fugitive peace

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.