fugitive peace

Two op-eds of mine today try to explain what’s wrong with Israel’s basic strategy in Gaza - in both military and public-relations terms.

In the New York Times I argue that there’s a basic problem with Israel’s notion of “deterrence”.

In Ha’aretz’s English edition I try to explain to Israelis why they never win the PR war.

The pieces are below.

January 8, 2009

Fighting to Preserve a Myth

By GIDEON LICHFIELD

Tel Aviv

SUPPOSE Israel manages to prevent its campaign in Gaza from turning into a repeat of its disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. Suppose the army does not get bogged down fighting in the narrow streets of Gaza’s refugee camps and international outrage at the spiraling death toll does not force it to pull out with rockets still falling on Israeli towns. Suppose no soldiers are taken hostage and Hamas suffers enough damage to force it to accept a cease-fire on Israel’s terms. Then what?

Israeli leaders say often that the result will be to “re-establish deterrence” against Hamas, and by extension against Hezbollah and others. This harks back to the glory days when Israel defeated three Arab armies in 1967 and fought off surprise attacks from Egypt and Syria in 1973. The trouble is that “deterrence” does not exist.

The effect of deterring conventional military attacks, as Israel did back then, was that aggression found other channels. For more than three decades the main threat to Israel has been not from conventional armies but from guerrilla movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. And these groups cannot be deterred.

During the 2006 war, the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said that merely surviving an Israeli onslaught would equal victory for his movement. The same is true of Hamas — even more so, in fact, since it is the only real power in Gaza, whereas Hezbollah is in finely balanced competition with other Lebanese parties. (Indeed, though some Israelis say that Hezbollah’s current silence is proof that deterrence works, the real reason it has not intervened on behalf of Hamas is probably that it does not want to upset the political balance just ahead of the Lebanese elections a few months away.) Deterrence has to be equal to the enemy’s fear of defeat; when the only defeat is annihilation, there is no deterrence unless Israel is prepared to reduce all of Gaza to rubble.

Even if Israel now manages to impose a cease-fire on its terms, the calm will be short-lived unless it is willing to reoccupy much of the Gaza Strip indefinitely. Moreover, as long as Israel plays the role of aggressor in Palestinian eyes, Hamas’s support remains high. And each attack has weakened the relative moderates within Hamas and strengthened its most extremist leaders.

Israel needs instead to abandon its military concept of deterrence in favor of a more pragmatic political one. What could deter Hamas is the fear that by using violence it will lose support among its people.

How to create this? It is worth remembering that Israel launched its operation after the breakdown of a cease-fire that had held, reasonably well, for several months. Each side accused the other of breaching it, both with some justification. Instead of trying to re-establish the cease-fire, Israel’s leaders, driven by the need to bolster their ratings ahead of an election in February, decided to try to strike a decisive blow against Hamas.

What Israel should do now is work for a cease-fire on terms that allow both sides to save some face. It should then do something it has done far too little of in the past: improve Gazans’ living conditions significantly. The aim should be to construct a long-lived state of calm in which Hamas has more to lose by breaching the cease-fire than by sticking to it.

In the longer term Israel will have to accept that Hamas is no fringe movement that can be rooted out and destroyed, but a central part of Palestinian society. This will be the hard part, not least because of the opposition from Hamas’s secularist Palestinian rivals, Fatah.

But even though Hamas’s stated goal is Israel’s destruction, it has said many times that it would accept a truce extending decades. Some former Israeli security chiefs argue that such an accommodation — a peace treaty in all but name — would eventually oblige Hamas to accept Israel’s existence, or else lose its own base of support. It is a gamble, certainly. But the alternative is more innocent lives lost, more extremism and ultimately more trouble for Israel.

Gideon Lichfield, a correspondent for The Economist, was the magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 2005 to 2008.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

_{Last update - 02:21 08/01/2009}

Israel’s PR war

_{By Gideon Lichfield}
It had to happen at some point. The army attacks a civilian building identified as a source of fire; dozens of civilians are killed, and what little sympathy Israel enjoyed in whatever war it’s currently fighting evaporates. It happened in Qana during the Second Lebanon War, and yesterday a school in the Jabalya refugee camp became a global symbol of indiscriminate Israeli aggression.

