fugitive peace

It’s official. They’ve failed. A poll today from Khalil Shikaki’s polling outfit, PSR, says that Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh would beat Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas in a Palestinian presidential election.

This is the same Hamas that America, Europe and Israel have been variously boycotting, bombing and generally trying to exterminate for the past two years. The Annapolis peace process was meant to make Abbas popular; the economic stranglehold on Gaza was supposed to make Hamas hated. Failed, failed, failed.

Maybe this is why Olmert has said not once but twice this month that he wants to talk to Syria. Whenever the “Palestinian track” looks like it’s on the rocks, Israel revives the idea of peace talks with the one neighbouring country that it has had almost no actual friction with since 1973.

Could Olmert be serious this time? For a while this week I thought so. This month, Israel’s security services gave the cabinet their annual intelligence estimate. According to the reports, the Mossad and military intelligence agree that if America and Israel offer Syria a good enough deal, it would be ready to cut ties with the people Israel and America don’t like — Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran.

Why this is interesting is because the Mossad used to think otherwise. Perhaps it now believes that after Israel’s mysterious air strike on Syria in September, and after the assassination of Hizbullah’s man Imad Mughniyeh there last month — which Israel denies, but everyone assumes it did — the Syrians are now more scared and readier to talk. Last month Israel seemed to make use of that momentum by warning Damascus that if Hizbullah attacks Israel again, Israel will strike Syria.

In other words, with your eyes half-closed it could look like Israel is threatening Syria with consequences for bad behaviour while offering it a carrot for good behaviour — trying to lower Syria’s price.

And if you really read into the subtle nuances, Olmert seems to be lowering Israel’s price. Alon Liel, an Israeli diplomat who held back-channel talks with a Syrian expat from 2004 to 2006 (and who leaps on any sign of an Israeli-Syrian thaw), pointed out to me that Olmert has floated Syria talks about 10 or 15 times in the past 10 months. Often, he’s added the condition that Syria break its “Axis of Evil” ties first. But the last couple of times he’s said that negotiations could “lead to” Syria’s breaking those ties, a hint that he’s not so concerned about the preconditions any more.

The trouble is, a lot of senior Israelis are sceptical that Syria will simply turn its back on its old allies even if it gets back the Golan Heights and peace with Israel in return.

And outside Israel there’s even more scepticism. Recently various Western high-ups have been saying how disappointed they are with Syria. We heard it from a senior British official who came to Jerusalem last week; Angela Merkel said it today (German); Nicolas Sarkozy said it in December; George Bush says it every Monday and Thursday. Syria policy, Josh Landis says, is “the last red meat for the ‘freedom agenda’ crowd in the Republican Party” and is run by the last remaining neocons in the administration.

And Olmert, even if he wants to, can’t go against the American administration.

So don’t expect the talk of peace with Syria to come true. Take it, instead, as a sign of just how hopeless the Annapolis process has truly become.

“Hello? Is that Gideon Lichfield?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Good morning. This is Helena Bonham-Carter.”

Well, not Helena, as it soon became clear, but her mother, Elena, who had got my number from a mutual acquaintance and wanted to know whether Jerusalem was safe to visit after last week’s attack at a yeshiva that killed eight people. For a moment I weighed up whether the blood of the mother of one of the world’s most famous actresses would be on my hands. Then I shrugged and said, “of course it’s safe.”

She and assorted relatives showed up this week for a ceremony at Yad Vashem in honour of her father, Eduardo Propper de Callejón, a Spanish diplomat stationed in Paris who issued an estimated 1,500 Spanish visas in the summer of 1940 to help French Jews escape the approaching Nazis. Having disobeyed foreign ministry instructions, he was demoted and lived out the rest of his career in minor posts, dying in 1972. However, the visa registry from his time in Paris went missing and people whom he had saved proved hard to trace. Not until last year did his children manage to gather enough evidence to satisfy the examiners of Yad Vashem that he merited “Righteous Among the Nations” status.

It was a sweet ceremony in the gardens of Yad Vashem, attended by a flush of aristocratic-looking, besuited Spaniards and various branches of the Propper family (which now lives in five countries, including Israel). It was marred only by the hopeless inability of Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev, to pronounce the honoured man’s name; he stumbled and hesitated and finally came out not with “Ca-ye-khon” but “Cal-khe-yon”. This, coming after his speech about the 22,000-odd other “righteous gentiles” honoured at Yad Vashem, left the distinct impression that he was simply too busy to devote time to any of them.

