fugitive peace

We were seven, crowded around a table in a West Bank cafe: two officers from PA General Intelligence, two British journalists, one translator and, as seems de rigeur for any gathering of Palestinian men, two wide-eyed young toughs with an indeterminate relationship to the proceedings. Halfway through the conversation a family with two small kids holding party balloons came into the room, took a look at us and promptly left again.

A friend and colleague, Matthew Kalman, had invited me to join him for the interview because he needed someone who knew Moscow. As Matt wrote in his story, published today, one of the intelligence officers claimed to be among a hand-picked group sent to Moscow for anti-terrorist training by Russian special forces. His descriptions of where they had been and what they had learned were detailed enough to convince me, as was the Russian he had picked up (”thank you”, “please”, “hello”, “goodbye”, and the all-important krasivaya devushka, “pretty girl”). He had a pretty good accent too.

What intrigued Matt was that the methods the men were taught had been honed on Russia’s own version of the Palestinians: the rebels of Chechnya, brother Muslims in fact. Their training included a film of the botched rescue attempt in Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre, where at least 129 hostages died from after-effects of the gas that was pumped in to subdue the Chechen kidnappers. But the officer shrugged; this kind of geopolitical irony was beyond him. His trainers had explained to him that the people in Chechnya were irhabiin, “terrorists”. If his superiors told him to go after irhabiin in the West Bank or in Gaza — and he knew that this meant above all Hamas — he would obey.

I wanted to know why men from the PA security forces were ready to hunt down those same Hamas men that many of them, as members of Fatah’s militias, had fought alongside during the second intifada (though it was doubtful that this one had). The officer’s answer was one we’ve come to hear a lot of: the barbarity that Hamas displayed against Fatah men during their showdown in Gaza in June. There are truly horrific stories — of Hamas men riddling prisoners’ legs with machine-gun fire so as to sever them, for instance. Just how many such cases of extreme cruelty there were is hard to pin down: Fatah people tend to inflate the figures while Hamas people play them down as unauthorised “isolated incidents”.

But that matters little; these stories have become anchors of the anti-Hamas sentiment at all levels of Fatah, just as stories of Fatah torture in the 1990s were lore among Hamas. Much as I and others have been writing about the need for the world to recognise that Hamas represents a large chunk of the Palestinians and can’t just be swept under the carpet, as it is has been at Annapolis, there’s no getting away from the fact that a hurdle at least as big as the international community’s refusal to deal with Hamas is the internal hatred. Before June I had written several stories about Palestinian factional clashes and heard my interviewees recite the same mantras — national unity is paramount, we will never allow this to become a civil war, our common enemy is the occupation, and so on and so forth. It all sounds particularly hollow now.

We’re nearly there. And it seems I got it wrong when I said that Annapolis might be derailed by Ehud Olmert’s insistence that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state before negotiations began. I think the reason is he never actually insisted on it - he just managed to look as though he was.

How I got misled on this is instructive. The funny thing is I sort-of saw it all begin, though I didn’t realise it at the time.

On November 5th, at the Saban Forum dinner at the president’s residence, the Ha’aretz journalist Ari Shavit asked Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala), the head of the Palestinian negotiating team on Annapolis, whether the Palestinians would recognise Israel as a Jewish state. Ha’aretz reported this, but I first heard it from someone who had come straight from the dinner and was stunned by Abu Ala’s response.

“He could have thrown them a bone,” said my witness. “He could have said something like ‘Come on, guys, you know if it were up to me, you know what I think, but this is an issue that’s part of the talks and we have to leave it for the talks.’ I mean, they’re sitting there in the residence of the president of Israel. But instead he just said ‘let’s leave it for the talks,’ which makes it look to the Israelis like the whole issue of recognising the Jewish state is in question.”

I confess I didn’t take him too seriously. So what if Abu Ala didn’t soft-soap his hosts? He was right on the main point: recognition of Israel as a Jewish state implies renouncing the right of return, so it’s a no-no for Palestinians to concede it except as part of talks.

