Mrs Halaweh had introduced me by mobile to her nephew, Anwar, a retired professor of Political Science who, having spent most of his working life abroad, was now back in the Khan Younis family home. Prompted by his aunt, he invited me to breakfast.

On the Strip, places tend to merge into one another and it can be hard to see where a town or camp begins or ends. But Khan Younis’s city centre is unmistakable, distinguished by the noble remains of a khan wall – 60 metres long and ten metres high, including a tower and gateway – built in 1387 by the Emir Younis Ibn Ala’en-Nawruzi to shelter merchants and their goods in the heavy two-way flow of Cairo–Damascus trade.

Anwar’s ancestral home, within sight of the khan, took a battering in 1956 when Israel occupied the southern Strip during the Suez crisis. No family member was seriously hurt but Anwar, aged ten, permanently lost his hearing in one ear. The shooting of hundreds of civilians in the nearby al-Amal camp enraged him. The Israeli government told a subsequent UN inquiry that those killed were resistance fighters, misinformation eventually corrected by the publication of General Moshe Dayan’s diary. Two generations later, at the start of the Second Intifada, further structural damage was done to a gable end as giant bulldozers rumbled past to raze scores of homes on the edge of the camp and destroy all crops in fields separating it from a settlement.

Anwar was tubby and short-bearded and almost bald with a soft slow voice, grey-green eyes and the sort of nose that used to be described as ‘Jewish’. His English had a pronounced Indian lilt, a souvenir of eight years lecturing in New Delhi – his first venture out of Palestine. We sat in the restored wing, in a sparsely furnished room with a wide window overlooking a barren garden where two massive palm stumps made Anwar sad. ‘I feel they knocked those deliberately,’ he said. ‘They enjoy knocking Palestinians’ trees.’

Most of Anwar’s very extended family (he was one of twelve) still lived in Gaza; several others were also returnees. It surprised me to meet so many Gazans who had voluntarily incarcerated themselves in this open-air prison. The Palestinians’ attachment to their birthplaces sharpens the Nakba’s poignancy. However, as a widower with four married children settled in the US and Europe, Anwar would not have returned in 2004 had he foreseen how total the blockade would soon become.

Having spent most of his adult life abroad, this returnee viewed the Gazan scene with some detachment and an unexpected optimism. He intrigued me by defining, as one of Hamas’ main strengths, an essential incompatibility with ‘fundamentalism’.

‘You look surprised,’ he said, ‘but our tradition is not fanatical, we don’t have that temperament. So Hamas fanatics are easily diluted! For that much we can give thanks to Allah. Sure, the Mujamma seed took root when sown – but why? Because Zionism had changed the dynamics, distorted our social and political framework. The seed only flourished after the Occupation introduced “Judaism versus Islam”. Our conflict is about land and justice. The Zionists didn’t get rid of us because they were bigoted Jews who hated Muslims. They were secular Jews who had to drive us off land they wanted to settle.’

For a time Anwar had worked behind the political scenes, as an advisor to major decision-makers. ‘I warned them against outlawing Hamas, then imprisoning Gazans on the Strip. A territory sealed off from outside influences is a hot-house for extremism. Now more and more of Gaza’s resentful young jobless go regularly to the mosque. They’ve nothing else to do. A world of packed homes and empty pockets offers no hope and the most popular preachers describe the martyrs’ other-worldly rewards.’

Anwar’s cautious optimism sprang from a conviction that Hamas’ present heterogeneous support has the potential to cohere into something stable and constructive. He pointed out that it encompassed the impoverished masses in the camps and elsewhere who feel a certain loyalty because for generations they have been helped, free of charge, by Hamas-supported ISIs staffed by professionals. Then there are the disillusioned former Fatah followers (no longer deceived by posturing peace-seekers), many of whom are among the embittered victims of Fatah/PA corruption, a scandal unconcealed for years in the certainty that as long as officials toed the Israel/US line the donors of abused funds would choose not to notice. Very important, too, are the devout moderate Muslims, longing for peace and normality, by temperament apolitical yet valuing Hamas’ refusal to compromise on justice. And around the edges, menacing the rest, are those incurably belligerent rocketeers who despise the Hamas leadership’s conciliatory tendencies and shrug off the deaths and injuries suffered by their own communities when Israel retaliates. I said nothing to dim Anwar’s optimism but as he listed those disparate elements I did wonder – how to cohere them all?

Anwar brought up a subject rarely discussed, the ambiguity enveloping UNRWA’s role. On the West Bank a few mavericks had spoken to me, sotto voce, about that agency as Zionism’s partner in crime. What if there had been no post-Nakba humanitarian intervention? If Gaza’s Egyptian rulers, and the West Bank’s Jordanian rulers, had been left to cope with hundreds of thousands of Displaced Persons – starving, homeless, ill and in rags …

Benny Morris has written:

I told Anwar about Noha, my octogenarian but keen-witted Balata friend, who remembered her unusually prescient father objecting to the camps’ establishment. Looking beyond the immediate alleviation of misery, he saw the dispossessed Palestinians becoming institutionalised, being regarded as an acceptable though regrettable entity, their minimum basic needs regularly fulfilled. Minimum, yet enabling the world to forget about them. Noha wondered – without aid from the UN and Zionism’s international allies, wouldn’t the Nakba have been seen in perspective? Wouldn’t Israel have been held responsible for the alleviation of the uprooted population’s misery? Surely so many suffering so much would have made it impossible for the world to ignore the Nakba injustice?

To Noha I had replied, ‘But the UN, having put a match to the Nakba by voting for 181, had to become the fire brigade. Otherwise the vote might have been condemned as a criminal error.’

Anwar concurred with this and added, ‘At the time most refugees trusted they’d be rescued eventually by Arab armies taking back their land. Camp life seemed temporary – until 1967, when they realised their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren were doomed to a landless, stateless eternity.’

On 7 June ’67, as thousands fled across the Jordan from the Tulkarm region, Moshe Dayan, then defence minister, ordered his troops to leave the roads open. ‘In this way,’ records Brigadier-General Braun, ‘the population of the West Bank would be reduced and Israel freed of severe problems.’

In September ’67 Dayan urged senior IDF staff to promote emigration ‘because after all, we want to create a new map’. Two months later, General Narkiss didn’t disguise the Zionist project. ‘We are talking about emigration of the Arabs. Everything must be done – even paying them money – to get them to leave.’ On 14 July 1968, addressing a meeting in his ministerial office, Dayan said, ‘Anyone who has practical ideas or proposals to encourage emigration, let him speak up. No idea or proposal is to be dismissed out of hand.’

