Andrew was waiting when we emerged from the airport into the warm sweep and mosquitoes of the Dakar night. He drove us along the coast road, the Atlantic waves lashing the shore beside us, to begin another new life. But we watched the bombs landing in Iraq and we watched “the situation.” It is hard to let go of Jerusalem. Of all the lives we had lived so far, Jerusalem was the one that clung to us and that we took away with us when we left.We felt the shadow of Jerusalem and found that even the sand-filled wind followed us. Now it had a different name—the hamarteen instead of the hamseem—but it was the same breath of yellow dust and it covered us with the same longing.
Even far away in Africa the situation was there in front of us. Andrew had hidden from it but we brought it back to him. The children’s new teacher asked where we had come from and frowned at the answer: the war, Iraq, dead Muslims, rumors— “lived in Israel?” Senegalese pilgrims coming back from the Haj were full of brotherhood, and angry. The ebullient head of UNICEF in West Africa heard that we had lived in Jerusalem and out came her story: her family one of the thousands who fled their West Jerusalem houses in 1948, her uncle one of more than eighty people killed in the bombing of the King David Hotel by Jewish terrorists.
Not long after we had settled into the quiet of Gorée a couple of miles off the Dakar coast, President George W. Bush paid the island a visit. Gorée is a common pilgrimage for world leaders who pay homage at the main tourist attraction, the House of Slaves, and the islanders were blasé about the visitors who walked among them, talking and pressing flesh: Mitterrand, Mandela, Clinton, Pope Jean Paul II. The coming of Bush was different. It was the Senegalese’s first taste of post-9/11 security, and this time there was no walking among or pressing flesh. At dawn on the day of his visit almost the entire population of the island was herded into pens and held there, hot and thirsty, until the afternoon once the President had left. A privileged few, us included, were locked inside our houses under armed guard. We watched the President’s speech on television, the man himself a few meters away in a place emptied of people, bar security and a few screened guests.
“Today,” he said, on the platform Goréans had built for him near the old rose-stuccoed prison, “we can see the advance of human liberty... after the agonies of slavery.
“But,” he went on in the heat, to the tiny cluster of guests, “the spirit of the slaves did not break. Instead, the spirit of the captors was corrupted... As Christian men and women became blind to the clearest demands of their faith, turning into hypocrites, still they could not crush the desire for freedom... Blacks’ struggle for equality was resisted by the powerful for a long time... But our destination is liberty and justice for all... History moves in the direction of justice, therefore these problems will be overcome... We have,” he concluded, “an untamed fire for justice.”1
Listening to his words transported me straight back to so many conversations with Israelis and Palestinians who had also talked of the desire for freedom, of the same corruption of the occupiers’ spirit, and with the same fire for justice, much of it untamed. There was no escaping Jerusalem.
The occupation persisted. IDF re-invasions, land expropriation, and settlement building continued.2 So did the closures and curfews and the building of the Barrier. And Palestinian violence went on, though diminished: conditions were so grim that most Palestinians’ priority was to improve their daily lives, favoring a permanent ceasefire and the collection of arms from militants.3 Not wanting to lose support, and with many of its leaders assassinated, Hamas imposed another hudna—truce—in February 2005.* Yet since 2001 there had been no return to negotiations. Without government-driven talks to find a solution, Israelis and Palestinians tried negotiating for themselves: in 2003 Ami Ayalon and Sari Nusseibeh put together a plan backed by tens of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian signatures; more Palestinian and Israeli moderates met in Geneva to sign peace accords based on the Taba negotiations.4 Many people abroad welcomed these accords, including US Secretary of State Powell, who was lambasted by American hardliners for encouraging them.5 The international community still had its “road map,” the staged route to peace put together by the Quartet (US, UN, Russia, and EU). Sharon had accepted the road map, but with fourteen crucial qualifying conditions. His successor, Ehud Olmert, declared that Israel’s very future depended on the establishment of a genuinely viable Palestinian state, but not until after he had lost the power to try to effect that reality.6 Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, continued the tradition of falling short of Israeli demands to control Palestinian violence and militias and Qassam rockets; meanwhile the Occupied Territories grew yet poorer and even more desperate.