What I missed was that the media, and then the rightists within the coalition, would turn this into an issue. Within a week Olmert was insisting that “Whoever does not accept [Israel as a Jewish state] cannot hold any negotiations with me” and that “This will be a condition for our recognition of a Palestinian state.” Saeb Erekat retorted that “no state in the world connects its national identity to a religious identity,” which was rather foolish and only infuriated Israel even more.

A few days later Olmert repeated his demand to Javier Solana: the recognition of the Jewish state would be a “foundation for the post-Annapolis negotiations” and “is not subject to either negotiations or discussion.”

Both Israeli and international media interpreted this to mean that Olmert was making Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state a precondition for holding talks. But a close reading shows he never actually did.

When he said that only someone who accepts a Jewish state could hold talks with him, he followed it up with a qualifer: that he was sure Abbas and Salam Fayyad “are committed to prior agreements and want to make peace with Israel as a Jewish state”. In other words, they personally could hold talks with him. And when he said the condition was non-negotiable, he meant there would be no agreement without it — but not that there would be no talks without it.

Thus Olmert was able to make it look like he was bending to the rightists without actually doing so. This week, as if nothing had happened, he repeated that he wanted to complete a final-status deal within a year. If nothing else, you have to give the man his due as a master of manipulation.

Anyway, this week’s issue finally has my piece on Annapolis as well as an editorial written in London that calls on Bush to rescue Annapolis by making his own speech about the shape of a two-state solution, and a cover picture of Bush entitled “Mr Palestine” which I find absolutely hilarious.

A moment of sympathy for Ehud Olmert, who is up against some scary people on the Israeli right. I snapped these pictures in Jerusalem. This first one showing Olmert behind bars was put up by the Jewish National Front, an extreme right-wing religious-Zionist group. Their credo (Hebrew) includes calls to “detach the enemy from the land of Israel and distance the enemy tens of kilometres from the border”, and “stop being ‘the most moral army in the Middle East’ - let the IDF win!”

Meanwhile, Olmert may not be right-wing enough for Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu, who is a member of his coalition and claims the credit for making Olmert come up with all sorts of obstacles to Annapolis; but even Lieberman obviously isn’t right-wing enough for the “scientific workers from the countries of the USSR” who paid for a poster mocking his well-known opportunism: “Security - No! Jerusalem - No! Ministerial chair - Yes!” The text below says: “The time has come to leave the government and cancel the Annapolis conference!”

The Annapolis doomsday machine is now running at full tilt on the blogosphere: mainstream right-wing blogs like Michelle Malkin and Israpundit are issuing warnings about what a disaster it will be for Israel, while Time magazine’s Middle East blog asks whether the meeting will achieve anything.

I think it’s again fair to ask whether it will even happen. Ehud Olmert has been insisting that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition to the final-status talks that are to take place after Annapolis. The Palestinians are refusing.

That might seem silly; after all, the whole point of the two-state solution is that Israel will be a Jewish state and Palestine will be a Palestinian state. However, recognising Israel as a Jewish state means giving up the principle of the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel proper, since if all the refugees came back Jews would become a minority in Israel. The Palestinians know full well they will have to give this up anyway; the best they can hope for is that Israel agree to let in a certain number of refugees each year, as proposed in the Geneva Initiative. But this is meant to be part of the give-and-take of the final-status negotiations. Israel is trying to make the Palestinians concede it in advance.

Why? Probably simply because it can. As I described in my last post, a fortnight ago Abu Mazen caved in on his demand that the Annapolis meeting include a declaration pinning down the basics of the final-status agreement and a firm, six-month deadline for completing final-status talks. All he got in return was a non-committal agreement from Olmert to try to finish the talks within a year. In doing so he showed his weakness. Olmert, ever mindful of right-wingers in his coalition threatening to scuttle the talks, took advantage of this to try to shore himself up politically, as well as improve his own bargaining position before the talks begin.

