fugitive peace

The Annapolis doomsday machine is now running at full tilt on the blogosphere: mainstream right-wing blogs like Michelle Malkin and Israpundit are issuing warnings about what a disaster it will be for Israel, while Time magazine’s Middle East blog asks whether the meeting will achieve anything.

I think it’s again fair to ask whether it will even happen. Ehud Olmert has been insisting that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition to the final-status talks that are to take place after Annapolis. The Palestinians are refusing.

That might seem silly; after all, the whole point of the two-state solution is that Israel will be a Jewish state and Palestine will be a Palestinian state. However, recognising Israel as a Jewish state means giving up the principle of the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel proper, since if all the refugees came back Jews would become a minority in Israel. The Palestinians know full well they will have to give this up anyway; the best they can hope for is that Israel agree to let in a certain number of refugees each year, as proposed in the Geneva Initiative. But this is meant to be part of the give-and-take of the final-status negotiations. Israel is trying to make the Palestinians concede it in advance.

Why? Probably simply because it can. As I described in my last post, a fortnight ago Abu Mazen caved in on his demand that the Annapolis meeting include a declaration pinning down the basics of the final-status agreement and a firm, six-month deadline for completing final-status talks. All he got in return was a non-committal agreement from Olmert to try to finish the talks within a year. In doing so he showed his weakness. Olmert, ever mindful of right-wingers in his coalition threatening to scuttle the talks, took advantage of this to try to shore himself up politically, as well as improve his own bargaining position before the talks begin.

Did he do this with American approval? I doubt it. Now, however, he can’t back down even if he wants to. Avigdor Lieberman, whose Yisrael Beiteinu party is the right-wing linchpin in the coalition, is playing political one-upmanship on the prime minister by trying to get Olmert’s pre-condition voted on in the cabinet and possibly passed as a law. The latter would be pretty easy. Some liberal Israeli commentators are tearing their hair out at Olmert’s demand — “like denying the legitimacy of our own national existence,” wrote Yoel Marcus in Ha’aretz — but very few Israeli politicians would dare to refuse to support it.

This, I surmise, is why we still have no fixed date or invitations for Annapolis, two weeks before it’s supposed to take place. And Abu Mazen must be facing the dilemma of his lifetime. He fears that if he refuses Olmert’s pre-condition, the US will pull the rug out from under his feet; but that if he accepts it, the entire Arab world will brand him a traitor.

After being miles apart for months, the Israeli and Palestinian positions suddenly seemed to converge last week: the goal of Annapolis will not be to nail down prior commitments about final-status (borders, Jerusalem, etc) but to get negotiations moving again and to relaunch the “road map” with its on-the-ground commitments from both sides (fighting terrorism, stopping settlement-building). It will be what Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki recently described (pdf) as the “Launching Pad” option.

What triggered this change is still a bit of a mystery to me, but the magic moment seems to have been Olmert’s speech to the Saban Forum last week, when he said he wanted to finish up final-status talks by the time Bush leaves office a year from now. The Palestinians, who had been pounding on about how they would not go to Annapolis without commitments to the substantive issues and to a deadline for completing final-status talks, suddenly caved in completely. “The American, Israeli and Palestinian sides are all insistent that we reach an end before the end of Bush’s term in office, and that is what we wish,” Abbas said.

Why? Was Olmert’s vague aspiration — not a commitment — to a one-year deadline really enough for Abbas? Surely not. More likely, Abbas simply feared being painted by Israel and the US as a rejectionist if he held out any longer.

Either way, it was a move of genius on Olmert’s part, for two reasons. He neutralised the Palestinian objections at an extremely low price: a one-year deadline that nobody will hold him to if things go wrong. And he neutralised his domestic challengers too. For the next twelve months, anyone who tries to destabilise his coalition will be accused of derailing the peace process.

This especially applies to Ehud Barak. As defence minister, Barak is responsible for implementing Israel’s end of the road map: he decides which checkpoints get removed in the West Bank and what action is taken against unauthorised settlement-building. In the last few weeks he’s been positioning himself for an election by taking a tough line on all these things, trying to make himself look more security-minded than Olmert. By making the peace process all about the road map, Olmert has managed to make it look to everyone — and most importantly to the Americans, as Aluf Benn described last weekend — like Barak is the one throwing a spanner in the works.

