fugitive peace

It’s official. They’ve failed. A poll today from Khalil Shikaki’s polling outfit, PSR, says that Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh would beat Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas in a Palestinian presidential election.

This is the same Hamas that America, Europe and Israel have been variously boycotting, bombing and generally trying to exterminate for the past two years. The Annapolis peace process was meant to make Abbas popular; the economic stranglehold on Gaza was supposed to make Hamas hated. Failed, failed, failed.

Maybe this is why Olmert has said not once but twice this month that he wants to talk to Syria. Whenever the “Palestinian track” looks like it’s on the rocks, Israel revives the idea of peace talks with the one neighbouring country that it has had almost no actual friction with since 1973.

Could Olmert be serious this time? For a while this week I thought so. This month, Israel’s security services gave the cabinet their annual intelligence estimate. According to the reports, the Mossad and military intelligence agree that if America and Israel offer Syria a good enough deal, it would be ready to cut ties with the people Israel and America don’t like — Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran.

Why this is interesting is because the Mossad used to think otherwise. Perhaps it now believes that after Israel’s mysterious air strike on Syria in September, and after the assassination of Hizbullah’s man Imad Mughniyeh there last month — which Israel denies, but everyone assumes it did — the Syrians are now more scared and readier to talk. Last month Israel seemed to make use of that momentum by warning Damascus that if Hizbullah attacks Israel again, Israel will strike Syria.

In other words, with your eyes half-closed it could look like Israel is threatening Syria with consequences for bad behaviour while offering it a carrot for good behaviour — trying to lower Syria’s price.

And if you really read into the subtle nuances, Olmert seems to be lowering Israel’s price. Alon Liel, an Israeli diplomat who held back-channel talks with a Syrian expat from 2004 to 2006 (and who leaps on any sign of an Israeli-Syrian thaw), pointed out to me that Olmert has floated Syria talks about 10 or 15 times in the past 10 months. Often, he’s added the condition that Syria break its “Axis of Evil” ties first. But the last couple of times he’s said that negotiations could “lead to” Syria’s breaking those ties, a hint that he’s not so concerned about the preconditions any more.

The trouble is, a lot of senior Israelis are sceptical that Syria will simply turn its back on its old allies even if it gets back the Golan Heights and peace with Israel in return.

And outside Israel there’s even more scepticism. Recently various Western high-ups have been saying how disappointed they are with Syria. We heard it from a senior British official who came to Jerusalem last week; Angela Merkel said it today (German); Nicolas Sarkozy said it in December; George Bush says it every Monday and Thursday. Syria policy, Josh Landis says, is “the last red meat for the ‘freedom agenda’ crowd in the Republican Party” and is run by the last remaining neocons in the administration.

And Olmert, even if he wants to, can’t go against the American administration.

So don’t expect the talk of peace with Syria to come true. Take it, instead, as a sign of just how hopeless the Annapolis process has truly become.

While I was researching this week’s piece on the upcoming Bush visit to the Middle East, something caught my eye in the White House’s December 18th press briefing about it. Dana Perino, the spokeswoman, was asked whether Bush would meet with Hamas, and answered:

“I think the President wants to deal with the elected leader of all the Palestinians, which is Abu Mazen and Prime Minister Fayyad. So he is going to focus on talking with them. Hamas is a terrorist organization. He is not going to be talking with them.”

Now, all the reporters in the room knew that Hamas was also elected by the Palestinians, and that Fayyad was not elected at all but appointed by Abu Mazen to head an emergency government whose legal legitimacy is questionable at best. Nobody challenged her.

Still, Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and that’s a good enough reason not to talk to it, right? Except that a lot of the Palestinian security men guarding Bush on his visit to Ramallah have also been active in Fatah’s military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which has carried out more attacks from the West Bank than Hamas has; and the al-Aqsa men who killed two Israeli soldiers near Hebron last week were themselves on the PA security forces’ payroll. What’s more, this fluidity between the Brigades and the official PA forces has been common knowledge for years (even I’ve written about it). In short, “terrorist”, like “democrat”, is an extraordinarily flexible term in the Washington dictionary.

That nobody corrected Perino isn’t surprising. Press conferences are not for getting into arguments — there’s no point. The journalists are there to hear the official position, and at best pick up on whether it’s changed since the last time. If the official position is that Hamas are terrorists and Abu Mazen and Fayyad are democrats, that’s just another way of saying that Hamas are our enemies and Abu Mazen and Fayyad are our friends.

This loose use of labels is nothing new, of course: yesterday’s strategic ally is today’s evil dictator (Saddam) and yesterday’s freedom fighter is today’s terrorist (Bin Laden). The trouble is that as journalists we’re so used to this doublespeak that we don’t even notice it any more, so we just shovel it on to the general public — and usually we don’t have the time or the space to explain, to those who follow events less closely than we do, that the people we’re quoting are talking out of their backsides.

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.

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.

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.

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.