A mild version of the two-state solution was mooted in 1967 immediately after the Six Day War, when certain West Bank notables suggested autonomy for the newly Occupied Territories. Predictably, as Benny Morris explains, ‘Dayan rejected the idea, fearing it would evolve into Palestinian statehood. He, like the rest of the Labour Party leadership, firmly opposed such statehood, deeming it a mortal threat to Israel’s existence.’

Anwar said, ‘When you see the IDF graffiti, and the shocking results of their retaliations, remember there’s a 45-year build-up of frustration! Always the Zionists have desperately wanted us out – but we’re not going!’

Throughout those 45 years a reprehensible pattern has been repeated: Israel destroys, her foreign friends restore – usually with their taxpayers’ money. Anwar mentioned an example of which Shu had spoken: in May 2004 she witnessed some of the demolitions when Operation Rainbow was launched in retaliation for the killing of two Israeli soldiers. Within 24 days, bulldozers flattened 277 Rafah camp homes, leaving 3,451 Gazans without shelter or possessions. Anwar had just returned to Khan Younis and was among the many notables who appealed to the Quartet to intervene; clearly the IDF’s murders of dozens of civilians and their destruction of civilian property were war crimes. Yet the Quartet did and said nothing, the killings and demolitions continued. Then, on 25 June, at a press conference at UN Headquarters in New York, Kofi Annan was pinned down and had to make a statement which Anwar showed me – sellotaped into his old-fashioned newspaper cuttings album. The UN Secretary-General, speaking as the UN Quarter of the Quartet, said:

Anwar said, ‘That tells us pandering to Israeli killers is more important than protecting Palestinian civilians. Soon after came the usual “compensation” – guilty governments donating millions to rebuild homes. But you can’t resurrect the dead with donations.’

Anwar’s blood pressure rose perceptibly as I recalled my private view, in November 2008, of Tony Blair’s three armoured vehicles in their cordoned-off corner behind Jerusalem’s American Colony hotel. To the man and woman in the street such monster machines symbolise aggression and mistrust while ensuring that the Quartet’s leader can have no real contact with those he is being overpaid to help. Their cost (more than US$400,000) came in 2007 from the UN Development Programme’s ‘Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People’. They are little used; Blair has many fish to fry and the Palestinian People are mere minnows – for whom $400,000 could do a lot if invested in a refugee camp.

The Quartet’s headquarters, where Blair appears now and then for a few days, occupies a whole floor of one of Jerusalem’s most expensive hotels and Britain’s taxpayers foot most of this seriously astronomical bill. ‘But doesn’t Britain have austerity now?’ said Anwar. ‘Do the taxpayers know …?’

I guesstimated. ‘Perhaps 0.5 per cent know and even they may not care. In democracies people who work hard and pay taxes are conditioned not to fret about how their money is wasted. Unless some media person goes on the trail of who is wasting it. Then citizens become indignant – in a passive way, and not for long.’*

During my residency in Balata refugee camp Blair briefly visited the neighbouring city of Nablus, allowing me to glimpse the Quartet’s methodology. For security reasons, only the staffs of the city’s various UN agencies were aware of his presence among us. Not until he was safely back in his American Colony nook did the word get around – ‘Blair’s been here!’ Balata’s 26,000 refugees (four generations of them by now) were not on his agenda. In recent years, while the unemployment statistics become ever more harrowing, most UNRWA camps have suffered a reduction in funding. How come another UN agency can afford to spend $400,000 on three vehicles to assist the Palestinian People?

My breakfast visit had extended into the afternoon. ‘Come again!’ said Anwar. ‘I want to talk about the future.’ We fixed a day, then I left him with a cheering observation. In Israel and on the West Bank, I had found at least one sentiment uniting Israelis and Palestinians – scorn for Tony Blair.

* * *

On the Quartet’s first appearance in 2002 I pounced on the name as a fudge probably presaging new rounds of fake ‘peace talks’. (The reality is worse.) Russia, the US, the EU, the UN (always represented by its Secretary-General) – how to unravel that knot? Russia, the US, the EU’s member states – all are among the UN’s 191 member states. So what’s going on here? Ten years later, we know.

This international sponsor for the fictional ‘Peace Process’ is another tool with which the US shapes the Palestinians’ destiny for Israel’s benefit. An ad hoc committee, with no mandate from anyone, it has been led since his retirement from No. 10 by Tony Blair who uses it to collect an astounding selection of valuable feathers for nesting purposes.

In April 2003 President George W. Bush unrolled his Quartet-endorsed ‘Road Map to Peace’ which aroused tremendous international enthusiasm amongst those Middle East commentators who know not of what they speak or write. Apparently everyone was heading towards ‘a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel–Palestine conflict by 2005’.

Within a year Bush Jnr had in effect torn up his lovely new map by writing to Ariel Sharon (then prime minister) assuring him the US would never expect Israel to quit the West Bank’s city-sized settlements. This merely echoed President Clinton’s 2001 letter to Palestinian and Israeli leaders, approving ‘the incorporation into Israel of settlement blocks’. Yet to some eyes it brought tears of disillusionment.

In 2005 Quartet statements misinterpreted the withdrawal from Gaza and more than 5,000 journalists arrived in Gaza City to report on this momentous event and write up ‘Ariel Sharon, Man of Peace’. The Quartet had made no mention of the blockade and a few months later were embarrassed when James Wolfensohn, former World Bank president, complained after visiting Gaza, ‘Israel is almost acting as though there has been no withdrawal.’

Meanwhile the Quartet’s leader had a few other things on his mind. A private firm, Tony Blair Associates (remember Kissinger Associates?) feeds on very private consulting contracts linked to the sort of Arabs you get to meet if Israel favours you. The Emir of Kuwait paid $40 million for advice on ‘reforms’. More millions came from UAE coffers. Tony Blair Associates enjoyed an annual $2 million retainer from JP Morgan for ‘strategic’ advice. In 2007 JP Morgan arranged a $2 billion loan for Qatari telecoms company Q-Tel to buy the mobile company Wataniya. Wataniya wanted to operate on the West Bank and in November 2009 Blair successfully persuaded Israel to release the necessary frequencies – in exchange for the PA’s promise to forget the Goldstone Report on Cast Lead war crimes.

The Strip’s territorial waters hold an estimated $6 billion worth of natural gas fields and for their exploitation Blair tried to fix a deal between British Gas and Israel. This would be ‘good for Gaza’, he proclaimed. Yet all negotiations were with Netanyahu, not a prime minister known for giving Gazans their fair share.

The Quartet spends vast sums of public money but because of its peculiar genesis Blair can forget all about the normal ‘conflicts of interest’ and ‘disclosure’ regulations that bind British government officials and UN employees.

