January 2015
ON A FREEZING EVENING ON 4 JANUARY 2015, TWO DAYS before we left Israel, Sylvie and I sat by a fire in Bethlehem with a group of journalists, diplomats and NGO (non-government organisation) workers. The man sitting next to me – a leading Palestinian businessman – was regarded as a moderate. But what he had to say was chilling.
Any Palestinian businessman in the West Bank needs to deal regularly with Israeli officials, who have control over all aspects of business, including tax. While he opposed Israel’s occupation, this man believed it was important for Palestinians to work to improve their lot.
But what had angered him were events surrounding a vote by the 22-member UN Security Council on 30 December, just six days earlier. Jordan had submitted a resolution demanding a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank by 2017. Nine votes had been needed for the resolution to pass; 15 members had voted yes, five had abstained, and only the US and Australia had voted no.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat had commented that Palestinian leadership had known that the resolution would fail because of the make-up of the Security Council, but that they had decided to push it anyway. The businessman told me that had the Palestinians waited three days until Australia was off the Security Council, Malaysia or Venezuela would have gone onto the council and voted to support the Palestinians. He saw it as stunning incompetence. (Australia was a rotating member of the Security Council. The US, as a permanent member, had a power of veto, which they would have used. What angered the businessman was that Australia added a certain ‘respectability’ to the US position and that he would have preferred if the US had been shown to be alone in its Security Council support for Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank.)
Then the businessman really opened up: ‘Armed struggle is coming. I can guarantee you 100 per cent that Palestinians are going to take up weapons.’
I told him it was my understanding that the Israelis, through their massive system of informants, knew what was happening in every square inch of the West Bank.
‘Israeli propaganda,’ he retorted. ‘The Israelis’ strongest town in the West Bank is Bethlehem – they know everything. But in other places the Israelis are not so strong. I could take you to places where the Israelis know nothing. The weapons are already there – and when the time comes they will get more from the mafia. The mafia in Israel will sell weapons to anybody.’
Most Palestinians are reluctant to talk about armed campaigns. They talk about ‘peaceful resistance’, but once you get to know them they become more honest: a new armed conflict, or ‘uprising’, against Israel remains an option.
According to this businessman, about 2000 militants would join an uprising against Israel. ‘They will not fight in the open, as they know they will lose. It will instead be by stealth – it will be bombings, it will be snipers, it will be attacks in different parts of Israel. They will terrify Israelis. It would not be hard to get 2000 people out of 2.9 million in the West Bank to join the fight. The weapons are already there.’
The businessman cited the case of Palestinian prisoner Jamal Tirawi, who was released from prison in 2013. Before he was returned to the Balata refugee camp, the Israeli Army searched the refugee camp for weapons and found none. Then the Palestinian Authority security forces searched the camp and found none. Yet a couple of hours later to celebrate the release of Tirawi, scores of Palestinians came out carrying weapons. A European diplomat who was present was stunned by the number of weapons that had appeared despite the searches.
In our six years in Israel, one of the most interesting conversations I had was in December 2009 with Ahmad Aweidah, among the most powerful financial figures in the West Bank. Born in Jerusalem, he was educated at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and worked for the Société Générale banking group in France and then Paltel (Palestinian Telecommunication), the largest company in the Palestinian Territories. He now ran the Palestine Securities Exchange – responsible for US$7 billion in deposits.
I wanted to meet Aweidah because of his reputation as one of the brightest of his generation. He was not regarded as an ‘Israel hater’ and was often mentioned as a future leader. So I drove to meet him at his office in Nablus in the West Bank.
Aweidah called himself a moderate – which is why it was ominous that he wanted a one-State solution.
‘In terms of one State, I think we should go with the Martin Luther King call of one man one vote … It’s better than continued conflict, is it not? I think the two-State solution is no longer viable. I think the only solution now is one State where the Palestinians are the majority and the Jews are a protected minority, just like the whites are now in South Africa.’ The new State, Aweidah said, could be called ‘Israeltine’: ‘a combination of Israel and Palestine’.
