fugitive peace

Just back from two very busy weeks in the US, hence my lack of recent posts. I have to limit what I can post for now about my trip to Washington, since a piece is due in The Economist about the Annapolis summit and I can’t pre-empt it.

Not that I have a big scoop or something. Both in Washington, and in my interviews in Jerusalem and Ramallah in the couple of days since returning, I’ve found nobody who knows what the substance of the summit will be, when it will take place or even whether it will happen at all. A Palestinian official I saw today confirmed what Abu Alaa, the chief negotiator, said today in a press conference: they want a timeline for a peace accord to be announced at Annapolis. Israel opposes this, and in months of talks the two sides have come no closer on it.

Does Annapolis really matter? What’s the criterion for success? What if it doesn’t succeed, or doesn’t happen at all? The answers depend on the politics of whoever you’re talking to. Broadly speaking, the further to the left/pro-Palestinian people are, the more they think the summit matters and less likely they think it is to succeed. On the right/pro-Israel branch, they think the summit could yield something but its importance has been exaggerated anyway. Those happy few who are most enthusiastic about the summit are therefore in the political centre, at the equilibrium between optimism and importance. It’s just like the equilibrium of supply and demand.

What has this got to do with the French buying Jerusalem? Oh, nothing. It’s just that I returned to find the former site of the Israeli foreign ministry surrounded by billboards (above) advertising a new luxury housing complex. Old-time Jerusalemites have long been griping about how property prices are being driven up by the influx of French buyers - some of them immigrants, some merely investing for a rainy day - but this is the first time I’ve seen houses advertised directly at the French market.

Oddly, the Hebrew and English versions promise “a new lifestyle culture” while the French version offers “a new life and culture”. I’m not sure if that is just a bad translation, or a hint that the targets are existing Hebrew- and English-speaking Israelis but new French immigrants.

Just back from seeing “Jerusalem - The East Side Story”, which was being screened to a selection of Ramallah’s great and good, among them Rafiq Husseini, Mahmoud Abbas’s chief of staff. Unlike “West Bank Story“, an Oscar-winning musical comedy about rival Israeli and Palestinian falafel families, this is a worthy but relentless litany of the injustices Israel has visited on the Palestinians of East Jerusalem in its attempts to create a unified Jewish capital.

The film is largely (and tragically) accurate, but like most propaganda in this conflict, makes too few nods to the other side’s narrative to win over many viewers who don’t already sympathise with its message. For 70 minutes the narrator pummels us in the doom-laden tone that wildlife presenters usually reserve for the moment when a nestful of cute goslings is about to be devoured by a feral cat. You come out wanting to slit your veins, or preferably the narrator’s. Still, it has two good moments.

One is an interview with Husseini’s boss, the president of Palestine, recounting one of his favourite to-camera stories: how he showed the map of Israel’s separation barrier to George Bush in 2003. According to Abbas (though it varies slightly with each telling), Bush was furious and told Dick Cheney, “this is not a state”. Abbas looks proud and self-satisfied. The audience, until then respectfully transfixed, started laughing and jeering. They jeered even more when Bush appeared, awkwardly telling the press, “This wall is… uh… a problem.” I wished I could have seen Husseini’s face at that point.

The second is of an elderly Palestinian woman, with title deeds and old photos in hand, coming to see the house in West Jerusalem that she fled as a child. The camera follows her as a group of Israelis strolls past. She watches them recede, then sums up the whole conflict as well and as succinctly as anyone I’ve ever heard. “We live in fantasy,” she sighs, “and they live in denial.”