I met Badri Patarkatsishvili, who mysteriously died today in Surrey, in 2002. He had decided to grant me and a journalist from the Financial Times his first interview in a year and a half. We went to his house in Tbilisi, an enormous palace on a hill, where were shown into the garden—or rather gardens; there were several of them lumped together, each in a different style (Japanese, tropical, English country, and so on). I think we picked a spot under a gazebo, and sat waiting for Patarkatsishvili, who duly arrived in a golf buggy which he manoeuvred gingerly in between the bushes.

He talked a lot about the need to mend relations with Russia (this was before the Rose Revolution, when Eduard Shevardnadze was still in power, but things had already deteriorated badly), and how to promote Georgian economic development, hinting that he was the ideal person for foreign investors to deal with if they wanted to do business in Georgia.

I’ve posted the (unedited) interview notes here, but unfortunately they don’t give many clues as to why he was killed, if indeed he was killed. He was a close ally of Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who fled the country after a showdown with Vladimir Putin. When we met him he had already decided Russia was too hot for him too and had moved to Georgia. But in Georgia he stood against Mikheil Saakashvili for president, was under investigation for plotting to overthrow the government, and reportedly left in November to spend time at his homes in Israel and England. One of the people who worked for him was Andrei Lugovoy, the man Britain accuses of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB man who was poisoned with polonium-210 in London. Lugovoy, however, would now appear to be under the protection of the Kremlin, which accuses Berezovsky of having Litvinenko killed to besmirch Putin.

Confused? What it adds up to is that, like a lot of people who have suddenly disappeared from the Russian scene, Patarkatsishvili had no shortage of enemies, and so his death will probably remain a mystery. Sergei Dorenko, a former TV journalist who worked for Berezovsky’s television channel, ORT, before it was shut down, has posted some recollections of him (Russian). He also says that a friend of his spoke to Patarkatsishvili yesterday at 7pm London time, and he was full of beans. By 11pm he was dead.

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.

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.

This from today’s email inbox:

From: MORGANTINI Luisa
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 12:26 PM
Subject: P/R : 23 Palestinians killed, 55 blessed: where is the EU strong condemnation?

PRESS RELEASE
BY LUISA MORGANTINI
VICEPRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

23 Palestinians killed, 55 blessed inside gaza by IDF:
where is the EU strong condemnation of these murders?

Strasbourg , 17^th January
“23 Palestinians killed and other 55 blessed, children, women and men, by Israeli raids in only two days: where is the EU strong condemnation of these murders?” -asked Luisa Morgantini, Vice President of the European Parliament expressing a deep concern regarding the escalation of violence of these days in Palestine and Israel.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)

It had never really occurred to me to wonder whether questions of halakha, Jewish law, might hamper human-rights work. OK, driving to a protest on the sabbath is clearly out. But leave it to Rabbis for Human Rights to agonise about the conundrum that the shmita, or sabbatical year — which we are in now, when Jews may not farm their land — creates for a God-fearing Jew who wants to show solidarity with Palestinian farmers harvesting their olive crop. This came in today from their mailing list. I rather like the halakhically dubious but morally bracing conclusion:

Up until this point we have not really answered the question of how we, as a rabbinic organization, are participating in agricultural work in the Sabbatical Year. For those who accept the rabbinical permit to “sell” one’s land, there is no problem harvesting on land which is not ours and given the fact that we will not be profiting financially. Even the permit, however, stipulates that planting must be done by non-Jews because this is seen as an activity prohibited by the Torah and not just by the rabbis. We can certainly be present to guard and even digging the holes is permitted. Maimonedes says that when we see a non Jew doing the work that we are forbidden to do during the Sabbatical Year we should offer words of encouragement and wish that their efforts be successful. I think that, when we are talking about land that has laid fallow for all too many years because of settler violence and difficulties of access, the Land has had her rest and now is the time for justice.

(More pictures here)

Mostly, the Africans are invisible. You catch a glimpse of dark faces like a hallucination when the kitchen door swings open in just about any of Tel Aviv’s glitzy restaurants and bars, but for all the diners know they are teleported to work, or flown in specially from Sudan each evening.

That’s because most of the diners, like me until last night, have never heard of Levanda street. I stood on Levanda for at least half an hour, and almost everyone who passed by was either African or lost.

The street begins next to Tel Aviv’s central bus station, which pumps passengers in and out 24 hours a day, and runs between workshops and low-rise housing to where the shiny office towers of the business district rear up. Those Africans who have found paying work rent rooms. Those who haven’t are in the basement of the last house on Levanda.

I went with a handful of young Israeli soldiers. Some of them had been in the south the day before, near the Ketsiot prison where Africans who sneak across the porous border with Egypt are held while the UNHCR processes them. They had bumped into a gaggle of Ivorians who, through a bureaucratic snafu, had been released into the empty desert. The Ivorians had heard of this place in Tel Aviv that an NGO had rented as a shelter for migrants. The soldiers arranged for them to be picked up, and then decided to bring them some food.