Aweidah outlined how it would work. ‘Under one State, Jews and Arabs would share power at a local level for things like education and health, while things like water would be decided at a national level. The Jews would have their own canton and the Arabs would have their own canton. It would be a federal structure. The Palestinian canton would not be responsible for the defence of the country. I am happy for the Jewish canton to remain in charge of defence through the IDF. Not a single Palestinian would serve in the IDF. Jerusalem would be everybody’s. Jews would be able to live in Hebron not as settlers but as full citizens. The Irish and the English resolved their conflict. The English and the Scots. There have been many other conflicts that have seemed as intractable as this one.’
I suggested there would be a lot of resistance from Israelis because it would mean the end of the Jewish State. ‘But it would be the birth of the Jewish canton,’ he retorted. ‘Don’t worry, we will be good to them – they will be treated as a protected minority. We are not interested in oppressing them. Historically we don’t have a problem with Jews. Anti-Semitism is not an Arab or Muslim thing, it’s primarily been a Christian thing.’
While the US still talks about a two-State solution, most Palestinians I met had abandoned the idea. They said the last chance for this was under Netanyahu. Indeed, it is usually only visiting foreigners who cling to the idea.
The parents of the Palestinian children at Jack’s school had given up on a two-State solution. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, they rekindled some interest, but after Benjamin Netanyahu blocked Obama’s efforts they gave up hope.
‘What have we got from 15 years of negotiating since Oslo?’ asked Aweidah.
Today we’re sitting behind a wall with 600,000 Jewish settlers. So what will we get from another 15 years of negotiations – one million settlers? The Jews say ‘Never again’ about the Shoah [Holocaust]. We now say ‘Never again’ about losing more years negotiating and getting nothing. The settlers are actually rendering the two-State solution impossible and pre-empting the one-State solution. With the current growth of settlements, soon it will be impossible to divide the land anyway.
The attitudes of many Palestinians hardened after the election of Netanyahu in 2009. ‘Netanyahu still believes we are going to get up and leave,’ said Aweidah. ‘They have tried every trick in the book to push Palestinians out. They want the land, they don’t want the people. We say 15 years and we are the majority.’
Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar revealed one of the methods that Israel used to dramatically lower the number of Palestinians in the West Bank:
Israel had used a covert procedure to cancel the residency status of 140,000 West Bank Palestinians between 1967 and 1994. The legal advisor for the Judea and Samaria Justice Ministry’s office admitted this in a document obtained by Haaretz.
According to the document, Palestinians who wished to travel abroad via Jordan were ordered to leave their ID cards at the Allenby Bridge border crossing. They exchanged their ID cards for a card allowing them to cross.
If a Palestinian did not return within six months of the card’s expiration … [they] were registered as NLRs – no longer residents. The document made no mention of any warning or information that the Palestinians received about the process.
The Central Bureau of Statistics reported that the West Bank’s Palestinian population amounted to 1.05 million in 1994 – which meant the population would have been greater by about 14 percent if it weren’t for the procedure.
Today, a similar procedure is still in place for residents of East Jerusalem who hold Israeli ID cards; they lose their right to return if they have been abroad for seven years.
Ahmad Aweidah gave a different perspective: ‘There are people here now who are young and energetic and who believe in the future. Palestinians have one of the highest birth rates in the world. In Gaza alone in the first six months of this year [2009] there were 53,000 births.’ Time and demographics, he said, were on the side of the Palestinians: a mirror image of the view of Israel’s settlers.
He went on to say that the Palestinian economy was in ‘tatters’. ‘It’s an economy completely disfigured, a servile economy for Israel. We import 80 per cent of our needs from Israel. Palestinian companies are not able to trade as they wish, its people are not able to move as they wish. Gaza is a complete catastrophe. The Palestinian economy is at 10 per cent of our potential. Palestinians have about $70 billion of their assets abroad (particularly in the US and Arab world).’1
How did Aweidah interpret Netanyahu’s claim that Israel was trying to help the Palestinian economy?