This committee’s main task seems to be to make it easier for Israel to breach the Geneva Conventions with impunity – a function so obvious that one of President Abbas’s senior aides, Nabil Shaath, has gone public to denounce Blair for acting as Israel’s ‘defence attorney’. A French diplomat agrees with this. Anis Nacrour, once a senior advisor to Blair in the Quartet’s Jerusalem office, now talks of ‘… a smokescreen for the actions of the Americans and the tandem between Americans and Israelis. At the end of the day, all this was for buying time for allowing the Israeli government to do whatever they wanted to do.’

This explains why Ban Ki-moon accepts directives from the Quartet rather than from an authorised UN agency. The UN Human Rights Council in September 2010 agreed with the finding of the ICRC – Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza is illegal. Ignoring that, a UN Secretary-General, who has taken an oath to uphold international law, wrote in May 2011 to the relevant Mediterranean governments urging them to ‘use their influence’ to stymie the 2011 Freedom Flotilla II (in which I had invested quite a lot of energy and some money, hoping to arrive in Gaza by boat). Ban Ki-moon referred to the Flotilla as ‘not helpful’ because ‘assistance and goods destined to Gaza should be channelled through legitimate crossings and established channels’. This semi-literate wording is taken from a Quartet statement put out as part of the US/Israel manoeuvre to avoid another confrontation on the high seas.

As Ali Abunimah has noted, nobody knows who hired Blair or who can fire him. Anwar had told me his Ramallah contacts were reporting rumours of a move to sack him – politely, of course, by sending formal requests to the United Nations Development Programme and the British government. Anwar sighed and shook his head. ‘I told my PA friends that won’t work, the Quartet is too valuable, he’ll never let go.’ I remembered this prediction on 6 October 2011 when The Financial Times reported:

Take heed – how the political leadership of the Palestinians views this envoy counts for nothing.

The British glanced at a one-state solution, binationalism, before Partition in 1947. Finding themselves unable any longer to contain the guerrilla war in Mandatory Palestine, they proposed a temporary international trusteeship with local autonomy for both Arabs and Jews and a generously subsidised binational state as the eventual reward for living happily together. Enthusiastic backing for this plan came from the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the then president of the Hebrew University, Judah Magnes; most Zionists and Palestinians didn’t even stop to consider it.

In 1967, a few weeks after the Six Day War, a distinguished French Jew, Maxime Rodinson, felt worried and wrote:

This Sorbonne professor of Old South Arabian languages may have been the first outsider to discern the underlying affinity between South Africa’s white Nationalists and political Zionism’s Ashkenazi leaders. In 2012 his foresight seems quite uncanny.

In the late 1960s Fatah toyed with the notion of binationalism but were soon cowed by the height of the hurdles. Then Yasser Arafat took it off everyone’s agenda by clumsily presenting it, in his 1974 address to the UN General Assembly, as a secular ploy for undermining the Jewishness of the State of Israel. In 1988 the PLO reluctantly recognised Israel’s ‘right to exist’ and formally adopted the ‘two-state solution’.

Digging deep in my Palestine/Israel file, I came upon a long essay (‘Where is Israel Going?’, New York Review of Books, 7 October 1982) by Nahum Goldmann, for many years president of the World Jewish Congress. Written shortly before his death, at the age of 87, it is a sad and angry reaction to Israel’s ‘presumptuous invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut’. Thirty years on, it remains relevant.

Seven years later, in the International Herald Tribune (14 March 1989), Steven Pearlstein, one of ‘the Jewish elite in America’ deplored Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Fast forward to 6 December 1997 when The Economist reported that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had agreed to withdraw its troops from the West Bank. However, this decision

Sure enough, nothing did happen.

Ten months later Ahmad Samih al-Khalidi (a Palestinian writer and negotiator) flew a kite in Prospect (October 1998). Following the Oslo debacle, he noted:

Since that powerful intervention the debate had become vigorous though chiefly confined to the New York Review of Books, the Boston Review, the Arab World Geographer and Al-Ahram Weekly. In the last-named, Sharif S. Elmusa, professor of political science at Cairo’s American University, has argued persuasively (27 April–3 May 2006) for a binational state in Greater Palestine: Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan. For complicated reasons, lucidly explained by Professor Elmusa, the inclusion of Jordan (which has a majority Palestinian population) could solve more problems than it creates by catering for the needs of very many refugees. It’s easy to forget those millions in al-Shatat – in exile, not allowed to return to any part of Mandatory Palestine. They have been shamefully neglected since Oslo spawned the PA, which concerns itself only with the West Bank and Gaza.

The ancillary argument, about an end to the US annual subsidy of $4 billion (from government and private donors), is heard wherever people gather to discuss this conflict. In a review of Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion (London Review of Books, 23 June 2005), James Wood put it thus:

Those demons have been unflinchingly diagnosed by David Shulman in the New York Review of Books (24 February 2011):

In What Does a Jew Want? (2011, ed. Udi Aloni), Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, promotes the use of ‘binational’ rather than ‘one-state’:

Another sort of warning came in 2002 from one of Israel’s most eminent historians, Ilan Pappé, who in 2007 was forced out of Haifa University because he had referred to Zionism’s ‘ideology of exclusion, racism and expulsion’. He cautioned:

Yet in January 2009 we find Olivier Roy writing in the International Herald Tribune that the two-state solution, though ‘dead on the ground, remains on the diplomatic agenda’. Sadly, it still remains there, though the bleatings coming from its putative supporters sound increasingly feeble. The binational alternative is never discussed in polite diplomatic circles where collective inertia Rules OK. Its advocacy would involve taking action, being daring, telling the Zionists, ‘You can’t have your pretend “democratic” Jewish state, breaking international law every day of the week. But you could have a shared Land of Canaan, a real democracy in which all have equal rights and responsibilities.’

President George W. Bush’s infamous letter (14 April 2004) to Ariel Sharon, affirming US support for the settlements, apparently contradicted the Road Map and provoked much disappointment, fury, grief and frustration. It’s interesting to reread it now, with binationalism in mind. The Bush administration is indirectly acknowledging that ‘two-states’ is dead and signalling their approval of a Bantuesque alternative. The letter said:

Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University has recently put it another way:

Not since staying with Mazin Qumsiyeh in Beit Sahour had I met such a dedicated and confident binationalist as Anwar. Listening to him, I remembered Mazin’s conviction that a ‘well-organised, united grass-roots movement could bring about a win-win situation for all the people of the Land of Canaan’. The key word is ‘united’. Hence the unremitting US/Israel efforts to stoke disunity.

