fugitive peace

I’m finding it very entertaining that some right-wing bloggers, who don’t really like me my views (well, those few who have actually heard of me), are using my blog to support their arguments.

When I wrote about the seemingly conflicting polls on whether Israelis favoured talking to Hamas, a handful of right-wing blogs seized on the poll showing that only a minority favour it if you ask the question the right way. Of course, one of them felt obliged to clarify that I am “not exactly a friend of Israel or of truth” (though apparently I am a friend of truth when the truth suits them).

Now Noah Pollak at Commentary’s blog turns to me to help diss the J Street Project, the new “liberal” Israel lobby. His argument: J Street can’t possibly speak for Israelis because one of its members quoted the poll showing that 64% of Israelis favour talks with Hamas, and that poll, as yours truly has conclusively proved, is bunkum. Pollak’s clincher:

the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as “pro-Israel.”

Dangerous argument, if you ask me. AIPAC, sitting in Washington? Of course not. AIPAC, paternalistic? Perish the thought. But more to the point, aren’t these groups supposed to be advocating policies for the United States, not Israel?

So let it be recorded that despite having provided unshakeable evidence to the contrary, I personally think J Street is a good thing, though I’m sceptical that it will live up to expectations. No matter what your views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, something is clearly out of whack when the debate on Capitol Hill is far more constrained than it is in the rest of Washington, let alone in Israel itself. J Street aims to make it possible for American politicians to discuss talking to Hamas, something that Israeli politicians do every day, without fear of jeopardising their campaign finances and political careers. That’s not paternalistic; it’s called a healthy democracy.

A small but important lesson about opinion polls.

Three weeks ago Ha’aretz’s pollster, Camil Fuchs, published a poll showing that 64% of Israelis favour holding talks with Hamas in order to get a ceasefire and release Gilad Shalit, the captured soldier. Today the Tami Steinmetz Centre has issued the latest monthly Peace Index. It says that only 25% of Israelis and just 17% of Israeli Jews favour negotiating with Hamas.

Puzzled? So was I. I reported on the Ha’aretz poll a couple of weeks ago as evidence that Israeli opinion is shifting towards talks with Hamas. So I called Ephraim Yaar of the Steinmetz Centre for an explanation, and it turns out to be simple.

The Ha’aretz poll asked people if they supported talks with Hamas: yes or no. The Steinmetz poll asked them the best way for Israel to deal with the Qassam rockets from Gaza: (1) talks with Hamas; (2) a relatively restrained military response (though Israel’s idea of “restrained”, I should point out, still means several Palestinians killed every week); (3) a bigger but still limited response (ie, like the ground incursion that killed 110 people or so earlier this month); (4) a massive ground operation to reoccupy Gaza; (5) another option of your choice; (6) don’t know.

When you put the question like this, more Israeli Jews support reoccupying Gaza than talking to Hamas (see the table below).

So which poll is “right”? What does the Israeli public actually think about talks with Hamas?

I asked Fuchs. “When you include other options, you’re cognitively giving legitimacy to them,” he says. “What you’re doing is hinting to the person that there are other people who prefer these options.” When there’s only one option on the table, on the other hand, you’re asking them to choose between doing that and doing nothing.

In short, what the two polls taken together say is that if the people could run the government, and had a range of options for dealing with Gaza, more of them would go with a military option. However, if the government says it’s going to talk to Hamas, 64% of the public would support it (though Fuchs thinks the number now would be a little lower than three weeks ago).

Question 1: Should Israel conduct talks with Hamas towards a ceasefire and the release of Gilad Shalit?

Source: Ha’aretz/Dialog

Question 2: What is the best way for Israel to prevent rocket fire on the south?

Source: Tami Steinmetz Centre

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.

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.”

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.