When these things happen, Israel is quick to respond on the public-relations front. It didn’t take long before we foreign correspondents started getting text messages from the Israel Defense Forces on our cell phones. One said that the school was targeted because it was “a source of mortar fire.” Another informed us that video footage was available of rockets being fired from another UNRWA school several months earlier. A third told us the names of the Hamas operatives who were killed along with the children and mothers cowering nearby.

I frequently get asked by Israelis, “why aren’t we winning the PR war? Why don’t people understand that this is what we have to do?” Many are convinced that there is something wrong with Israeli hasbara (public advocacy), that the spokespeople aren’t effective enough, or that the Palestinians have a huge and demonically efficient propaganda machine.

When I hear this I have to explain that Israeli hasbara is so sophisticated that there is still no adequate word for it in English; that some of Israel’s spokespeople could talk the hind legs off a donkey and then persuade the donkey to dance the hora, and that the Palestinians barely even know what a spokesman is, let alone be able to provide one who is available when he needs to be and knows anything about what is actually going on. So why isn’t Israel winning the PR war?

Partly, of course, it’s because the numbers are against it. Six hundred Palestinians dead versus nine Israelis, as of today’s figures: There’s just no way to make that proportion look pretty. Retired generals can drone on all they like about what “proportionality” really means in the laws of war, ambassadors can helpfully point out that many more Germans were killed than British in the Second World War, but these are theoretical notions; on television, what looks bad looks bad. (Nor do I really buy the argument that if Israel’s casualties were more visibly bloody - if, say, the media showed the gory pictures of the few people who have been hit by Qassams instead of holding them back to keep the home front from getting agitated - then you could counter the stream of barbaric images from Gaza. There’s just no competition.)

But the deeper reason is this: Israeli hasbara is perpetually trying to answer the wrong question: “Why is this justified?” Of course, it’s natural for either side in a conflict to try to explain why it, and not the other side, has the moral high ground. But, especially in a conflict where both sides have been claiming the moral high ground for decades, nobody in the outside world is all that interested. From a foreign correspondent’s point of view, it makes for boring journalism: “The Israelis said this, but the Palestinians said that.” And since we’re all studiously trying to be “neutral,” we’ll always balance your view against theirs; so the fact that you make more of an effort to explain than they do doesn’t really matter.

The question the foreign media really wants answered is invariably not “who’s in the right?” but “how will this round of fighting improve the overall situation?” And on that point, Israel never has a convincing argument. Given the country’s long history of engaging in wars that kill many more of its enemies than its own citizens but only buy a few months or years of calm, it’s a tough call to explain how this latest escapade will change the strategic balance, bring peace and prevent the need for another such bloodbath further down the line. Often that’s because there is in fact no good reason: Wars are fought for short-term gains. And it doesn’t help that with the constant competition for power within Israeli coalitions, it’s easy to interpret this war, like many others, as a political imperative, not a strategic one.

And so when the question the world is asking is not “who’s right?” but “what works?” the consistent impression Israel leaves is that it kills people because, at best, it simply doesn’t have any better ideas, and at worst, because some Israeli leader is trying to get the upper hand on one of his or her rivals. And no amount of hasbara can make that look good.

Gideon Lichfield, until recently The Economist’s Jerusalem correspondent, will be moving to the weekly’s New York bureau.

© Copyright 2009 Haaretz. All rights reserved

Picture: Hadar Naim

Yesterday the unthinkable happened. I stood in front of a large audience at a conference in Tel Aviv and said that I thought Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was Israel’s best choice for prime minister. (Actually I said “most interesting”, not “best”, but if we’re being honest, what’s the difference.)

If my Palestinian friends find out they will stop talking to me. Maybe most of my Israeli friends too. Politically I’m somewhere to the left of Meretz. Was I out of my mind?

It was the Globes annual business conference, and I was speaking about Israel’s long-term economic prospects. The main problem, I said, was political stability. Governments change so often that it inhibits serious policymaking.

I took the world financial crisis as an example. Israel should not be feeling the pain much. Its markets were hardly exposed to the strange financial instruments that have brought the rest of the developed world to its knees. Its exports will suffer, but that should only produce a mild slowdown. But the banks are panicking and shutting down credit, ignoring the Bank of Israel’s sharp interest-rate cuts, and that is causing the whole economy to shudder. Growth will be around 1.5% next year by the Bank of Israel’s estimate; in per-capita terms, that’s a recession.