‘After all,’ said Anwar, ‘binationalists are only seeking justice. We’re ready to share, to become equal citizens in a one-man-one-vote multicultural state.’ He paused, laughed, corrected himself. ‘Forgive – I meant one-person! We’re way ahead of our political leaders – even those knowing it’s the only solution fear to say so. Or else have a vested interest in the status quo – though they’d be a minority. But an influential and unscrupulous minority! To the fearful it looks like defeat, after years of claiming total independence. But when that can’t happen, why not march on to claim what could happen? We never were an independent nation-state the way Europeans think of it. We’ve been robbed of our lands, our water, our homes, our rights to trade and study and travel – not of our sovereignty because we never had it! If we must think of “victory” and “defeat”, binationalism also defeats the Israelis. It really inflicts a worse defeat on them, losing their artificial “Jewish” state – which never really existed with its one-fifth Palestinian population. Naturally Zionism’s political leaders can’t bring themselves even to think about one state. But some Israeli intellectual heavyweights know the score, have spelt it out in their 2004 Olga Accord. What’s needed now is open discussion all over the place – everyone having to think about the unthinkable, as Ali Abunimah might say.’

I mentioned the difficulty of ‘selling’ binationalism to Palestinian support groups in Ireland and Britain – and no doubt elsewhere. People whose favourite cause is a ‘Free Palestine’, and who haven’t experienced ‘the matrix of control’, tend to reject the need for a new campaign. Especially one that may not bear fruit until the old among them are dead and the young themselves old.

Anwar thought my timescale too pessimistic. ‘Barriers looking insuperable now could quickly come down if we unite to use clever weapons. Our foreign friends must learn two states were never on the Zionist agenda but served them well as a Trojan horse. They must stop calling for a free Palestine – that’s backing the Trojan horse and blocking the only road to peace. They must invite more binationalists to address their rallies, explaining the twenty-first-century realities.’

One such meeting, I told Anwar, was held in Dublin in February 2010, addressed by Ghada Karmi, Ilan Pappé and John Rose. I couldn’t go but a friend kept detailed notes and remarked, ‘There was no real attempt made to engage with the horrendous difficulties of working towards a one-state solution.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Anwar. ‘What counts is those three being heard – all thinkers, much respected by our foreign friends. As discussions widen and deepen, attitudes will change.’ I nodded, remembering how well Anwar’s friend, Ali Abunimah, has put it in One Country:

I quoted Ghada Karmi’s plea for a mass-binationalist movement working with kindred Israeli groups and advanced through Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). At that, Anwar grimaced and shrugged. ‘For me, as a professional scholar and amateur diplomat – well, BDS has to be problematic, intellectually and emotionally. But we don’t have a wide choice of weapons – I can’t oppose it. Ghada is right. Run a global BDS campaign, demand one-person-one-vote and a constitution like South Africa’s. When we’re not demanding independence we can’t be demonised as terrorists threatening security. All perspectives change!’

We set about stoking each other’s optimism. I said, ‘Now is the time for a big push, given so much more support for Palestinians since Cast Lead and the Flotilla murders. No more haggling about borders, simply asking for justice, asking Israelis to share the land the same as South Africa’s whites do.’

‘And the world is watching,’ said Anwar. ‘Watching like never before! Imagine our Tahrir Square – truly non-violent, no stone-throwing kids, no jeering slogans, no flag-burning – but all those Palestinians calling for citizenship, the vote, equality before the law … The IDF daren’t attack, within micro-seconds they’d be seen by millions! They’d have to leave at home their rubber bullets, tear-gas canisters, sewage-cannons, prison vans!’

Here a big dark cloud of realpolitik overshadowed my optimism. ‘How are the US reacting to all this? How long before their foreign policy shifts?’

‘Maybe only years, given a certain convergence of pressures. We’re sensing so many tremors, like aftershocks – Egypt the earthquake. I know you’ve talked with Mahmoud al-Zahar – don’t look so surprised! The Strip is small and you’re conspicuous. He probably knows you’re sitting here now! From him and your younger Hamas friends you’ll have picked up atmospheric changes – right?’

I nodded. ‘They told me their manic Charter didn’t feature in the ’06 electioneering – and we went on from there.’

‘On Fatah’s side,’ said Anwar, ‘Abbas’s stupid “Statehood” game with the UN signals more change – some West Bank PA factions falling out of step with the US-funded Dayton Brigade. In the short term it’s a bad game, confusing and deluding people like Oslo did. It’s meant to be anti-binationalism but it’s so crazy it’s having unintended consequences. I’ve many grand-nephews and -nieces here on the Strip and they and their friends on the West Bank have registered the end of an era. To them Abbas, Netanyahu, Obama – all look irrelevant, so moulded by the past. And so focused on personal concerns – like winning the next election – sensible kids can’t take them seriously. The young are in the majority. And they want new leaders, nearer their own age, creatively concerned about their future. They’re much more willing than their grandparents and parents to consider binationalism. The recent input from young Mizrahi Jews is part of the same pattern. Some of them want to jump barriers, be with their Palestinian peers, have people admit all Israelis are not Europeans settled in the Middle East. There’s change too across the Atlantic. Even AIPAC, the ADL and the rest of the constellation – my US friends tell me they can’t recruit enough replacements as the grandads die off.’ (A few months later I had an email from Anwar saying, ‘Net’s 29 standing ovations in the US helped us a lot by giving such publicity to AIPAC’s control over US politicians. We laughed over the choreography with the background music of dollars streaming into bank accounts!’)

Even among Israelis, BDS has been gaining momentum since Cast Lead. The ‘Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions’ movement acquired a coherent strategy in 2005, following a Palestinian Civil Society call for a global support group that would steadily concentrate on the essential coloniser-colonised relationship at the root of Palestine’s tragedy. In the words of Lisa Taraki, a cofounder, ‘The basic logic of BDS is the logic of pressure – not diplomacy, persuasion or dialogue.’ Understandably, activists like Anwar find this strategy testing. Can it be right to punish ordinary decent Israelis who need to export their produce? Is it wise to boycott cultural and academic exchanges when communication is so often prescribed as the cure for conflicts? (Don’t shoot! Talk to the IRA! To FARC! To the Taliban! To Hamas! To everyone …) In fact all my Israeli BDS friends are exceptionally dedicated communicators – but time has proved that their government, and all its institutions and international backers, are allergic to talking honestly about justice as the basis for peace. Although BDS never targets individuals, its successful operations will inevitably penalise some academics, artists and writers who are amiably disposed, in a vague way, towards the Palestinians. However, as one of my Haifa friends observed, ‘If you’re vague you’re supporting the Occupation. Not liking it but going along with it. As BDS bites, those Ha’aretz-reading liberals will have to see themselves as others see them.’ And when it comes to ordinary decent citizens – given the ‘silence and passivity’ of Israel’s majority, it seems nothing less stringent than BDS will prompt them to overcome their ‘studied blindness’.