Meanwhile, having agreed to put the road map back at the centre of the peace process, the Palestinians seem to have remembered suddenly what a bum deal it was for them in the past. The road map’s first stage requires the PA to begin “sustained, targeted, and effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure”, while Israel “immediately dismantles settlement outposts erected since March 2001″ and “freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)”. But though the road map quite clearly describes these as simultaneous, Israel has usually insisted that the Palestinians carry out their end of the bargain first. That’s why the road map never got anywhere. The Palestinians are now warning that this could precipitate a crisis in the talks (but, curiously, coming to Olmert’s rescue by saying it is Barak and Livni who are the stumbling blocks, though Olmert himself seems to be sending similar signals: “If stage one of the road map is implemented - if the Palestinians dismantle terror infrastructure - then and only then will Israel have to implement” a final-status agreement).

But I don’t see that the Palestinians have any leverage here. They said there’d be no Annapolis without Israeli commitments to final-status issues; they caved. If they say there’ll be no Annapolis without a proper Israeli commitment to the road map, who’s going to take them seriously?

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.

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.

The final entry in my correspondent’s diary of reporting from two weeks ago. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending the week in Washington, getting some takes on the upcoming Annapolis summit. I’ll be posting some thoughts on that at the beginning of next week.

Three millennia, one neighbourhood at a time

TODAY is a Jewish holiday, the Rejoicing of the Law, and West Jerusalem is as quiet and bucolic as an English village on a Sunday afternoon. It seems a good morning for a bike ride.

I zoom down the hill towards Yemin Moshe, the first Jewish neighbourhood outside the walls of the Old City. Its builder, a Jewish philanthropist in the late 19th century, set the style for the new city by covering everything—the houses, the streets and the staircases that run down the hillside—in rough-faced, yellow-white Jerusalem stone. He put a windmill there too, only to discover, so legend goes, that there wasn’t enough wind.

I swing past the shuttered old railway station with murals of 1930s Palestine, past the Sultan’s Pool, a rocky valley where cattle and horses took water in the days of the Ottoman rulers, and climb the road that winds around the Old City’s southern walls. Below me snakes a dusty ravine studded with old olive trees. This is the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna—the Bible’s word for hell, possibly because the refuse burned and the corpses dumped there in ancient times released a stink not of this world.

I enter the Old City at the Zion Gate (in Hebrew), David’s Gate in Arabic, passing the alleged site of both King David’s tomb and the Last Supper. Both claims are dubious, but myth often has more power here than scholarship. I rattle over cobbles and down a hill to the Western Wall, the holiest site of Judaism. Since my lycra cycling shorts undeniably constitute immodest dress, I remain outside the security gates, watching a group of American Jewish teenagers doing a festive circle dance.

Out of the Old City through the Dung Gate and down a hill so steep my wheels skid, I head into Silwan. This Palestinian neighbourhood has the misfortune to lie atop Jerusalem’s ancient precursor, the City of (King) David. Right-wing Israelis have stealthily bought up a few houses near the site of the archaeological dig, each of which is now a mini-settlement with barbed wire, electric gates and a threadbare Israeli flag.

On to a dusty track along the Kidron Valley, where I am distracted by a bizarre set of Greco-Egyptian monuments hewn from the rock. A passing tour guide tells me they are the tombs of David’s son Absalom and of “the Pharaoh’s Daughter”. I look them up later. Absalom’s tomb has previously been ascribed to Jehoshapat and to Hezekiah, the Pharaoh’s daughter’s tomb (if indeed it’s her in there) is somewhere else, and what he said was her tomb is actually called the Grotto of St James, and actually contains the mortal remains of a Jewish priestly family. Clearly, Israelis and Palestinians weren’t the first to argue over who owned what here.

I ride past the garden of Gethsemane, where Judas betrayed Jesus. Christian pilgrims cheer me on as I struggle, but eventually walk, up the steep hill towards the Mount of Olives cemetery. By Jewish tradition this is the world’s best place to be dead, for when the Messiah comes, those buried here will be the first to rise and follow him.

I recall a cold November night when I came here with the scion of an illustrious rabbinical family and we stumbled around tombs looking for his ancestors, stopping spellbound as the unearthly dawn call of the first muezzins echoed off the Old City walls below us.

Puffing, I ride along the ridge at the top of the Mount of Olives and stop to look over the Judean desert to the east. On these barren slopes Israel plans to build 3,500 homes to connect the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim—on a hilltop in the distance in front of me—to Jerusalem, thus taking a large bite out of the West Bank. To Palestinians it has come to symbolise Israel’s refusal to take peace seriously.

I carry on to the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, which was a Jewish enclave in Jordanian territory between Israel’s birth in 1948 and its capture of the West Bank in 1967. The dividing line between the slightly ramshackle Palestinian neighbourhood and the neat, aloof university precinct is as sharp as the day the border fence came down.

