. Idly, I try to imagine him planning a suicide bombing. He has been jailed a dozen times, for a total of over nine years. That, on the Israeli punishment scale, means minor offences; I doubt he ever hurt anybody.

Somehow I find this reassuring. We like to think we are good judges of character. But of course, that can be an illusion. A couple of years ago I visited a courteous, bearded gent in Gaza who was one of the leaders of Islamic Jihad; a man who had made a career out of sending young Palestinians out to blow themselves up for the glory of the cause, taking young Israelis with them. I still remember how fondly he played with his grandchildren.

The second entry in this week’s correspondent’s diary from The Economist’s website.

From economic stagnation to flamenco in one day

AFTER three years here, I still don’t understand the West Bank security regime. Israelis are forbidden from visiting the main Palestinian cities, and at some, like Nablus, checkpoints block them.

But in others, you can drive all the way in and out without being stopped, and since there are rarely any signposts, it’s easy to end up there by mistake. The first time I went to Hebron, I stopped a taxi driver to ask the way. “You’re in the middle of it,” he grinned.

We visit a stationery factory in Hebron. The usual stories. The checkpoints make moving goods between cities in the West Bank, let alone to Gaza, costly and slow. It’s hard to compete with Israeli goods, which suffer fewer hold-ups.

More surprising is that Hebron’s paper-pounders, shoe-smiths, clothes makers and others are really worried about competition from China. Even here in Palestine, they feel the same global threat as everyone else. Except that here it’s much harder to make your business leaner and meaner, since so much depends on Israel, on things beyond your control.

We drop in on a senior Hamas man, a member of parliament, portly and bearded as per usual. But unusually, he is one of the few not in an Israeli jail. I cheerfully ask why. He bristles. I realise that my question could imply he was an Israeli collaborator. Pointedly, he explains that he spent two years in prison, and (this with some pride) was even elected to parliament from there.

Then he runs down the usual list of PA repressions against Hamas. But he says his Islamist charity, which distributes clothes and meals for Ramadan to poor families, is still raking it in, thanks to the Islamic tradition of giving 2.5% of one’s earnings as zakat, or charity, while what he calls “pro-Fatah” organisations like the Red Crescent are finding it hard to raise funds.

I’ve been asking every Islamist I meet how Hamas is dealing with the attempts to close it down, and I realise that this is the answer. They may go underground politically, but they can still do what they know best: collecting zakat to pay for social projects like soup kitchens and schools. That was what made them popular in the first place. The PA is closing down lots of Islamist charities, but it can’t close them all. Hamas can play this game for years.

He sends us on to three young men who have stories of being arrested and tortured by the PA. All were active during the intifada, when Hamas and Fatah militants fought for a common cause. Now they’re enemies. We sit around a plastic table in the concrete-walled courtyard of their family’s house and they tell me of being hooded, tied up and suspended by the wrists. Again, they say, it is much worse than what the Israelis used to do.

At iftar in my fixer’s home in Ramallah that evening, the conversation turns to the 87 Palestinian prisoners who were supposed to have been released this morning as a goodwill gesture—all part of “boosting” Mahmoud Abbas. At the last minute Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, decided to withhold some of the pardons. (Why, I asked an Israeli journalist friend. “He’s got nothing else to do,” she sneered.)

At any rate, Israel is holding some 9,000 Palestinians. If anything, agree the iftar diners, Mr Abbas will look to his people like a fool for accepting such a measly token.

From Ramallah I drive down to the Dead Sea for a concert by Paco de Lucia, Spain’s most famous flamenco guitarist. The setting is a desert gorge walled by massive cliffs. The warm, heavy air of 400m below sea level fills with breathtaking music. The audience is a relaxed, joyful crowd of Israelis of all ages.

I find my concentration wandering. To be able to flit between the Israeli and Palestinian worlds is a rare privilege; most of their inhabitants cannot. But not for the first time, I’m finding the contrasts hard to digest.

Each day this week I’ll be putting up my post from the correspondent’s diary on The Economist’s website. The events described took place two weeks ago. The story I published based on that reporting is here.

Nablus finds itself squeezed on all sides

“RAMADAN kareem” is the traditional greeting during the Muslim holy month. “Ramadan k…” begins my Palestinian fixer when I pick her up this morning, but what follows is a choice Arabic curse that would cause another Danish-cartoon-style uproar if I printed it here.

She hates Ramadan, with its total fasting from dawn-to-dusk. Her feet hurt, her joints hurt, her children whine, people are irritable, everything shuts early, vast numbers of guests must be fed at the evening iftar meal. “I fast in order to work up more anger at the Israeli occupation,” she says, perhaps only half in jest. But she spends the rest of the day venting spleen in equal measure at racist Israelis, hypocritical Muslims, backward Arabs and the whole stinking world in general.