Anwar was among several Palestinian friends who registered disappointment – rather than surprise – when the Irish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign failed to organise a boycott of a four-day, state-funded Israeli film festival in Dublin. As the Irish Times reported on 24 November 2011, the Israeli ambassador to Ireland, Boaz Modai, claimed that:

‘Freedom of speech’ is a tricky one and sure enough the pressing of that button gained Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore’s official attendance at the festival’s opening night.

Perhaps the Government of Ireland is uninformed about ‘Brand Israel’. This global campaign, launched (coincidentally?) in 2005, is funded by various Israeli government agencies and major pro-Zionist international (mainly US) groups. Its primary purpose is to promote Israel as a ‘normal’ country involved in tourism, sports, innovative science, cultivation of the fine arts, a vibrant youth culture – and so on. ‘Brand Israel’ can afford to employ high-powered PR firms and all Israel’s consulates and embassies are kept busy on its behalf.

In 2008 the Israeli writer Yitzhak Laor revealed the ‘price tag’ attached to government sponsorship of ‘Brand Israel’ operations. Any Israeli accepting funding from the Foreign Ministry for taking his or her cultural or artistic work abroad is obliged to sign a contract undertaking ‘to act faithfully, responsibly and tirelessly to provide the Ministry with the highest professional services. The service provider is aware that the purpose of ordering services from him is to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel’.

So much for freedom of speech.

Mr Modai’s claim that the Dublin film festival was non-political is scuppered by Judith Butler’s reflections on BDS and ‘normalization’:

Many of Judith Butler’s family were Holocaust victims. She grew up in the US in a household sympathetic to the new State of Israel and is now Maxine Eliot Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkeley. One of her closest friends, Udi Aloni (Israeli-American writer and film maker), has referred to:

During Dublin’s film festival fracas Ireland was accused, in the Israeli press, of being ‘the most anti-Israel country in Europe’. This brought a frightened squawk from our addle-pated Department of Foreign Affairs: ‘We are not hostile to Israel. We are critical of certain policies, particularly in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. These are not the same things.’ Here is a vivid illustration of Judith Butler’s point: ‘To work to the side of the Occupation is to participate in its normalization.’ For whatever reasons, the Irish government (and most others) want to ‘continue to act as normal’, to maintain friendly relations as though Israel’s repression of the Palestinians were some isolated error of judgement, the choice of a wrong policy in a specific case, when in truth it is central to the State’s existence and has been since 1948. ‘Neutrality is not an option’; we all have a moral duty (usually occluded by realpolitik) to be hostile to a government that deliberately and relentlessly inflicts so much suffering on successive generations of a people who did nothing to deserve the Nakba and its consequences. To make our hostility effective, BDS is ‘the most powerful non-violent means available’. If millions were saying, ‘We cannot continue to act as normal’ while the repression continues, then things would change – and everyone would be that much closer to binationalism.

Tony Judt was one of the many Jewish supporters of BDS. Not long before his death, in an interview with Kristina Božic in the London Review of Books (25 March 2010), he repeated his call for the EU to use its ‘enormous leverage’ and say to Israel, ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t be part of the EU market.’ Why don’t we do this? Because of ‘ridiculous self-blackmail’. Tony Judt’s Dutch and German friends said to him:

I had occasion to quote Tony Judt in Jabalya as I talked with angry members of a football club which had just signed a letter to UEFA’s president, Michel Platini, condemning the suggestion that Israel might host the 2012 Under-21 tournament. Gaza has 42 football clubs and though their kicking spaces are so limited their enthusiasm is boundless. Each had signed this letter, denying Israel’s ‘right to be treated as a member of the community of nations’. One young man, Uthman, an English Literature graduate of al-Aqsa University, asked with tears of despair in his eyes, ‘Why does Europe treat Israel so kindly? In Europe there’s no AIPAC!’ Yet again I tried to elucidate the European bad conscience but those young men were impatient of Holocaust talk. Although not Holocaust deniers (of whom I did meet a few among the younger Palestinians) they might be described as Holocaust sceptics – doubting the numbers and gruesome details. For this, Israeli hasbara and some fanatical imams share the blame. Zionists have consistently inflated the role of the Holocaust in the creation of the State of Israel. Hasbara presents their State-building as an understandable/forgivable consequence of the Holocaust. Who, after that attempted genocide, could blame the Jews for seeking to establish a ‘safe homeland’? The reality, as recognised by the historian and former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, is that Zionism, since the 1890s, has been partly ‘a movement of conquest, colonisation and settlement … forced to use the tools of colonial penetration’. Moreover, the dominant Zionist attitude to Hitler’s Jewish victims was revealed by Ben-Gurion’s chilling calculation, made a few weeks after the Kristallnacht pogrom (9 November 1938). Israel’s future Prime Minster explained: ‘If I knew it was possible to save all the [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring to Eretz-Yisreal, I would choose the latter – because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.’ Exactly four years later, in December 1942, when Jews were being murdered by the million, Ben-Gurion reminded his followers, ‘The catastrophe of European Jewry is not, in a direct manner, my business.’ No doubt this sentiment partly explains why the Holocaust was little spoken of between 1948 and the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. After that came the founding of ‘the Holocaust industry’ and since then, as Norman Finkelstein puts it, ‘The Nazi holocaust has been fashioned into an ideological weapon to immunize Israel from legitimate criticism … Whenever Israel comes under renewed international pressure to withdraw from occupied territories, its apologists mount yet another meticulously orchestrated media extravaganza alleging that the world is awash in anti-Semitism.’ No wonder some young Palestinians are Holocaust sceptics.

A classic Zionist fabrication was provided by Ruth Zakh, Israel’s deputy-ambassador to Ireland, in an Irish Times ‘Opinion’ (1 June 2011). It was headed ‘Political Stunts not the way to end Gaza Conflict’.

From this we gather that Gazan weapons inflict widespread damage on Israel’s population, a message regularly reinforced by the international media. What percentage of the general public is aware that in ten years (2001–2011) Gazan rockets and mortars killed 23 people (22 Israelis and one Thai farm labourer)? Admittedly, 23 too many. But in 22 days Cast Lead killed more than 1,400 Gazans and since the end of that operation the IDF have killed another 200 plus – despite Ruth Zakh’s misleading statement about Israel having ‘withdrawn both its military and civilian presence from the Gaza Strip’.

