fugitive peace

Each day this week I’ll be putting up my post from the correspondent’s diary on The Economist’s website. The events described took place two weeks ago. The story I published based on that reporting is here.

Nablus finds itself squeezed on all sides

“RAMADAN kareem” is the traditional greeting during the Muslim holy month. “Ramadan k…” begins my Palestinian fixer when I pick her up this morning, but what follows is a choice Arabic curse that would cause another Danish-cartoon-style uproar if I printed it here.

She hates Ramadan, with its total fasting from dawn-to-dusk. Her feet hurt, her joints hurt, her children whine, people are irritable, everything shuts early, vast numbers of guests must be fed at the evening iftar meal. “I fast in order to work up more anger at the Israeli occupation,” she says, perhaps only half in jest. But she spends the rest of the day venting spleen in equal measure at racist Israelis, hypocritical Muslims, backward Arabs and the whole stinking world in general.

I have asked her to set up a West Bank Grand Tour. Since Hamas defeated Fatah’s forces in Gaza in a bloody showdown in June, the American-Israeli-Fatah plan has been to try to defeat Hamas by making Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, more popular.

The method: strangle Gaza’s economy, make life better in the West Bank, and hold peace talks with Mr Abbas. The people of Gaza will suffer—are suffering—but that is the price the civilised world has decreed they must pay for finding themselves trapped in the middle of a factional bust-up. I want to know how well it’s working.

Our first stop is Nablus. Nestled in a majestic valley, it’s one of the most picturesque Palestinian cities. And one of the poorest. It is known both for its traders and for its terrorists (from both Hamas and Fatah), and the Israeli checkpoints that have gone up around it since the intifada have effectively closed off the rest of the West Bank to many of its businesses, shrivelling its economy. Much of the male population is forbidden from leaving at all.

We stop in at a cardboard packaging company, now running at 40% of its pre-intifada capacity. The manager tells me he thinks Israel’s plan is to make life in Gaza better, not worse, so that Palestinians will leave the West Bank and go live in the tiny, overcrowded coastal strip.

I must look sceptical. “You find this strange?” he asks. He gives his chair a shove and rolls back towards the window. Red-roofed Jewish settlements are perched on the hilltops all around, boxing Nablus in, causing a shortage of housing land. He gestures at them. “These people are not leaving. They are investing. They are here to stay. It’s very difficult to tell them to go back to the 1967 border; that’s become history now.”

I can see why he thinks so. Since the Gaza pullout in 2005, the Israeli government has managed to evacuate one West Bank settlement outpost of just nine houses—to terrific settler resistance—while several other new ones have gone up. Israeli governing coalitions are unstable by nature and getting more so; in the face of the settlers’ single-mindedness, they are virtually impotent.

We head on and meet two “Islamists”, as Hamas members have started calling themselves since the Palestinian Authority (PA) began arresting them—as if it might save them. They are of a type I have come to expect: jolly, roly-poly men with neatly trimmed beards. The first looks so much like a rabbi that I glance at the crown of his head looking for the black skullcap.

His flat overlooks one of Nablus’s tough, volatile refugee camps, a maze of tightly-packed slum housing. He takes me upstairs to show me the empty flats above, where Israeli soldiers periodically break in to get a better shot at wanted militants. He says the soldiers have written warnings on the doors, but the childish Hebrew scrawl—“Please, there are no living here”—with misshapen letters curling into their Arabic equivalents, is clearly the hand of a local.

The second Islamist, who got out of Israeli custody only to be arrested by the Palestinians, describes how a fellow prisoner was blindfolded and made to kneel with his hands tied. When he subsided on to his haunches from exhaustion, they hit him. I mention that it sounds like the way Israeli jailers commonly treated Palestinians until the courts banned the practice. “No,” my interviewee says. “Worse than the Israelis.”

On Friday a colleague and I visited Bil’in, a Palestinian village that has become famous for its weekly protests against the anti-terror fence/separation barrier/apartheid wall. (NB: when I learn Javascript, I’ll add a “delete as appropriate” feature so you can read the version of this blog that corresponds to your politics.) This week the villagers were celebrating an Israeli High Court decision to reroute the barrier, restoring to the village about half of the farmland that the existing route cuts off.

By the time we arrived the festivities had ended so the village could gear up for a wedding celebration, and handfuls of foreign sympathisers were loitering around trying to hitch rides back home. We drove out to the site of the protests next to the fence itself, where the ground is littered with the packaging from tear gas grenades.

As we stood taking pictures we heard a gunshot, and a minute later another. A group of boys in the distance had evidently strayed too near to another part of the fence, and the soldiers on the other side were firing warning shots and gunning the engine of their jeep. We decided not to make them any more jumpy by hanging around too close to the fence ourselves, and started driving back.

On the way I stopped the car to take a leak in an olive grove. From there I could hear the boys and the soldiers cursing each other in a fluid mix of Hebrew and Arabic. We walked closer, and it became clear that this was part of an established and mutually enjoyed tradition:

Boy: Fuck your sister!
Soldier: Your sister is a whore!
Boy: Your mother and your sister are whores!
Soldiers: [uproarious laughter]
Boy, mockingly: Where is Sharon? Sharon is dead!!
Soldier: [more laughter] You’re not a man!

That was true. The kids were barely into their teens, but they were hurling stones and insults at the troops with an air of long practice. From time to time a stone would hit the fence with a clang, which only seemed to amuse the soldiers even more. As we got closer the boys welcomed us in Hebrew; then, when we replied in Arabic, began badgering us to take pictures of them and give them money. One of them showed us the scab of what he said was a rubber bullet wound on the back of his head. It could have been, though his claim that it had been inflicted earlier that afternoon was clearly preposterous.

We took the pictures, but held back the money, citing as an excuse our wish to maintain the purity of the muqawame, the resistance. They pressed spent rubber bullets and a live round used for firing them (the cartridge of an ordinary round but without a bullet in the tip) into our hands as souvenirs. As we took our leave they returned to yelling and launching stones from their slingshots, though the army jeep had by now retreated well out of range…