In the spring of 2004, at the height of criticism of the Separation Barrier’s route and just before the hearing of the International Court of Justice on the Barrier’s legality,7 Sharon had announced a historic decision: the unilateral removal of all Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and four from the West Bank.
“Disengagement,” as it was called, was opposed by those who wanted to keep every inch of the Occupied Territories, and welcomed by some others as a brave first step. More withdrawals would inevitably follow: once started, we would see that dismantling settlements need not lead to civil war between Israelis and the diehard settlers. When the time came (August 15–September 12, 2005), Israeli forces evacuated the remaining settlers with sensitivity and gentleness. The policing of the withdrawal was exemplary.
But others predicted that the plan was to finalize control of the land: by withdrawing from settlements it didn’t want to keep anyway, the government could say it had made painful concessions, point to the inevitable chaos in Gaza after disengagement and thereby hold on to the West Bank indefinitely. Sharon’s gamble was that “the world would be grateful to Israel for quitting Gaza and for a few years at least lessen its pressure for solutions to other territorial demands. Gaza would save the West Bank.”8
Sharon himself explained the strategy: “The Palestinians understand that this plan is, to a great extent,” he said, “the end of their dreams, a very heavy blow to them,”9 and that the “current arrangement [with the Americans] determines for sure that Israel will not return to the 1967 borders” in the West Bank.10 The US administration—Israel’s partner in the disengagement process—changed decades of US policy by accepting previous Israeli expansion into the Occupied Territories. “In the light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers,” said a presidential letter, “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”11
Sharon’s long-time right-hand man, Dov Weisglass, went further, stating that disengagement from Gaza was designed to “freeze” the peace process. “Although by the way the Americans read the situation, the blame fell on the Palestinians, not on us, Arik [Sharon] grasped that this state of affairs could not last, that they wouldn’t leave us alone, wouldn’t get off our case. Time was not on our side... The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns.” And all this “with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.” This was to be “formaldehyde,” he said, for a Palestinian state.12
The day after the withdrawal of settlers from the Gaza Strip Shimon Peres blithely admitted that its 38-year occupation and settlement—and attendant misery for millions of victims—was a “historic mistake.”13 But he also warned that Sharon’s disengagement strategy would only perpetuate the conflict; Israel must provide the Palestinians with a viable and contiguous state and “give up all of the land that it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.” “If you keep 10 percent of the land,” he had admitted, “you keep 100 percent of the conflict.”14
The experience of the Gaza Strip post-disengagement showed that, while the Israeli web of control remains over this unchosen land, no peace plan will bring peace.15 While much of the world celebrated the beginning of new optimism for peace, behind the Gaza Barrier the 1.5 million Palestinian inhabitants were coping with total, asphyxiating closure, exacerbated by a new tactic: terrifying sonic booms breaking the sound barrier overhead throughout the night, night after night.16 The 5,000 settlers and soldiers were gone (so only Palestinian eardrums could be damaged by the tactic); Israeli control remained. Control not only of borders, airspace, and territorial waters, and over all movement of people and goods in and out of the Gaza Strip, but also of the Strip’s electricity, water, gas, and oil, of the collection of customs duties due to the PA, of the issue of Palestinian ID cards and all population data—births, marriages, deaths. All Palestinians must still be registered with the Israeli interior ministry. Following the withdrawal, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and medical NGOs on the Palestinian side appealed to the international community for—at the very least—essential medicines to be allowed into Gaza and for sick patients trapped at the borders in inhuman conditions to be permitted to pass.17 Most of the time, these appeals were ignored, as medicines continued to be blocked.
So much for quitting Gaza. The former head of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, the UN Special Envoy to the Quartet, likened post-disengagement Gaza to a giant prison.18 Nahum Barnea, Israel’s leading commentator and another of those who saw the reality, wrote, “We delude ourselves, that we have disengaged from Gaza, that the occupation is over, that they go their way and we go ours. All we have done is taken our hand out of the cage, leaving the keys in our hands.”19
I went back to Jerusalem as often as I could, and I saw the effects of the freezing process and the political formaldehyde, a fluid used to preserve dead bodies and remnants of the still-born or once-living—Weisglass knew what he was talking about. Life was much improved for Israelis, much worse for Palestinians. I heard from Israelis about the hope that had been ignited by the withdrawals of settlements and of Israelis’ weariness with those settlers who were determined to remain. I saw my friends Jeff and Shoshana, who also talked, though less confidently than President Bush, about history moving in the direction of justice. There were still slivers of the old fears, and the resentments: “I hate being Israeli sometimes, I feel like an animal in a zoo,” said one girl. “People come and look at us to see what we’re doing, what cruel things us Jews are up to now. And they watch us, without understanding.” Israelis felt like an exhibit for the old colonial world, a remnant of those countries’ own dabblings in subjugating other peoples. “Europeans went home after their colonial experiments,” Alison told me. “We have no home but here. And now we’ve built ourselves into a pit with our settlements and it is more dangerous for Jews here in Israel, our refuge, than anywhere else in the world. How ironic is that?”