Did he do this with American approval? I doubt it. Now, however, he can’t back down even if he wants to. Avigdor Lieberman, whose Yisrael Beiteinu party is the right-wing linchpin in the coalition, is playing political one-upmanship on the prime minister by trying to get Olmert’s pre-condition voted on in the cabinet and possibly passed as a law. The latter would be pretty easy. Some liberal Israeli commentators are tearing their hair out at Olmert’s demand — “like denying the legitimacy of our own national existence,” wrote Yoel Marcus in Ha’aretz — but very few Israeli politicians would dare to refuse to support it.

This, I surmise, is why we still have no fixed date or invitations for Annapolis, two weeks before it’s supposed to take place. And Abu Mazen must be facing the dilemma of his lifetime. He fears that if he refuses Olmert’s pre-condition, the US will pull the rug out from under his feet; but that if he accepts it, the entire Arab world will brand him a traitor.

After being miles apart for months, the Israeli and Palestinian positions suddenly seemed to converge last week: the goal of Annapolis will not be to nail down prior commitments about final-status (borders, Jerusalem, etc) but to get negotiations moving again and to relaunch the “road map” with its on-the-ground commitments from both sides (fighting terrorism, stopping settlement-building). It will be what Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki recently described (pdf) as the “Launching Pad” option.

What triggered this change is still a bit of a mystery to me, but the magic moment seems to have been Olmert’s speech to the Saban Forum last week, when he said he wanted to finish up final-status talks by the time Bush leaves office a year from now. The Palestinians, who had been pounding on about how they would not go to Annapolis without commitments to the substantive issues and to a deadline for completing final-status talks, suddenly caved in completely. “The American, Israeli and Palestinian sides are all insistent that we reach an end before the end of Bush’s term in office, and that is what we wish,” Abbas said.

Why? Was Olmert’s vague aspiration — not a commitment — to a one-year deadline really enough for Abbas? Surely not. More likely, Abbas simply feared being painted by Israel and the US as a rejectionist if he held out any longer.

Either way, it was a move of genius on Olmert’s part, for two reasons. He neutralised the Palestinian objections at an extremely low price: a one-year deadline that nobody will hold him to if things go wrong. And he neutralised his domestic challengers too. For the next twelve months, anyone who tries to destabilise his coalition will be accused of derailing the peace process.

This especially applies to Ehud Barak. As defence minister, Barak is responsible for implementing Israel’s end of the road map: he decides which checkpoints get removed in the West Bank and what action is taken against unauthorised settlement-building. In the last few weeks he’s been positioning himself for an election by taking a tough line on all these things, trying to make himself look more security-minded than Olmert. By making the peace process all about the road map, Olmert has managed to make it look to everyone — and most importantly to the Americans, as Aluf Benn described last weekend — like Barak is the one throwing a spanner in the works.

Meanwhile, having agreed to put the road map back at the centre of the peace process, the Palestinians seem to have remembered suddenly what a bum deal it was for them in the past. The road map’s first stage requires the PA to begin “sustained, targeted, and effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure”, while Israel “immediately dismantles settlement outposts erected since March 2001″ and “freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)”. But though the road map quite clearly describes these as simultaneous, Israel has usually insisted that the Palestinians carry out their end of the bargain first. That’s why the road map never got anywhere. The Palestinians are now warning that this could precipitate a crisis in the talks (but, curiously, coming to Olmert’s rescue by saying it is Barak and Livni who are the stumbling blocks, though Olmert himself seems to be sending similar signals: “If stage one of the road map is implemented - if the Palestinians dismantle terror infrastructure - then and only then will Israel have to implement” a final-status agreement).

But I don’t see that the Palestinians have any leverage here. They said there’d be no Annapolis without Israeli commitments to final-status issues; they caved. If they say there’ll be no Annapolis without a proper Israeli commitment to the road map, who’s going to take them seriously?

Update (November 7th): Another journalist tells me he has had his meeting with a diplomat on November 26th cancelled because, he’s told, the diplomat has to go to Annapolis. Daniel Levy also confirms the date and has his usual sharp analysis of what to expect.