2,000-odd Africans entered Israel last year, a growing tide encouraged by the news that Israeli soldiers, unlike their counterparts in most of north Africa, don’t shoot migrants (and even help them). Some are refugees from wars and genocide, and some just want a better life.

The ones from Cote d’Ivoire have one of the more uncertain futures. Most of them – so they say, at least – fled the fighting that broke out after a rebellion against Laurent Gbagbo, the president, in 2002. On the recommendation of UNHCR, people from war zones like Darfur get automatic “temporary protection” from the Israeli government, which means the right to stay and work until the UN deems it safe to go back. Until recently, that included Ivorians. But the 11 who arrived at Levanda street this week were among the last batch who might be eligible. The civil war was officially declared over in March, and refugees will now have to prove their case for protection, though they may have left Cote d’Ivoire two or three years ago and have no idea what is going on there.

The 11 new arrivals were mostly young men who said they had been rebels in the war. They were friendly, though still a little annoyed at having been dumped in the desert. An argument broke out between a couple of them about whether talking to journalists was likely to improve their chances of asylum. Then they took us inside.

It’s a small warren of rooms, which judging by the scraps of posters used to be a nightclub. At their estimate, which looked about right, around 100 people are packed in to it. They’ve run out of sleeping space, so some are sleeping outside, in temperatures that have fallen close to freezing. Bags, clothes, mattresses and cooking pots take up almost all the dry floor space. What was once shelving improvises as bunk-beds. They could sleep in the bathrooms if they weren’t inch-deep in diluted urine. A couple of broken, shit-filled toilets are the alternative to relieving themselves outside. Well-wishers have brought some bits and pieces of kitchen equipment, utensils and food. A few, though, clearly have some money, whether sent by relatives, borrowed, earned or stolen; there are a few mobile phones and even the odd MP3 player.

Their plight illustrates how slow the refugee rumour mill is to catch up with reality. When just a few dozens or hundreds were trickling across each year, it was easy for Israel to give them a much better life than they could have elsewhere. “Would you have come if you knew what the conditions were like?” I asked one of them who had been designated as the spokesman. “Not at all,” he said.

The space is divided by nationality: Ivorians in one section, Eritreans in the next. The Eritreans are usually classified by the UNHCR as economic migrants, and have little chance of staying permanently.

Scanning a list of names of people awaiting their UN documents I came across a young Eritrean geography graduate called Aaron. He had excellent English, an easy, ironic smile, and cynical sense of humour. When I asked why he had come to Israel, he gave me such a look that I apologised for asking a stupid question. “No, it’s not stupid,” he said, and looked around us at the pile of blankets and mattresses. “I was just, you know [ironic smile] looking for a better life.” After graduating, he had few job prospects and faced getting drafted into the army. “But I like my freedom. I was born free and I intend to stay free the rest of my life.”

I told him if that George Bush heard him, he would probably get an American passport on the spot. He laughed loud and ironically, declined to be photographed, and then walked out of the shelter to the bus station. A relative from Eritrea had contacted him, asking him to meet yet another new arrival and bring him back to the shelter. Aaron was one of the ones with a phone.

I took his number. He felt like someone I could have met nursing a lazy afternoon drink in any of Tel Aviv’s cafes. I’d like to think he soon will be. I doubt it, though.

One of the great things about working for a weekly is that I can usually avoid the press conferences, photo-ops, stake-outs and other feeding frenzies required of the purveyors of instant news. With Bush coming I’m especially glad. Here are some edited highlights from the schedule sent to the media (my emphasis added):

Tomorrow:

11:55 – Official reception at Ben-Gurion International Airport… entry via Terminal 1 by 09:00… MBU’s [ie, mobile broadcast units] to enter… by 07:00;

Thursday:

Meeting and Press Conference of the Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas with President of the United States of American (sic), George W. Bush… Press conference will begin at 11:30 a.m… All Press MUST arrive at the Press Gathering Point BEFORE 06.30.

Friday:

08:10-09:40 – Visit Yad Vashem…. Pool members at PM’s Jerusalem Office by 06:00

Not that the rest of us are going to have it easy. Jerusalem traffic has already slowed to about half its usual speed. Military choppers keep buzzing overhead in both Jerusalem and Ramallah. There are more guns around than at an NRA convention. People are avoiding making appointments for the next couple of days. Some who commute between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are finding places to stay overnight so they don’t have to make the trip. Some offices in Jerusalem have given their employees the time off; one friend who works for an international agency has been told to stay at home because of “security concerns”, though it’s not clear whether they’re afraid their employees will get caught up in a assassination attempt or run over by a speeding presidential limousine.

This had better be good.

Or in the local language, court acquits Palestinian.