It’s bull. It’s just for media consumption. Netanyahu doesn’t want to pay the price for peace. He’s not interested in removing the settlements, he’s not interested in a two-State solution, but he has to say something. What he actually believes is that Palestinians should pack up and go to Jordan …
In 1948 we were not supposed to be staying here. But we are still here. We have strong population growth, we are building things, we’re constructing things, we’re having kids, we’re getting married, we have a thriving culture, we have a thriving film industry now and we’re not going anywhere. We are a people who have a will to survive and who know how to survive. And Palestinians in the diaspora are successful – they are doctors, investment bankers, lawyers. The game is not lost. Far from it – we have survived against almost insurmountable odds. This is 62 years on. That plan did not go the way it was intended. The plan was that we would be completely emptied out of this land. [David] Ben-Gurion completely fucked up. He should have finished the job then.
The Israelis have even alienated the Israeli Arabs. The Israelis could have so easily made Israeli Arabs part of their society and defenders of their society, but instead the way they have treated them has made them more extremist over the years.
As I sat listening to Aweidah, one of the brightest young Palestinians, outlining his vision for the future of his people, I wondered whether Israel had failed to reach out to the next generation of moderate Palestinians. Aweidah, 40, should be a bridge to a future in which Israelis and Palestinians live alongside each other.
As I drove from Nablus back home to Jerusalem, I kept thinking to myself: if this is how the moderate Palestinians are talking in public, how are the extremist Palestinians talking in private?
Many people believe that if the Palestinian Authority disbanded itself it would precipitate the end of the occupation. That is, they believe that the PA helps Israel to maintain the occupation.
‘The role of the Palestinian Authority cannot be underestimated in how it’s easy and relatively cheap to run the occupation,’ Israeli Sarit Michaeli from human rights group B’Tselem told me.
If the PA didn’t exist Israel would have to fix traffic lights in Ramallah, set the curriculum and print schoolbooks in Nablus, paint zebra crossings in Bethlehem, prosecute criminals on issues other than security – a Palestinian who’s a rapist or thief would have to be found and brought to trial by Israeli courts – and anything to do with running water, sewerage would have to be done by Israel … This money would have to be provided by Israel.
Israel uses the existence of the PA as a retort to people who criticise the occupation. It’s a very common thing from Israeli spokespeople and media to say that Palestinians run their own lives … The existence of the PA … has allowed them [Israel] to posit the claim that there is really no direct occupation. This is important, because a lot of people buy this argument in Israel. If you have a situation where the control is indirect it’s easier to mask this control.
Michaeli argued that the PA had very little authority. ‘The Palestinian economy is completely subjugated to the Israeli economy.’ The World Bank found that restrictions imposed by Israel cost the Palestinian economy $US3.4 billion per year: 35 per cent of Palestine’s GDP.2
For the first two years we were in Jerusalem, the Israelis said it was impossible to have peace with the Palestinians – how could Israel make peace with the Palestinian Authority when it was divided from Hamas? Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that ‘First they [the PA] should make internal peace with Hamas and then they can try talking to us.’ But when PA leader Mahmoud Abbas did try to ‘make internal peace’ with Hamas, Netanyahu said that this was the reason why Israel could not make peace. After the PA and Hamas announced a ‘unity government’ in April 2014, Israel suspended peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and Netanyahu would later tell his security cabinet: ‘Today, Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] said yes to terrorism and no to peace.’3
This was despite the fact that Abbas insisted not a single person who had been a member of Hamas could become part of the new Palestinian Government. Apart from Abbas’s own distrust of Hamas, he had another reason to ensure that no Hamas figure was part of any new government: money. The US lists Hamas as a terrorist organisation, so the US Congress would cease funding the Palestinian Authority should it have any involvement with Hamas.
When Hamas made it clear it was prepared to agree to a Palestinian State along 1967 lines and recognise Israel, Netanyahu came up with another condition: that the Palestinians must recognise Israel as a Jewish State – a condition no previous Israeli prime minister had introduced.