What’s needed is a fiscal stimulus plan. But with Israel yet again in an election cycle, it’s impossible to get a serious one passed. There is a package, but frankly, it’s a joke.

When Netanyahu was finance minister he did a lot of good things. He introduced sensible fiscal management, which provided greater economic stability - the month-long war in 2006 hardly caused a blip in the economy - and reformed the financial markets; one effect of those reforms was to separate banking, insurance and asset management, specifically to prevent a crisis in one part of the financial system infecting the rest of it.

He also did a lot of harm to the poor and the middle class because, as is often the case with economic reforms, it was the rich that benefited first. The welfare-to-work “Wisconsin programme” got lots of people into work, but it didn’t make them better off, just increased the numbers of the working poor. The number of mortgages has been falling steadily too, which is a bad sign for the middle class’s health. But I’ve talked to some of Bibi’s policy whizkids over the years I’ve been here, and I think they recognise the mistakes.

So if we’re talking about economic policy, he has a more ambitious and intelligent one than his rivals. And a Likud government will be more stable than either a Kadima or Labour one, and more able to make reforms happen. For Israel, this is better.

For the Palestinians, of course, Likud is a different story.

Bibi says he doesn’t want to reach even a vague final-status agreement with Abbas now, as Olmert has been trying to for the past year. He talks instead about something called “economic peace”. This translates as: we’ll try to boost the West Bank economy enough so that they stop wanting to bomb us, and then, once they’re nice and quiet, we’ll think about talking about negotiating about working towards possible moves that might, in the fullness of time, when the moment is ripe, and without prejudice to Israel’s right to bomb the hell out of anyone it thinks is a threat, lead, eventually and in the long run, to Palestinian independence. Oh, and let’s not even mention Gaza.

You can guess what I think of that.

However, the fact is that neither Kadima nor Labour is offering the Palestinians anything better. Olmert’s offer of a “shelf agreement”, along with half-baked measures to boost the West Bank’s economy while strangling Gaza in an attempt to get the Palestinians living there to turn on Hamas, amounts to pretty much the same thing, just dressed up more nicely.

In fact, it’s better for the Palestinians to have an Israeli prime minister who doesn’t even pretend he wants to give them a state than one who claims to be working on it very hard while indefinitely stringing the process along because s/he has nothing else to offer as a policy platform. It may not be better for Abbas himself; his political survival depends on stringing out the process just as much as Olmert’s did and Livni’s will. But if that’s the best he can offer his people, he should go too.

Furthermore: if Olmert were, by some already thankfully remote chance, to reach a shelf agreement with Abbas before the election in February, it would be a disaster for the Palestinians, and for Abbas personally. Armed with that agreement, Bibi would be in an even stronger position to say that there is nothing more to talk about.

(I don’t, by the way, set much store by the argument, typical of certain hopeful leftists, that Israel’s biggest peace concessions have been made by Likud leaders. Netanyahu handed over most of Hebron to Palestinian control signed the Wye River Memorandum when he was prime minister in 1988, but under duress, not because, like Ariel Sharon with Gaza or Menachem Begin with the Sinai, he suddenly woke up and decided that it was the right thing to do.)

The other main thing to give one pause is that Bibi, to whom we owe the immortal fear-mongering line “It is 1938, and Iran is Nazi Germany”, is the man most likely to send Israeli fighters to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and possibly start another war to bring the entire Middle East down in even more flames than are engulfing it already. But I think if Israel had any window for bombing Iran, it ends when Barack Obama is sworn in. Without at least tacit support from the United States, he can’t do it.

So I say Bibi for prime minister. And by as many seats as possible. The Israeli left needs a total defeat if it’s to rise as a serious political force again.

I just outlined this reasoning to one of my Meretz-voting Israeli friends. He said, “Wow. You’re thinking like an Israeli.”

(And, just to make it clear, this is not the official position of The Economist.)

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…

I’m feeling pretty cynical about the Bush visit, and not just because getting around Jerusalem has been impossible (again). Akiva Eldar’s diatribe—“Bush is an accomplice to an offence far worse than all of the criminal offences of which Olmert is suspected combined”—was a shade harsher than I would allow myself, but his despairing assessment of the peace process and Bush’s non-contribution to it is right on target.