I have asked her to set up a West Bank Grand Tour. Since Hamas defeated Fatah’s forces in Gaza in a bloody showdown in June, the American-Israeli-Fatah plan has been to try to defeat Hamas by making Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, more popular.

The method: strangle Gaza’s economy, make life better in the West Bank, and hold peace talks with Mr Abbas. The people of Gaza will suffer—are suffering—but that is the price the civilised world has decreed they must pay for finding themselves trapped in the middle of a factional bust-up. I want to know how well it’s working.

Our first stop is Nablus. Nestled in a majestic valley, it’s one of the most picturesque Palestinian cities. And one of the poorest. It is known both for its traders and for its terrorists (from both Hamas and Fatah), and the Israeli checkpoints that have gone up around it since the intifada have effectively closed off the rest of the West Bank to many of its businesses, shrivelling its economy. Much of the male population is forbidden from leaving at all.

We stop in at a cardboard packaging company, now running at 40% of its pre-intifada capacity. The manager tells me he thinks Israel’s plan is to make life in Gaza better, not worse, so that Palestinians will leave the West Bank and go live in the tiny, overcrowded coastal strip.

I must look sceptical. “You find this strange?” he asks. He gives his chair a shove and rolls back towards the window. Red-roofed Jewish settlements are perched on the hilltops all around, boxing Nablus in, causing a shortage of housing land. He gestures at them. “These people are not leaving. They are investing. They are here to stay. It’s very difficult to tell them to go back to the 1967 border; that’s become history now.”

I can see why he thinks so. Since the Gaza pullout in 2005, the Israeli government has managed to evacuate one West Bank settlement outpost of just nine houses—to terrific settler resistance—while several other new ones have gone up. Israeli governing coalitions are unstable by nature and getting more so; in the face of the settlers’ single-mindedness, they are virtually impotent.

We head on and meet two “Islamists”, as Hamas members have started calling themselves since the Palestinian Authority (PA) began arresting them—as if it might save them. They are of a type I have come to expect: jolly, roly-poly men with neatly trimmed beards. The first looks so much like a rabbi that I glance at the crown of his head looking for the black skullcap.

His flat overlooks one of Nablus’s tough, volatile refugee camps, a maze of tightly-packed slum housing. He takes me upstairs to show me the empty flats above, where Israeli soldiers periodically break in to get a better shot at wanted militants. He says the soldiers have written warnings on the doors, but the childish Hebrew scrawl—“Please, there are no living here”—with misshapen letters curling into their Arabic equivalents, is clearly the hand of a local.

The second Islamist, who got out of Israeli custody only to be arrested by the Palestinians, describes how a fellow prisoner was blindfolded and made to kneel with his hands tied. When he subsided on to his haunches from exhaustion, they hit him. I mention that it sounds like the way Israeli jailers commonly treated Palestinians until the courts banned the practice. “No,” my interviewee says. “Worse than the Israelis.”

The image on the left is a map that I bought in an antiques shop in Jaffa. It is dated 1940 and shows Jewish-owned land in green. Under the legend “FACTS”, it states, “The greater part of Palestine is still uncultivated. Jews now own less than six percent of the land of Palestine.” It enumerates three zones: in the largest, called Zone A, “land transfers to others than Palestine Arabs are prohibited”. The map is issued by the “Keren Kayemeth Leisrael”, the Jewish National Fund.

The image on the right is the JNF’s land holdings today. As I wrote in last week’s story, there is some disagreement over dates, amounts and prices, but between 1949 and 1953 either 1.25m or 2m dunums (1,250 or 2,000 sq km) was added to the 6% or so that Jews owned before Israel was created, by means of selling the JNF land that the state had confiscated from those same “Palestine Arabs” who had fled the war.

It took me a while after I bought the antique map to read the legends properly and realise that it was propaganda. The JNF was trying to show how little land Jews controlled, and how restricted they were from acquiring more, in an attempt to stave off criticism that they were taking over Palestine. In the preceding years tensions had flared and land prices had gone up many-fold as the Arabs in Palestine started to resist the slowly growing Jewish influx.

The figures are, of course, somewhat misleading. The 6% refers to the whole of Palestine, of which a great deal was and is desert, and does not easily support large population centres. Much of the Jewish land shown in the 1940 map is concentrated in the coastal strip, where Tel Aviv and its metropolitan sprawl, the biggest population concentration in Israel, are today. Looked at in terms of population rather than land, the picture changes: though estimates vary, by 1940 Jews were around 30%.

Likewise, today’s dispute about the JNF is based on a somewhat misleading figure. According to its charter, its land can be leased to Jews only. But it owns only 13% of Israel. So is it really such a big issue? When you look at the map on the right, where the JNF holdings are so tightly packed that they clearly outline the northern West Bank, it becomes clear that in the bit of Israel that most people want to live in, the non-arid part—in other words, from about the level of Ashkelon northwards—the JNF owns a great deal of the land, perhaps as much as half.