Gossip on the sidelines of the Saban Forum at the weekend and in Ramallah today is that Annapolis will indeed start on November 26th, as planned. Olmert has also just said that it will be at the end of the month. This is not good news.

Palestinian sources have been telling me that it would be better to postpone or cancel the summit than have a half-baked one empty of substance. Other Arab officials have been saying the same thing. Israeli ones, similarly, say that the summit itself is less important than the process. Their positions on the substance remain miles apart: the Israelis still want vagueness on the grounds that too much commitment is dangerous when both leaderships are weak, while the Palestinians want commitment to the main principles (especially the 1967 borders) and to a timeline for completing negotiations, on the grounds that anything less will make Abbas look like a chump. And the lack of enthusiasm for the summit in the White House has been an open secret in Washington for ages.

In short, it feels as if the only one really interested in this any more is Condi Rice.

One source tells me they will hold the summit without any joint declaration on the substantive issues, merely an agreement on the negotiating process to follow it. That might be so — this source has been right before — but it might just be too embarrassing for everyone concerned. It would especially embarrass Abbas, who has been pretty categorical about how he won’t turn up unless Israel makes concrete promises.

And the most foolish-looking would be Rice herself. She has been pushing Annapolis as the answer to America’s problem of how to increase Abbas’s legitimacy, which is America’s strategy for its broader problem of how to weaken Islamist movements like Hamas. If Abbas caves in and comes to a meaningless summit it will do nothing for his legitimacy or America’s policy goals (which I think are quite warped, but that’s another matter).

So I still wouldn’t rule out some kind of breakthrough as the date gets closer. But given the limited pressure that Rice is willing or able to apply to either Olmert or Abbas, it will be a minimal breakthrough designed not to bring peace but to save face: Rice’s face, first and foremost.

For the crowd that filled Rabin Square in Tel Aviv tonight (Saturday night) for the annual memorial ceremony, there was what a friend of mine described as “a surrealistic irony, like something out of a Greek tragedy”: on Sunday, the actual anniversary of Rabin’s death, his assassin, Yigal Amir, will watch as his newborn son is circumcised.

Rabin’s son Yuval, who this year spoke at the ceremony for the first time, remarked that one of the names for the circumcision ceremony in Hebrew is the Covenant of Isaac, or Brit Yitzhak, since Abraham’s son Isaac was the first Jewish male to get snipped on the prescribed eighth day after his birth. Arranging for a man to perform a Brit Yitzhak on the anniversary of his murdering another Yitzhak sounds like the kind of nasty joke dreamed up by a deity who has had a particularly tiresome day.

Indeed, for the Israeli religious right this will probably pass into legend as a stroke of divine justice. Luckily for the people in the square, not too many looked like they believed in divine justice. Though Rabin’s death is sometimes compared to JFK’s in terms of the national trauma, the mourning of it, at least nowadays, is a strictly partisan affair, observed mainly on the secular left and centre. By my reckoning, a good one-third of the people were wearing the blue shirts of the Labour youth movement. Most of them would have been too young to remember the day he was killed.

There were no big names from parties to the right of Rabin’s Labour party (unlike two years ago, when Tsipi Livni, then in the Likud, caused quite a buzz by giving a speech). On the contrary, there were several not-so-veiled references to the fact that though Yigal Amir is in jail, nobody has punished those in the settler movement and the Likud who incited against Rabin; his son noted that “one finger pulled the trigger, but many hands brought it there”.

I confess that tears welled up a couple of times. One was during Yuval Rabin’s eulogy for his father, which was tough and moving. The other was the minute’s silence, when 150,000 (according to the organisers) yakking, jabbering Israelis suddenly went into a hush. You could have heard a mobile phone ring all the way across the square; I just prayed it wouldn’t be mine.

