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

There were not as many people as I expected at Mahmoud Darwish’s funeral today in Ramallah. My uneducated guess is not much more than 10,000, and some of the friends I was with thought even fewer.

It was rather low-key, too. A handful of people had tears in their eyes, but for the most part the air was a curious mix of sombre and festive.

I was glad I’d been to see his last public recital a few weeks earlier. Anything else I could say is superfluous, so here are some pictures. (Anyone who wants to use them is welcome, but please credit me.)

It started off at the Muqata’a, the presidential compound in Ramallah, where Darwish’s body had been flown in from Amman. Only senior officials, diplomats and the press were allowed in, and only with prior coordination. We had no coordination and my friends weren’t even press. We got in anyway. You just keep pushing gently until the security guards get tired of blocking you.

After some speeches, his coffin was carried out and loaded on to a pickup truck.

The cortege left, followed by a few mourners, including this boy on his father’s shoulders.

Down by the Palace of Culture (a huge conference centre at the other end of town), the Palestinian scouts waited to form an honour guard.

Others carried a Palestinian flag about 50 yards long.

Boys played hide-and-seek under it.

The cortege arrived.

Darwish was buried. There was a 21-gun salute. (Seven guns, three times. Rather ragged.)

And everyone went home. As we left we saw a squad of the elite presidential guard jogging up the road singing marching songs in Arabic to the tune of “I don’t know but I’ve been told…” Seems the American security training is having an effect.

Home after a long day in Ramallah interviewing Fatah people about whether their party can ever get it together. It’s like listening to Marxist student politics (which, after all, is what Fatah started out as). Long rants about local committees, district committees, regional committees, ad hoc committees, sub-committees; the central committee, the higher committee, the revolutionary council; protocols, rules and constitutions; agendas both hidden and explicit; struggle, unity, fawda (chaos) and fitna (strife); the cadres, the party, the movement, and the national interest, which someone is always either pursuing or undermining, and often both at once.

During a break in the schedule I paid my first visit to Yasser Arafat’s new mausoleum, completed last autumn (above). It’s an austere, brilliant pearl incongruously plopped in the middle of the ramshackle Muqata complex, the presidential headquarters: a cube-shaped mausoleum at the end of a long plaza, with mosque off to one side. The whole thing is dressed in pale Jerusalem stone, which makes it impossible to look at in sunlight without getting an instant headache.

Inside we are spared a Lenin-like mummy and squadrons of goose-stepping troops. Instead a single soldier standing astride two rifles - presumably one for him and one for Abu Ammar, should he ever be resurrected - guards the tomb itself, which is inscribed with Abu Ammar’s dates of birth and “martyrdom”. [Update June 18th: a reader writes: "There are normally two guards (in equally ill-fitting suits) standing over Arafat’s grave. You must have caught one on a pee-break." ] In Palestine a martyr is anyone whose death, even if it was by natural causes, is linked with the struggle, though in Arafat’s case maybe it’s a nod to the popular conspiracy theory that the Mossad had him infected with HIV.

This evening I got back to Jerusalem, went to dinner, and came home to find that someone had, with a cardboard head and pair of arms, transformed the letterbox outside my building into a robot.

In Jerusalem any odd behaviour can usually be explained by a nearby festival belonging to one or another religion. But I’ve run through all the possible Christian, Jewish and Muslim dates and come up with nothing.

Just got in from the swish opening reception in Bethlehem for the Palestine Investment Conference. As Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, said, “We are throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” Well, a lot of those who turned up seemed to be not foreign investors but expatriate Palestinians who took advantage of a brief moment of Israeli openness to get a permit to visit home. Still, that’s a party by anyone’s standards.

I spent a bit of the previous afternoon with one of the real investors, the CEO of Qatari Diar, which plans to co-build Rawabi, a new Palestinian town for 40,000 people on a hillside about 15 minutes drive north of Ramallah. I didn’t think there were any hills in the West Bank that hadn’t been conquered by either Palestinians or settlers, but there we were, scrambling over the stones while the Qataris’ Palestinian business partner described the layout and gushed over the breathtaking views (you could even see the towers of Tel Aviv silhouetted in the sunset). I and another journalist recorded the CEO talking about how important it was to him to invest “with our brothers in Palestine” and saying that the symbolism mattered more than the profits.

As we talked to him a minion walked up and handed us each little boxes with “Balenciaga” and the Qatari Diar logo embossed on them. We fingered them nervously. Our employers both have policies about accepting gifts, but you don’t offend a senior Gulf businessman who is probably related to the royal family just after you’ve met him.

The interviews over, we walked back to the cars parked on the other side of the hill, where we discovered that one of the Palestinians had left his SUV in neutral and it had rolled 50 metres down into the ravine, where it lay with its windscreen wipers waving in a forlorn distress signal. The owner seemed remarkably sanguine. My colleague backed his car out gingerly.

Back on the road, we opened the little boxes. Turned out we needn’t have worried. Qatari Diar may be willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on its Palestinian brethren, but when it comes to journalists it makes do with the cheapest possible fake-leather notebook (and rightly so). Balenciaga might not be too happy, though.

A lettuce festival. Only in Palestine.

A few weeks ago left-wing protestors went around Tel Aviv putting up these mock leaflets from the Israeli electric company, which announce power stoppages “because the headquarters of an army that harms citizens in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and carries out war crimes is operating in your city”, and inform the residents that “for humanitarian reasons the stoppages will not be total, leaving you the decision on whether to distribute the allocated supplies to hospitals, heating systems, sewage or private homes.”

It hit home a little harder this week, when large parts of Gaza were plunged into darkness after Israel suspended fuel supplies for the power station. And as I lay in bed this morning summoning up the strength to dash across the frozen floor and switch on the heating, I reflected on the story I wrote yesterday about the outages and realised how extraordinarily little electricity Gaza actually uses.

Assuming 1.4m people live in Gaza (some say 1.5m), and that its peak wintertime electricity consumption — ie, when Israel isn’t cutting off the fuel — is 250MW (UN figures, though 240MW has also been reported), then that’s 180W per person, or a couple of light bulbs. If they used all their electricity on standard 2kW electric heaters, there would be one heater per 11 people.

Israel’s peak demand, which it has been hitting (Hebrew) thanks to the cold snap in recent days, is around 10,000MW, or 1.5kW per person, over eight times as much as Gaza’s.

Remarkably, that’s a higher rate than Britain, which uses something over 62,000MW in winter, or only a little over 1kW per capita (maybe the Brits use more natural gas). In the US, needless to say, the peak rate is well over 2kW per capita.

Al Gore — you got some visiting to do. Maybe you should recommend Islamism to the world as a way to cut carbon emissions.

Or in the local language, court acquits Palestinian.

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.