Back into town, past the elegant, orientalist American Colony hotel where I and other journalists meet aid workers and diplomats to share overpriced meals and cynical stories. Past St George’s cathedral, where Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli convicted of treason for leaking his country’s nuclear secrets to the press in 1986, often hangs out—stateless, forlorn and, say those who know him, now slightly unhinged.

I cross the former border with Jordan, now a highway, and swerve past black-coated ultra-Orthodox hasidim as I cut through Mea Shearim, then up to the Russian Compound, where a notorious prison for Palestinian detainees sits in the shadow of the magnificent Holy Trinity church.

My home stretch takes me past my local watering-hole, the Restobar. Some locals still know it as Moment—the name it had when a suicide bomber entered it and killed himself and 11 others in 2002. I slalom through security gates into the quiet little street where the prime minister’s house is, and race past a tall, strapping security guard who watches me from behind impenetrable sunglasses, assessing whether I have a weapon concealed in my lycra shorts. Past the Belgian consul’s house, a superb neo-classical mansion whose Palestinian owner leased it to the Belgians in 1948 to keep it out of Israel’s hands. And home.

Every stone in Jerusalem has a history—or several, and often contradictory. Many outsiders find it an oppressive place. But where else can you cover over three thousand years by bicycle in less than an hour and a half?

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.

The second entry in this week’s correspondent’s diary from The Economist’s website.

From economic stagnation to flamenco in one day

AFTER three years here, I still don’t understand the West Bank security regime. Israelis are forbidden from visiting the main Palestinian cities, and at some, like Nablus, checkpoints block them.

But in others, you can drive all the way in and out without being stopped, and since there are rarely any signposts, it’s easy to end up there by mistake. The first time I went to Hebron, I stopped a taxi driver to ask the way. “You’re in the middle of it,” he grinned.

We visit a stationery factory in Hebron. The usual stories. The checkpoints make moving goods between cities in the West Bank, let alone to Gaza, costly and slow. It’s hard to compete with Israeli goods, which suffer fewer hold-ups.

More surprising is that Hebron’s paper-pounders, shoe-smiths, clothes makers and others are really worried about competition from China. Even here in Palestine, they feel the same global threat as everyone else. Except that here it’s much harder to make your business leaner and meaner, since so much depends on Israel, on things beyond your control.

We drop in on a senior Hamas man, a member of parliament, portly and bearded as per usual. But unusually, he is one of the few not in an Israeli jail. I cheerfully ask why. He bristles. I realise that my question could imply he was an Israeli collaborator. Pointedly, he explains that he spent two years in prison, and (this with some pride) was even elected to parliament from there.

Then he runs down the usual list of PA repressions against Hamas. But he says his Islamist charity, which distributes clothes and meals for Ramadan to poor families, is still raking it in, thanks to the Islamic tradition of giving 2.5% of one’s earnings as zakat, or charity, while what he calls “pro-Fatah” organisations like the Red Crescent are finding it hard to raise funds.

I’ve been asking every Islamist I meet how Hamas is dealing with the attempts to close it down, and I realise that this is the answer. They may go underground politically, but they can still do what they know best: collecting zakat to pay for social projects like soup kitchens and schools. That was what made them popular in the first place. The PA is closing down lots of Islamist charities, but it can’t close them all. Hamas can play this game for years.

He sends us on to three young men who have stories of being arrested and tortured by the PA. All were active during the intifada, when Hamas and Fatah militants fought for a common cause. Now they’re enemies. We sit around a plastic table in the concrete-walled courtyard of their family’s house and they tell me of being hooded, tied up and suspended by the wrists. Again, they say, it is much worse than what the Israelis used to do.

At iftar in my fixer’s home in Ramallah that evening, the conversation turns to the 87 Palestinian prisoners who were supposed to have been released this morning as a goodwill gesture—all part of “boosting” Mahmoud Abbas. At the last minute Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, decided to withhold some of the pardons. (Why, I asked an Israeli journalist friend. “He’s got nothing else to do,” she sneered.)

At any rate, Israel is holding some 9,000 Palestinians. If anything, agree the iftar diners, Mr Abbas will look to his people like a fool for accepting such a measly token.

From Ramallah I drive down to the Dead Sea for a concert by Paco de Lucia, Spain’s most famous flamenco guitarist. The setting is a desert gorge walled by massive cliffs. The warm, heavy air of 400m below sea level fills with breathtaking music. The audience is a relaxed, joyful crowd of Israelis of all ages.

I find my concentration wandering. To be able to flit between the Israeli and Palestinian worlds is a rare privilege; most of their inhabitants cannot. But not for the first time, I’m finding the contrasts hard to digest.