It almost seemed as if Israel was coming up with an excuse for every development. The more I talked to Israeli officials, the more it became clear: I was watching in slow-motion as a government sabotaged perhaps its last chance for peace.
I asked New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren whether Netanyahu’s new condition of recognising Israel as a Jewish State was a negotiating ploy or a legitimate claim. Her answer was surprising. ‘My feeling is that it might be both things,’ she replied.
It’s certainly possible that Netanyahu made it a priority to scuttle the talks, because we don’t see real evidence that he really wanted them to succeed. But I buy his argument that ‘Until they officially acknowledge this is the nation State of the Jewish people I cannot be convinced based on incitement or whatever that this agreement won’t be a precursor for them to try to destroy this State’ … If I were the Palestinians I would have said, ‘We already recognised you, basically, and we won’t take away the Arab rights and we won’t let this affect the right of return but sure, if you want to be the nation State of the Jewish people go for it. From now on you’re the nation State of the Jewish people, and by the way, since you want that so badly we’d like the land swaps to be this way or we want this on the refugees.’
Crispian Balmer of Reuters was also critical of the Palestinians, and believes they should be placed under greater scrutiny. ‘I also do get frustrated because I think sometimes the Palestinians are given a free ride. We’re all very critical of the occupation and they [the Palestinians] are the underdog, but at the same time, last year we did a story on honour killings in the Palestinian Territories … They do some pretty foul stuff themselves.’
And Balmer has pointed out, it is not just the Israelis who are hostile to the foreign media. ‘It should also be said the Palestinians are pains in the arse too when it comes to some of this stuff. I’ve had significant problems with the Palestinians, be it Hamas gunmen smashing into our newsroom in Gaza and threatening to throw one of our people from the 12th storey or in the West Bank.’
It was 23 September 2011. President Mahmoud Abbas had just submitted an application for Palestine to become the 194th member of the United Nations. The PLO had been given UN Observer status way back in 1974, long before it declared the independent State of Palestine in 1988. The Oslo Accords – which created the Palestinian Authority – had offered a brief ray of hope, but since then the peace process had stalled as Israel continued to aggressively expand its settlements in the West Bank.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, and emboldened by the events of the Arab Spring, Abbas and his team had been courting the international community for many months before arriving for the 66th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York. Their hope was that full membership of the UN would take them to the brink of statehood. The next step after official recognition by the UN would be for Palestine to become a sovereign country, consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
I was there to cover the proceedings at the UN, along with a huge contingent of international media.
Benjamin Netanyahu rose first to address the assembly, delivering a speech fit for prime-time American television: perfect English with an American accent. (Netanyahu lived in the US for many years.) The speech ticked all the boxes, painting Israel as the David against the Goliath of Iran. His message amounted to: ‘We won’t have a State imposed on us. The only solution is one that the Israelis and Palestinians work out for themselves through direct negotiations.’
Compared with this, Abbas’s address later in the day was one of the worst crafted speeches I had heard. He raced through his words, barely stopping to allow the generally friendly audience of diplomats from 190 countries to offer him the applause they clearly wanted to give. He spoke entirely in Arabic and made no attempt to pitch his message directly to key players by using occasional phrases in English, French or Hebrew. He could easily have rehearsed some targeted phrases for the international media along the lines of ‘Why should we be one of the last people on earth to live under occupation?’ A simple message which could have been run on news bulletins around the world – not just in the Arab world.
Worse still, he made no effort to appeal to the very people who would be crucial in deciding whether Palestinians ever got a State: the Israeli public. Apparently playing to his own constituency, he mentioned Muslims and Christians but made no reference to any Jewish connection with Jerusalem. It was an appalling misjudgement by Abbas, displaying a real lack of courage. There can’t have been too many times when a speaker with the attention of the world on him has lost an opportunity so comprehensively.