I sat in a West Jerusalem café with Nahum Barnea and watched Jaffa Road go by: busy, thriving, normal again. Suicide bombings had tailed off, the economy was recovering, tourists were back, the hotels all full. People were getting on with their lives: the fear that had been so overwhelming only a few years before was in retreat. We talked about Arafat, who had died in October 2004, about Sharon, felled by a stroke in January 2006, and of Israel’s genuine fears about Iran developing nuclear technology.
“This is our worry now, not the Palestinians,” said Nahum. “As far as that conflict goes, we have normality again, and that’s pretty good.” Other Israeli friends talked of the same freedom from fear, the same welcome return to normality, and of the majority view that the future looked better than for some time. Many now gave the situation no thought at all.
In East Jerusalem and Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank, there was no normality. As for Gaza, life in the Strip had been desperate enough in the autumn of 2005, but it was to get far worse. Under absolute control, there could be nothing approaching normality. And in the West Bank the cementing of Israeli control continued, seemingly faster than ever, with more settlement building, more roads for Israelis only, while for Palestinians there were continuing raids, house demolitions, land requisitions, and still tightening closures. Despite all assurances to the contrary, the numbers of barriers to movement in the West Bank increased. Even when some checkpoints were removed under international pressure, others replaced them, in greater numbers. By August 2005, the number of “obstacles to movement” in the West Bank numbered 376; by May 2009 the number was 634.20
For Palestinians, conditions were worse than ever: people less able to move, more cut off, more restricted, more imprisoned and, above all, increasingly denied their holy city. And all this more unseen than ever. Again and again the words of the young journalist and artist telling a group of friends of the latest unreported IDF raids on Ramallah came back to me: “It’s easier to reach heaven than the end of the street.” Her pale and beautiful Semitic face wore the strain of closure all too clearly. But all this was screened off from the rest of the world.
And then, just as Israelis were enjoying their normality, Palestinians’ despair brought Islamic fundamentalists to power. In exactly the same way that moderate Israelis had complained in February 2001 that Palestinian violence had given them Sharon, now moderate Palestinians complained that Israeli violence and policies had just led to the election of their own extremists: Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian legislative assembly.* These moderates pointed out that a majority of Palestinians had voted against Hamas, and that the party’s victory was more of a vote against the corruption of the PA and its failure to deliver services let alone an agreement with Israel. But there was Hamas—in power—and Israelis now found themselves facing a democratically elected organization with a bloody terrorist past and a sworn opposition to Israel’s very existence. All this at a time when Iran’s president was questioning the Holocaust and had called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”
“Where’s the big surprise?” asked one Fatah member in Jerusalem. We were sitting in a café next to the Damascus Gate, drinking fruit juice that the owner had crushed for us from the baskets of oranges spilling over in the corner. “We’ve had nearly forty years of occupation. We’ve tried everything—international law, nonviolent resistance, violence, and force. Nothing has brought us our rights, our freedom.” He grew angry. “The opposite. At every step Israel puts up new demands and conditions— now it insists we become democratic—and all the while it carries on taking yet more of our land and making our lives unbearable, unlivable. And what does the West do? Says little and does nothing.” Offering me more juice, he went on, “Instead everything is our fault, and they, the US and the EU, arrogantly tell us what to do and how often we ‘disappoint’ them. All this builds up the Islamists and undermines the moderates—Fatah, Abbas—who’re punished for not protecting Israelis from our violence but are not allowed to protect us against Israeli violence. Of course our moderates have no hope of being heard.