The Gazans respect for John Ging led many to expect more support from the Irish government. Uthman asked me, ‘Why does your country not talk strong for us? Your Foreign Minister came visiting for a few hours but afterwards said nothing strong. Did you burn too many Jews?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘we didn’t burn any Jews but for economic and sentimental reasons Ireland has always been subservient to the US.’ Then I confessed that Shannon airport is permanently at the disposal of the US armed forces, however illegal their missions, and of the CIA as it flies its captives in unmarked planes to unnamed countries for courses of ‘enhanced interrogation’.

It took time to explain all this in simple English. Five of us were sitting in the shade of a half-collapsed wall, looking across this club’s pitch – a cleared bomb site, strewn with fragments of metal and splinters of glass. Soon it would be lost to the club; new shacks were planned.

On the far side rose a towering monument to Cast Lead’s savagery, the bisected remains of a ten-storey, Oslo-era block, designed to US corporate specifications and constructed of reinforced concrete. Its ground floor had been let to many stores, a car showroom, bakers, barbers, a restaurant, a few cafés, a dentist’s clinic, a gas cylinder store. On the next two floors were offices, above them, flats. Scores of women and children were among the 210 killed here, Uthman told me. Then immediately after the ceasefire many others died while trying to salvage something from within the unstable ruin. The bomb had left one half upright, in an extremely perilous condition. Tons of jagged slabs still hung by lengths of steel 100 feet or more above four children whose donkey-cart was being loaded with scraps of unidentifiable substances – for use in Gaza’s ‘building trade’, where a wealth of ingenuity makes up for a dearth of materials.

We crossed the ‘football field’ and within this macabre edifice Uthman insisted on leading me by the hand across a narrow causeway of rubble – shifting beneath the feet – to a point from where I cold look far down into the depths of the basement. There lay the bomb’s massive case, by far the biggest of the many ‘souvenirs’ displayed to me on the Strip. Two visiting ISMs had longed to auction it on eBay, to raise money for its maimed victims. A kind impulse, but no one could think how to haul it up – and anyway, unless the top bidder lived in Gaza, there would be an insoluble transport problem. One wonders, why the Goldstone Enquiry? To drop such a bomb on a shopping centre-cum-residential block is in itself a war crime for which there could be no possible excuse or explanation.

On a very windy morning I walked the length of Gaza Port’s breakwater with Fahd and Yaser, two of Anwar’s bilingual grandnephews. They were first cousins, jobless graduates of Gaza’s al-Azhar University, politically on the same wavelength but in appearance almost comically dissimilar. Tubby Fahd took after his great-uncle, Yaser was unusually tall for a Palestinian with conspicuously long features: long nose, long chin, even long ear lobes. They felt none of Anwar’s reservations about BDS and worked hard on their computers as organisers for its National Committee. It cheered them that Dexia, a persistently targeted French-Belgian bank, was about to sell its Israeli subsidiary. And two French companies, Alstom and Derail Veolia, were loosening their ties with Israeli partners while numerous other companies had begun to register the effects of negative publicity. The University of Johannesburg was boycotting Ben-Gurion University. In Britain the University and College Union (the UK’s largest academic labour union) and the University of London Union (Europe’s largest student union) had voted to cut all links with Israeli institutions. Also, David Cameron had resigned, with minimum publicity, from his position as Honorary Chairman of the Jewish National Fund, a powerful Zionist agency. And Marc Almond and Andy McKee had cancelled visits to Israel. When I asked ‘Who are they?’ my companions looked worried and sympathetic; no doubt to them this lacuna suggested the onset of Alzheimer’s.

At the end of the long breakwater we perched on smooth boulders, the Mediterranean being boisterous on three sides, cooling us with showers of spray. The only people visible were a few fishermen in the far distance, repairing their boats’ bullet holes, and Fahd noted that here we were beyond range of eavesdroppers – unless Israel’s latest pride and joy, a mini-drone known as ‘the Ghost’, incorporates some lip-reading device.

It heartened these keen campaigners to know that Israel was about to legislate against BDS, thus proving its effectiveness and gaining it much valuable global attention. The Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel was passed a few weeks later, on 10 July (by 47 votes to 38), and a government spokesperson described BDS as ‘an existential threat’. Already this legislation had ignited controversy; thirty-six distinguished law professors considered it unconstitutional and leading civil rights groups were preparing to challenge it in the courts. On the West Bank, settler businessmen were also preparing lawsuits – against BDS organisations and individuals, who would be compelled to pay reparations at a fixed rate (30,000 shekels: US$8,700) without the injured party having to provide any evidence of actual injury. Companies complying with boycotts will be barred forever from doing business with any government office or agency.

Said Fahd, ‘All this helps towards what Zionists most dread – the delegitimising of Israel! Which prepares the way for binationalism …’

Yaser added, ‘The joke is, people backing the law say it’s to block delegitimisation efforts! On Facebook I saw “Peace Now!” car stickers saying “Sue me, I’m boycotting settlement products”. But only brave people will use those.’

‘Another new law bans Nakba Day,’ said Fahd. ‘Schools and institutions commemorating it will lose all funding – it denies the Jewish and democratic character of the State! An amendment to the Penalty Code protects that character – people denying its existence can be jailed. Even though with a normal IQ you can see it’s not possible to be Jewish and democratic with one-fifth Muslim citizens. Tied in are the “acceptance committees” – naked apartheid! Every village and community built on public land can have a committee to reject Muslim newcomers. The bill calls them “candidates who fail to meet the fundamental views of the community”. So how can they get mad when we publicise their apartheid system?’

‘The positive bit,’ said Yaser, ‘is how all this unites some of us, Israelis and Palestinians protesting together. Next month Jerusalem will see a big joint demo. It’s being organised by Daniel Argo from the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity group and Murad Shafea from Silwan. We’ve had a video conference with them. Dan says we must have a unified state called Israeli-Palestine and all of us as equal citizens. He’s brave!’

Fahd was suddenly looking gloomy. ‘This government plans about twenty new laws, all meant to criminalise new ways of thinking, like binationalism. They feel they’re being pushed to the exit. When I first heard them saying BDS is an existentialist threat, I cheered. Now I’ve nightmares about another Cast Lead because they feel pushed. Or an all-out attack on Iran instead of just assassinating nuclear scientists. I wish they could see Israeli-Palestine as a model for the whole region – we’re demanding rights people don’t have in most Arab states. They could get a lot of respect if they shared with us what your friend Mazin calls the Land of Canaan.’

I asked, ‘At present, how do you see one-state support on both sides?’

Fahd shrugged. ‘What would you expect? Very little on the other side until BDS bites harder – far harder! But Desmond Tutu says for us it’s picking up speed faster than it did for the ANC – in reaction to Cast Lead.’