But then I remembered Barbara Plett, a BBC journalist who admitted to crying at the pathos of the moment when the helicopter carrying Yasser Arafat on his last journey to a Paris hospital lifted off from the presidential compound in Ramallah. She was roasted by pro-Israel media watchdogs such as HonestReporting: “Another BBC Mideast reporter displays open attachment to one side of the conflict”. Although her report was in the BBC’s “From our own correspondent” programme, which is meant to be a personal view — rather like this blog — the BBC partly upheld a complaint against her. She was transferred to Pakistan not long afterwards. When I started this blog, though it’s separate from The Economist, my editor warned me to “remember Barbara Plett”.

So should I be admitting that my eyes got damp for Rabin? They say Karachi’s quite nice this time of year. Somehow, though, I don’t think HonestReporting will jump on my “open attachment to one side of the conflict” for this one. Palestinian media groups might, but they seem to have less interest in hunting down such infractions, or maybe just fewer resources, and certainly less clout (I can’t immediately recall a case of a journalist being drummed out of her job for being too pro-Israel).

Nor do I think it’s somehow more legitimate for a journalist to shed tears over Rabin than over Arafat. Rabin may have made a greater leap towards peace than any Israeli leader before or since, but a lot of Palestinians remember him chiefly as the man who talked peace while letting the settlements grow faster than ever (as the book Lords of the Land, which I reviewed recently, points out, making it all the more ironic that the settlers hated him so). In political terms, settlement-building is to Palestinians what terrorist attacks are to Israelis: the deal-breaker, the actions that belie the other side’s claim to want peace. Arafat, at least before the second intifada, was a bit like Rabin, trying but failing to stop the extremist forces in his society. They both got the Nobel.

But in any case, what moved me, like Barbara Plett, wasn’t the memory of the man himself, but the emotion of the moment. Surely that’s legitimate for anyone.

All of us here in Jerusalem are twiddling our thumbs waiting for the Annapolis summit to happen — or not — so here’s an update on progress.

I’ve been hearing off-the-record hints from since mid-September that the meeting might not be in November as planned, but this State Department press conference two weeks ago was the first official acknowledgement I’ve seen that it’s “either November or December” — though that was the deputy spokesman, Tom Casey, and perhaps he just hadn’t been properly induced into the current spin; I haven’t noticed it elsewhere.

But the pressure is rising. This week we’ve learned that Rice won’t be bringing invitations or a firm date with her when she comes to the region this weekend. The Palestinian chief negotiator, Ahmed Qurei, insisted that the Israelis agree to a deadline for negotiations, else no dice. Abbas told al-Hayat al-Jadidah that he wants the deal done in six months [Arabic] (thanks to The Israel Project for the translation), while Olmert’s aides tell Ha’aretz that for all his refusal to set a deadline, the Israeli PM would like to see the deal concluded within a year and that the obstacle isn’t Abbas, but that annoying Mr Qurei, making all sorts of tiresome demands. Ha’aretz also claims that the Palestinians are calling for the implementation to be completed within six months, which I think must be an error.

(I forgot, by the way, to crow smugly at having published the rumours that Qurei was taking over as chief negotiator from Sa’eb Erekat long before they were confirmed. There. I’ve crowed. It’s the small pleasures that get us through the day.)

Meanwhile, even though the talks on the core issues of final status are stuck, the signs are that the two sides are trying to carry out confidence-building measures on the ground — but not very effectively. Facing US pressure to evacuate outposts, Ehud Barak has been in talks with settler leaders about removing some of them voluntarily, but these have gotten bogged down and now Barak says no outposts will be gone before year’s end. Palestinian confidence-building, meanwhile, consisted of deploying 300 police to Nablus today, supposedly as part of a transfer of security authority from Israel to the PA. But the question is whether this will be more than symbolic: the Israeli army will still stay in control, at least at night.

Meanwhile, dissident Palestinian factions including Hamas and the PFLP decided to postpone their conference in Damascus, slated for next week, so that it can be an anti-Annapolis coinciding with the summit. They’d better have flexible hotel reservations.