fugitive peace

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.

I think I must be coming down with Jerusalem Syndrome.

I was up late writing and had decided to pack it in. I went to close the balcony door and was arrested by the sight of a big billow of mist. I went outside. Warmish-coolish dampish clouds rolled by. And then I heard it.

A kind of ethereal chanting. Male voices. Hard to tell how many; sometimes it sounded like one, sometimes like half a dozen.

Hard also to tell where it came from. The walls of the buildings around here bounce sounds back and forth. My first thought was the muezzins of East Jerusalem. But the wind was blowing from the west, so they couldn’t have carried that far, and this wasn’t the prescribed chant of an Adhan but something less structured, rising and fading out, and in a more Western musical key.

I couldn’t sleep, so I took my bike out. I rode down towards the old city, stopping every so often to listen. I still heard them. The direction was still vague. I reached a vantage point in Yemin Moshe overlooking the floodlit old city walls. I could hear the voices, faintly, but they were at the threshold of my hearing; they might have been coming from inside the old city, but maybe not.

I turned and rode back up towards the centre of town. It’s hard to overestimate how empty Jerusalem is at four in the morning. In ten minutes I saw maybe half a dozen cars and a handful of pedestrians. I invented outlandish stories for what each one of them was doing walking the streets at this hour. I guess none of them looked like he was listening for disembodied voices though.

I reach the pedestrian precinct and suddenly came upon crowds of teenagers out drinking. Voices, raucous, cheerful. Not the ones I had heard. I carried on to the beginning of Mea Shearim; maybe it was from an early-bird yeshiva. But I could hear nothing.

I turned back again. A JCB digger was partly blocking a road and a taxi was trying to pass it. The taxi driver hooted a couple of times, waited, then advanced with extreme caution. Since a guy went crazy on a bulldozer yesterday everyone’s afraid of earth movers.

I got home, stopping a few more times. By now the voices were in my head as much as outside it; I thought I heard them, and they would resolve into a car engine, the wind in my ears, a radio playing in a house I passed.

Outside my house I waited a long while and listened. The unsteady flapping of the Belgian flag on the consul’s residence; distant whispers of cars; a leaf drily hitting the ground. No voices. One of the guys I had cycled past a few minutes earlier walked by. He didn’t meet my gaze.

I went in and up to the balcony. Birdsong. Wind. The beginnings of sunrise. No more mist. No voices.

A digression from my normal topic and a return to my geek days, when I wrote about science and technology.

My erstwhile colleague at The Economist (and one of the people who interviewed me for my first job there), Chris Anderson, now the editor of Wired magazine, has published an essay in the latest issue entitled “The End of Theory“. It doesn’t even come with the question mark that the authors of such audacious claims usually tack on to protect themselves.

In a sentence, it argues that the classic scientific model - come up with a theory,  then test it by experiment - is becoming obsolete with the advent of gigantic data sets (anything from the contents of a library to the genomes of all the species of microbes found in air) and extremely powerful computer networks that can crunch the data to look for patterns.

The purpose of a scientific theory is to allow you to make predictions about how things will behave - “in all cases where you have A and B, you will get C”. To be able to make those predictions you need to have an explanation, ie, a theory: “Because of XYZ, A and B will always produce C”. What Chris is saying is that in this new era we will cut out the middleman - the theory. Processing vast amounts of experimental data will find out what A and B lead to, and do so highly accurately, without your ever having to understand exactly why. (A good comparison is translation engines that “learn” to translate by comparing vast corpuses of texts that have been translated from one language to another, such as European Union documents. What emerges after the computer has been trained is a fiendishly complex, computer-generated algorithm that makes no sense whatsoever - there is no theory in it - but can translate extremely well.)

There are lots of comments running around the blogosphere about Chris’s idea; some think he’s a genius, others think he’s off his trolley. What I like is that Wired is simultaneously running a feature on its website entitled “5 Things Wired Pronounced Dead Prematurely“.