‘Among us,’ said Yaser, ‘attitudes changed, specially in our age-group, when al-Jazeera published the Palestine Papers. Then we saw the dung-heap in the PA’s backyard. And we realised honest people were trying to persuade them to go one-state as a credible alternative. Hearing Erekat boasting about PA forces killing “terrorists” to “help” Israel – that was shock-therapy! We knew it went on, but boasting about it is different …’

Fahd was emphatic. ‘For certain we’d accept if Israel made the offer. If you asked people now most might say “No!” because they can’t imagine such a thing. That’s why it needs to be talked about loudly, in public. If the offer was genuine we’d say “Yes!” We’re tired – very tired – of conflict. We want justice before peace but we do want peace – badly.’

Yaser lit his last cigarette and tossed the empty package into the sea. I said nothing with difficulty. He made an obvious point too often overlooked. ‘While outsiders go on and on about two states we know we can’t have an independent Palestine. We live here, with the reality. The Zionists have won, they’ve taken so much land there’s not enough left to fight over, even if we could fight.’

‘Which we can’t,’ said Fahd. ‘No one gives us F-16s, helicopter gunships, Merkavas, gunboats and drones.’

Strolling back to the beach, our thoughts turned to Freedom Flotilla II. We had heard news that morning; the Irish MV Saoirse (of which I am the proud part-owner to the extent of perhaps half an ounce) was in dry dock in Turkey having its propeller mended after sabotage by Israeli frogmen (or their proxies). The US ship – Audacity of Hope, ironically named after President Obama’s second book – was languishing in a military marina near Athens while her skipper, John Klusmire, languished in Greek police custody. He was soon to appear in court, charged with ignoring an order to remain in port and with risking the lives of passengers who could be harmed by the IDF en route to Gaza. The obedient Greek government had confined the other eight boats to various ports – an illegal move, according to Nikos Chountis, a Greek Flotilla activist. The Free Gaza movement, organiser of these international flotillas, had been told of a compromise Greek–Israeli deal favoured by the ever-compliant Mahmoud Abbas and that celebrated US stooge (aka the UN Secretary General) Ban Ki-moon. The Greeks had offered to transport to Israel, for delivery to Gaza, the boats’ cargoes (goods and mail). Rejecting this offer, a Flotilla spokesperson reminded everyone that in 2009 and 2010 the cargoes of captured boats were allowed to spoil in Ashdod warehouses; humidity destroyed cement, heat destroyed medications. And the delivery of some 3,000 private letters, many containing cash gifts, had overtaxed the Strip’s UN agencies.

My companions had reservations about the Flotilla project. Both appreciated the hard work and courage of the participants – especially such dogged activists as the eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor, Hedy Epstein. But they felt it would be wise to abandon the pretence that badly needed humanitarian aid was being shipped to Gaza. Those few ships could carry only token amounts. The Israelis can prove their cargoes are unimportant and accuse the organisers of staging political stunts.

‘Better to focus on freedom,’ said Fahd. ‘The freedom to arrive and depart, keeping all attention on that central problem, our imprisonment.’

Yaser agreed. ‘We’re not starving Africans dying in a drought-stricken desert. Our tragedy is not a food shortage but a freedom shortage.’

‘D’you remember ’08?’ Fahd asked. ‘The Israelis allowed several boats through the blockade. Later they sailed away with passengers who urgently needed out but couldn’t get permits. All publicity should concentrate on that lack of freedom to lead normal lives – as students, businessmen, builders, musicians, friends, patients, pilgrims, holiday-makers.’

Yaser nodded. ‘The next Flotilla should say it doesn’t want to take anything in, only take people out! Patients to get to specialist hospital units, students to get to foreign universities while scholarships are valid, relatives and friends to visit bereaved people. The Israelis couldn’t sneer then about political stunts.’

‘But they’d go on about the Victoria,’ said Fahd. For my benefit he explained, ‘The Israelis captured this commercial ship a few months ago, carrying fifty tons of weapons from Iran for Gaza – the IDF said.’

Yaser laughed. ‘Iran’s too smart to try getting past the blockade! Those weapons were for someone else – maybe Assad, via the Lebanon. Iranians love him and he’s in big trouble. But the story made good propaganda. Media people repeat what the IDF tells them – “See the danger! We must keep Gaza cut off from all these heavy armaments!” Like there were no tunnels! The Flotilla should get friends of Zionism to check cargoes on the way – then what could Israel say? What excuse for stopping Gazans going to hospital or college or visiting relatives? The Flotilla is there to help them, they’re not asking to go through Israel where they might stop off to blow someone up. Why won’t Israel let them out of prison? It could be a dual-purpose campaign, “Free Gaza!” and big publicity for BDS!’

Already there is a strong link between BDS and the Flotilla. Zionism and its faithful followers may ridicule the latter as an alliance of archaic Lefties, shrill eccentrics, thwarted minor politicians, faded Flower People, professional publicity-seekers, covert Communists, and cheerleaders for terrorism. In fact, as Mark LeVine, history professor at the University of California, often points out, ‘The political and strategic implications of the Flotilla are quite real. It symbolises that the Palestinians and their international supporters are refusing to play by Israel’s rules …’ BDS also carries this message.

Back at Anwar’s house, we heard that a Scandinavian boat had also been sabotaged. And that a US State Department spokesperson had praised the ‘established and efficient’ methods of supplying Gaza’s needs through Israel.

A few days later I had a different sort of conversation in a dismal café, reeking of over-used cooking oil, near al-Azhar University. Jamal and Salim were English Language and sociology students (the language barrier limited my range of student acquaintances) from Jabalya camp. Unlike Anwar’s atypical grand-nephews, with their sights fixed on binationalism and BDS, these young men – both close to graduation – seemed confused and on edge.

The recent ‘Unity Agreement’ between Fatah, Hamas and a few minor splinter groups and individuals bothered them. Salim thought it a bad omen that the signing took place in Cairo’s Mukhabarat, the Egyptian government’s intelligence headquarters of ill repute, where so many Palestinians have been tortured on Zionism’s behalf. He couldn’t believe in that ‘unity’; past experiences made it seem chimerical; he imagined betrayal of the overall Palestinian cause being plotted behind its façade. Jamal condemned Hamas for compromising their principles, going after the mess of pottage that would reward their working within the PA structure – in other words, collaborating with Israel.

Salim said, ‘Hamas leaders are getting afraid, losing support. After the war [Operation Cast Lead] they got very popular again. Now with no jobs and always people being killed – women and children – most see these rulers can’t help us. Even worse, while they keep power, Israel won’t let others help us, all must suffer because they won’t let go. I’d like a real Unity Agreement, leaders united, power-sharing, like in Northern Ireland. But that’s not what got signed in Cairo. Hamas have no unity inside themselves, must talk two ways at once. Last year, to make calm their own mad dogs, Haniyeh said Fatah “wages war against Islam”. But he has waged war on Islamic Jihad.’