Which meant that listening to Olmert’s speech of welcome at the conference hosted by Shimon Peres, I found myself adding subtitles sotto voce:

“President Peres… Your ardent dedication to Israel throughout its 60 vibrant years is unmatched, while your rich experience and leadership provides us all with guidance and fills us with hope for the future.”

You never give up, you old has-been. You fill me with hope – hope that I don’t turn into such a perennial loser.

“It gives me great pleasure to offer a special welcome to the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush—a great personal friend whose commitment to the State of Israel is immeasurable.”

You’ve taken three days out of your last year in office to party here with the presidents of Poland, Albania, Togo, Burkina Faso and Palau. You must really have bugger-all to do back in Washington.

“You are an unusual person, you are an unusual leader and you are an unusual friend of the people of Israel.”

I’ve met some freiers in my time, but you take the biscuit.

“Our countries represent different peoples, but they have kindred souls… Our core beliefs, our founding values and our aspirations are all drawn from the same inspiration.”

Remember–it’s us versus them. The good guys against the crazy Muslims. I know we’ve got some religious nut-jobs too, but hey, you do the God stuff yourself, you know where that comes from.

“Relations between our countries have evolved into a joint vision and are based on a deep understanding of the invaluable benefits of close cooperation.”

We’ve dug ourselves into the same deep hole. So get out the chequebook already.

“With full confidence I say that the United States under your leadership represents the pinnacle of this friendship.”

And you’ve dug the deepest. Boy, would I hate to be in your shoes.

“Israel is and must remain capable of securing its own future, relying only – and I repeat again, at the end of the day – only on ourselves for our protection. But everybody in Israel knows that we can always depend on our greatest ally in the world, the United States of America, when navigating the geo-political challenges of the future.”

Don’t ever — and I repeat again, ever — tell us what to do. But when we come asking for help, you better give it or else those lobby people will be on you like a ton of bricks.

“Israel continues to actively seek peace with its neighbors, especially with the Palestinians. We are making great efforts and seeing progress on this front, which we believe, with continued dedication and labor, will come to fruition…”

We’re on the case, okay? So as I said, quit leaning on us…

“In addition to strong diplomatic relations, an integral element of the close cooperation between our countries is the dedication of the Jewish communities and the numerous Jewish organizations in America. I thank you for your efforts and know that you will continue to play a key role in preserving our special relations.”

…or else.

“Israel’s founding generation could only have dreams of achieving a state as advanced and spectacular as we have today. As one Jewish people, one Jewish nation, we must continue with the same vision, the same energy, and the same passion for developing our country, our homeland, as our forefathers had, so that we can implement our inspiring vision for the future.”

Our grandparents showed up here with nothing, and look what they created. Now we’re so busy fighting each other, never mind the Arabs, that we’re on a straight line to trashing it all.

“Mr. President, in 2004 you said that America as a ‘nation is stronger and safer because we have a true and dependable ally in Israel’.”

You must have been on drugs. Frankly, you need us as an ally like you need a hole in the head.

“Today I say to you Mr. President, Israel is stronger and safer because we look to the future, and we know that the United States of America will always remain our closest and most dependable ally.”

But hey, we’re not complaining. Like I said, get out the chequebook.

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.

… is here, in 13,000 words, more or less.

I feel sorry for the poor Winograd commission that investigated the second Lebanon war. They’re nice, serious, committed people who tried to give Israel the definitive, all-encompassing recipe for how to make sure it doesn’t screw up a war ever again. It took them:

• 16 months
• Over 270 witnesses and interviewees
  
• 629 pages, including appendices
• 21 pages for the table of contents alone
• 223 instances of the word “fail”, “failure”, “failed” etc
• 286 instances of the word “flaw” or “flawed”
• 14 key recommendations for reform of the army and executive branch

But the press and public are calling the report a sell-out. Why? Because the only thing they want to know is: whose fault was it that so many soldiers died in Lebanon for nothing? Or more specifically, will the person whose fault everyone believes it was, Ehud Olmert, now at last quit? And since he has no intention of doing so, it’s Winograd’s fault for not giving him the push.

There is a Russian saying: kto vinovat i shto dyelat’? — “Who is to blame and what is to be done?” Israelis, being impatient people, only want to know who’s to blame; to hell with what’s to be done, because in a few months time the government will change again and nobody will do it anyway. Which is why, as I wrote in this week’s piece on it, the Winograd report will probably sink into obscurity like all its worthy predecessors.

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!”

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.