fugitive peace

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.

For the crowd that filled Rabin Square in Tel Aviv tonight (Saturday night) for the annual memorial ceremony, there was what a friend of mine described as “a surrealistic irony, like something out of a Greek tragedy”: on Sunday, the actual anniversary of Rabin’s death, his assassin, Yigal Amir, will watch as his newborn son is circumcised.

Rabin’s son Yuval, who this year spoke at the ceremony for the first time, remarked that one of the names for the circumcision ceremony in Hebrew is the Covenant of Isaac, or Brit Yitzhak, since Abraham’s son Isaac was the first Jewish male to get snipped on the prescribed eighth day after his birth. Arranging for a man to perform a Brit Yitzhak on the anniversary of his murdering another Yitzhak sounds like the kind of nasty joke dreamed up by a deity who has had a particularly tiresome day.

Indeed, for the Israeli religious right this will probably pass into legend as a stroke of divine justice. Luckily for the people in the square, not too many looked like they believed in divine justice. Though Rabin’s death is sometimes compared to JFK’s in terms of the national trauma, the mourning of it, at least nowadays, is a strictly partisan affair, observed mainly on the secular left and centre. By my reckoning, a good one-third of the people were wearing the blue shirts of the Labour youth movement. Most of them would have been too young to remember the day he was killed.

There were no big names from parties to the right of Rabin’s Labour party (unlike two years ago, when Tsipi Livni, then in the Likud, caused quite a buzz by giving a speech). On the contrary, there were several not-so-veiled references to the fact that though Yigal Amir is in jail, nobody has punished those in the settler movement and the Likud who incited against Rabin; his son noted that “one finger pulled the trigger, but many hands brought it there”.

I confess that tears welled up a couple of times. One was during Yuval Rabin’s eulogy for his father, which was tough and moving. The other was the minute’s silence, when 150,000 (according to the organisers) yakking, jabbering Israelis suddenly went into a hush. You could have heard a mobile phone ring all the way across the square; I just prayed it wouldn’t be mine.

But then I remembered Barbara Plett, a BBC journalist who admitted to crying at the pathos of the moment when the helicopter carrying Yasser Arafat on his last journey to a Paris hospital lifted off from the presidential compound in Ramallah. She was roasted by pro-Israel media watchdogs such as HonestReporting: “Another BBC Mideast reporter displays open attachment to one side of the conflict”. Although her report was in the BBC’s “From our own correspondent” programme, which is meant to be a personal view — rather like this blog — the BBC partly upheld a complaint against her. She was transferred to Pakistan not long afterwards. When I started this blog, though it’s separate from The Economist, my editor warned me to “remember Barbara Plett”.

So should I be admitting that my eyes got damp for Rabin? They say Karachi’s quite nice this time of year. Somehow, though, I don’t think HonestReporting will jump on my “open attachment to one side of the conflict” for this one. Palestinian media groups might, but they seem to have less interest in hunting down such infractions, or maybe just fewer resources, and certainly less clout (I can’t immediately recall a case of a journalist being drummed out of her job for being too pro-Israel).

Nor do I think it’s somehow more legitimate for a journalist to shed tears over Rabin than over Arafat. Rabin may have made a greater leap towards peace than any Israeli leader before or since, but a lot of Palestinians remember him chiefly as the man who talked peace while letting the settlements grow faster than ever (as the book Lords of the Land, which I reviewed recently, points out, making it all the more ironic that the settlers hated him so). In political terms, settlement-building is to Palestinians what terrorist attacks are to Israelis: the deal-breaker, the actions that belie the other side’s claim to want peace. Arafat, at least before the second intifada, was a bit like Rabin, trying but failing to stop the extremist forces in his society. They both got the Nobel.

But in any case, what moved me, like Barbara Plett, wasn’t the memory of the man himself, but the emotion of the moment. Surely that’s legitimate for anyone.

All of us here in Jerusalem are twiddling our thumbs waiting for the Annapolis summit to happen — or not — so here’s an update on progress.

I’ve been hearing off-the-record hints from since mid-September that the meeting might not be in November as planned, but this State Department press conference two weeks ago was the first official acknowledgement I’ve seen that it’s “either November or December” — though that was the deputy spokesman, Tom Casey, and perhaps he just hadn’t been properly induced into the current spin; I haven’t noticed it elsewhere.

But the pressure is rising. This week we’ve learned that Rice won’t be bringing invitations or a firm date with her when she comes to the region this weekend. The Palestinian chief negotiator, Ahmed Qurei, insisted that the Israelis agree to a deadline for negotiations, else no dice. Abbas told al-Hayat al-Jadidah that he wants the deal done in six months [Arabic] (thanks to The Israel Project for the translation), while Olmert’s aides tell Ha’aretz that for all his refusal to set a deadline, the Israeli PM would like to see the deal concluded within a year and that the obstacle isn’t Abbas, but that annoying Mr Qurei, making all sorts of tiresome demands. Ha’aretz also claims that the Palestinians are calling for the implementation to be completed within six months, which I think must be an error.

(I forgot, by the way, to crow smugly at having published the rumours that Qurei was taking over as chief negotiator from Sa’eb Erekat long before they were confirmed. There. I’ve crowed. It’s the small pleasures that get us through the day.)

Meanwhile, even though the talks on the core issues of final status are stuck, the signs are that the two sides are trying to carry out confidence-building measures on the ground — but not very effectively. Facing US pressure to evacuate outposts, Ehud Barak has been in talks with settler leaders about removing some of them voluntarily, but these have gotten bogged down and now Barak says no outposts will be gone before year’s end. Palestinian confidence-building, meanwhile, consisted of deploying 300 police to Nablus today, supposedly as part of a transfer of security authority from Israel to the PA. But the question is whether this will be more than symbolic: the Israeli army will still stay in control, at least at night.

Meanwhile, dissident Palestinian factions including Hamas and the PFLP decided to postpone their conference in Damascus, slated for next week, so that it can be an anti-Annapolis coinciding with the summit. They’d better have flexible hotel reservations.

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.