Salim was referring to August 2009 when Islamic Jihad raged against Hamas’ participation in ‘secular’ elections and attacked Qassam units – the first armed opposition to the ruling party since 2007. Not many Gazans objected when an unspecified number of captured jihadists were promptly shot in defiance of every international law and convention. Your average Palestinian is sensibly afraid of Salafist-types who seek to please Allah by slaughtering all brands of infidels and throwing acid in the faces of ‘naked’ (i.e., bare-headed) women.

When I asked how much regional changes might affect the Palestinians Salim replied that, as Mubarak was being removed, exhilarated crowds gathered on city streets throughout the OPT, suddenly feeling empowered. But on the Strip they were roughly dispersed by unlabelled ‘security forces’. ‘Those men wore no uniform,’ said Salim. ‘They looked like Salafists getting that job to let them be violent. They like acting military but Hamas wants them only political. We were out in Palestine Square, calling for unity against the Zionists, when the Salafists made us run home. Is it a crime to ask for something good, like unity? For that we got beaten by men who don’t want Muslims working with other Muslims who read the Holy Koran differently!’

Jamal cited the Nakba Day (15 May 2011) protest march from Gaza, Syria and Lebanon towards Israeli borders. ‘That couldn’t have happened before Tahrir. We got courage from seeing how big governments, even with American friends, can go weak!’ On the Lebanese border the IDF killed ten Palestinians and afterwards explained, ‘They tried to damage the fence.’ Four were killed on the Syrian border and one in Gaza. Israel predictably accused Iran of having organised these border breaches to promote terrorism and deflect attention from the current woes of the aptly named Bashar al-Assad. Jamal assured me the ‘event’ was pure Palestinian, Facebook-organised by exiled activists. I said I hoped there would be many more and much bigger marches – without deaths.

‘There was a big plan,’ said Salim, ‘for millions to march on Israel, all arriving at borders around the same time. It got everyone excited – thousands to march from Egypt, Syria, the Maghreb, the Gulf, Jordan, Lebanon, even Europe and America, the whole al-Shatat! The IDF heard and got panicked. They said to a newspaper they’d got no way to stop a mass non-violent march on the West Bank, even 4,000 couldn’t be stopped if the PA police wouldn’t help. Then they saw they’d no problem – we had no leaders to organise us and no money to move so many Palestinians around the world.’

‘Wrong!’ said Jamal. ‘Fatah and Hamas can find millions. Hamas maybe from Iran or some Saudi prince. Fatah from Abbas’s billion-dollar hidden slush fund!’ (This is money much spoken of and allegedly accumulated by the CIA-funded operatives.) ‘We know the problem is bad leadership, not needing money.’

‘We don’t know anything!’ retorted Salim. ‘How could we? All is lies and secrets. Hamas puts around that slush fund story – is it true, not true? Keeping people not knowing is one control method.’

‘Whatever way, Americans won’t let Palestinians be like Egyptians.’ Jamal was looking angry. ‘Obama’s people yelled against that Unity Agreement – no government including Hamas can have aid!’

Salim smiled slightly. ‘From here on, maybe what America says isn’t so much important?’

I made no comment but, taking the short term view, found it impossible to share in Salim’s optimism. On the very day of Mubarak’s departure, the New York Times reported, ‘The White House and the State Department are already discussing setting aside new funds to bolster the rise of secular political parties.’ I wondered then – how many millions will it take to secure political power for secular parties in a Muslim country? The answer soon came from Hillary R Clinton:

A month later Mrs Clinton again gave tongue:

Two months after that President Obama made a chilling announcement (19 May):

So it was definite; whatever seeds of hope had been sown in Tahrir Square were not to be allowed to germinate. Genuine self-determination would be thwarted.

By the end of 2011 the Obama administration had decided to talk to the hitherto condemned Muslim Brotherhood. Early in 2012 William Burns, Deputy Secretary of State, travelled to Cairo for a meeting with Khairat al-Shater, one of the Brotherhood’s most powerful leaders. The main US concern, at that date, was Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. Mr Burns conveyed that the US could obtain for Egypt, through the IMF and the Gulf States, an extra $20 billion aid money – if the treaty continued to be honoured. During that and later meetings, US representatives brought the Muslim Brotherhood to heel. The movement showed willing to favour a free-market economic model (with a few minor concessions to Egypt’s impoverished millions) and always to take US security needs into account.

In June 2012 Dr Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected President of Egypt. Almost immediately, according to DEBKA, President Obama was able to reassure a White House gathering of Jewish-American leaders that ‘President Morsi would be required to devote a section of his earliest speech on foreign affairs to the specific affirmation of his profound commitment to the peace pact with Israel’. (DEBKA is a website linked to Israel’s intelligence agencies.) Sure enough, within hours Morsi was announcing that the new Egypt would honour all its old treaty obligations. An invitation to visit the White House in September 2012 promptly followed. Then came his first state visit as President – to Saudi Arabia, on 11 July. On his return he made several public statements guaranteeing that Egypt would never interfere in the Gulf States’ domestic politics, would ‘respect the regional balance of power’ on Iranian issues and would not allow its relationship with Erdogan’s Turkey to grow too close. In Riyadh he had announced that ‘Egypt would keep the same distance to the Palestinian factions’ – meaning his regime would be even-handed in its dealings with the collaborationist secular West Bank regime and the defiant non-secular Gaza regime. Yet during his election campaign he had promised to end the blockade of Gaza. When Hillary Clinton visited Cairo and Jerusalem in mid-July, Israel reported that she had compelled President Morsi to agree to maintain the blockade. On Israel Radio, Danny Ayalon, the Deputy Foreign Minister, explained: ‘She is bringing a very calming message. President Morsi’s agenda will be a domestic agenda. There is no change and I surmise there will not be for the foreseeable future.’

US strategists describe this sort of skulduggery as ‘a managed transition of power’. The New York Times noted that Mrs Clinton had to abandon her plan to give a ‘significant’ speech in Alexandria lest it might further enrage those many supporters of the military who believed the US had gone over to the Muslim Brotherhood. An odd illusion: General Tantawi and the Military Council knew that Egypt would continue to receive an annual military subsidy of $1.3 billion, plus an extra $1 billion aid package to get them through ‘the transition’.

* In September 2011 UK’s Channel 4 produced a Dispatches documentary investigating Tony Blair’s financial frolics in the Middle East.