The next day I was walking along Fifth Avenue and ran into two Israeli journalists with whom I’d flown from Israel, Shimon Shiffer and Nahum Barnea. They are two of the elder statesmen of Israeli media, both from Yedioth Ahronoth – the largest selling newspaper in Israel and generally a centrist paper. They were sitting in the sun outside a café in a plaza, reading the papers, so I joined them. We started talking about the UN speeches.
With no warning, Shiffer snapped: ‘I now talk to you as an Israeli, rather than a journalist. As an Israeli, I was outraged at Abbas’s speech! I’m a supporter of Abbas and the Palestinians, but for him to wipe the Jews out of the history of Jerusalem … this outrages me!’
If he’d outraged an influential supporter, I thought, what impact had he made on the less sympathetic Israeli public? I realised how the Israelis were wiping the floor with the Palestinians in terms of how to play public relations. There really was no contest.
After 50 years of occupation, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has become a media war. The Israelis are winning this war, without question – not because they have the better argument, but because they have a better resourced and more intimidating media and lobbying machine. Living in Israel, I experienced Israel’s hasbara machine on a daily basis. When a missile was fired into southern Israel from Gaza and landed in towns such as Sderot or Ashkelon, the Israeli PR people would send out texts along the lines of ‘Rocket lands in Ashkelon – Russian-speaking media can contact [name and phone number included], Japanese media can contact [name and number], German media can contact …’ It would then go on to say that if you wanted to speak to a woman who had a child at the school you could call her on the number provided or if you wanted to speak to a paramedic on the spot you could call his number. It amounted to a rapid-response media special forces team.
The machine worked even harder during the time of the Gaza wars. During the 2012 Gaza War, three Israelis were killed when a missile from Gaza hit their home. I needed to get to the front line and our car was not working. An email arrived saying that the think tank Israel Project had a bus leaving Jerusalem, which I joined. With about 30 journalists on board, staff from the Israel Project handed out ‘Fact Sheets’. Their staff also walked up and down the bus with baskets of sandwiches: ‘Pastrami on rye or vegetarian?’ they asked. Many journalists live off organisations like the Israel Project. In Israel, you can be driven to war while being fed facts, figures and pastrami on rye.
The Palestinian side, in contrast, were appalling – highly disorganised and suffering from the fatigue of a 50-year occupation. Which made me wonder: given that Israel’s image around the world was probably the worst it had ever been, due largely to the wars with Gaza and the occupation, and the Palestinians’ image was probably as good as it had ever been, what would be the situation if the Palestinians ever learnt to do public relations the way the Israelis do it?
By November 2012, facing the prospect of a US veto after its application was referred to the UN Security Council, Palestine had decided to reduce its ambitions and pursue an upgrade to ‘Non-member State’. The resolution was approved by a majority of UN members – with Australia, on the initiative of Bob Carr, taking the historic decision to abstain. Palestine had partially achieved its objective – no thanks to Abbas’s appalling speech in front of the UN.
One day in 2010, a year into my posting, I ran into the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. While I had spoken to him on the phone, I had never met him so I introduced myself. ‘I’m having real problems getting any information out of your side,’ I said. Then I added, ‘Compared with the Israelis.’
Erekat looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, the Israelis are good, aren’t they?’
My only thought was, well, you’re getting a billion dollars a year in funding from the European Union, Australia and other countries and you still can’t put together a functioning public relations department?’
Fifty years on, the Israelis have set up a largely remote-controlled machine and have got every inch of Gaza and the West Bank mapped out. Yet the Palestinian are just playing with the same old blunt instruments. But while the Israelis are able to maintain military control over the Palestinians, they will not win the real contest. As Israel continues to rule over an increasingly large population – a minority Jewish population (based on demographics) is now on the brink of controlling the lives and movements of a majority Palestinian population in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza – Israel’s occupation is, inevitably, doomed.
The only question is whether what comes next will be an orderly, political process or a violent, chaotic one in which many people will die. I am by nature an eternal optimist. But after six years of living amid this conflict I fear that the latter is now almost inevitable.