“So we hold elections—we shouldn’t be amazed when the winners are those seen as the greatest resisters to the occupation, the least corrupt and most likely to do something about social conditions. We made our democratic choice, but we’re told it doesn’t suit Israel or the West. Israel says: ‘Look, here’s proof that Palestinians don’t recognize Israel,’ cuts all contact and stops handing over our money—taxes that they collect ‘for us.’” I remained silent. He was venting the resentment of so many Palestinians.
In joining the democratic electoral mechanism, as opposed to boycotting the elections as it had in 1996, Hamas had made an all-important statement about abandoning the tactics of violence and signing up to the political process. Instead of embracing that shift and building on Hamas’s new political responsibilities, the international community declared that, even though it deemed the election “free and fair,” it did not approve of the electorate’s choice and would now seek to overturn it.
Astounded, the Palestinian people watched as the international community clapped sanctions on them for electing Hamas, sanctions described by the UN special rapporteur as not only “the first time an occupied people have been so treated” but also “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.”21 And all for exercising democratically (and certifiably fairly) their right to vote for a party that happened to be one of which Israel and its friends disapproved.
In our old village Maha was as cheerful as ever, but her sister’s Jerusalem house had been demolished and the family now lived in a tent against the cold, and all the while the new Israeli settlements in the valley were surging ahead.22 Maha’s daughter was hoping to be a doctor, but how, she asked, was she to study now that their university—on the West Bank side of the Wall—was cut off from Jerusalemites? “Who knows how often student permits, if we can get them, will let us through.” She had no choice but to start learning Hebrew and to apply to the Hebrew University. Ghassan, the computer engineer, was still struggling to see his wife and son, separated from them by the Wall. Even praying was still difficult: in an East Jerusalem Friday rainstorm I sat trapped in a car while mounted Israeli police charged down Muslims trying unsuccessfully to reach al-Haram al-Sharif to pray. Two drenched little boys looked at me from behind their father’s sheltering hands, stepping back to avoid the horses’ clattering hooves.
Zahi, still denied Israeli customs clearance for his own company’s equipment (it had now been sitting at the docks for more than five years) talked of the thousands of tons of produce, including millions of flowers blooming for Valentine’s Day in Europe, all rotting, blocked for weeks at the one gate, Karni, where produce could leave Gaza. Ostensibly there was a bombers’ tunnel underneath Karni, but nothing had been found after three separate attempts to locate it.23 “The gates are closed against us more frequently than ever now—especially when there’s a crop harvested and ready to sell. We can be economically strong, if only we are allowed to get our produce to a market.” On the way to Ramallah I saw the new “terminals” to control Palestinian movement, with cattle-crush turnstiles just like a market.
Inside the city, beyond the turnstiles and the lines of imploring women, my friends and colleagues were less free to move than ever before.24 They were increasingly filled with anguish, at the closures, and the loss of Jerusalem, and despair—among some—at the ascendancy of the Islamists. Career women wondered what restrictions Hamas would now place on them, and why the West had undermined civil society programs, thereby encouraging Hamas. I drove a rented car, fearful but unhindered, through the waving green flags and heady shouts of a Hamas demonstration in Manara Square, and then on to Bili’in, a village to the west where Israeli peace activists stood side by side with Palestinians protesting at yet more land being taken from them. The tear gas flew and the police cudgels wheeled about our heads and the crowds went slowly home. On my way back I gave a lift to a settler called Yisrael who explained again that the West Bank is all Jewish land and that Palestinian resistance is all just about jihad—the desire to destroy—nothing more.
I joined a party of North American clergy being shown the Barrier by Jeff Halper in his peace-activist role. We began at Abu Dis, where the Wall stands across the middle of the main road, severing one half of the community from the other. The bus disgorged us at the stump of road that once swept through the town and on down toward the Dead Sea. These are ancient routes, ancient names. One of the sawn-off districts is al-Azariah, a corruption of “Lazarus.” Palestinians jested that Jesus would be hard put to raise Lazarus now, with the Wall in His way.
The North American clergymen looked up and gasped at the structure dividing Palestinians from Palestinians and at the wraiths of the once-thriving community. We looked across the Palestinian valley to the Forest of Peace and the village where Andrew and I had lived and where Maha still lived, at the work going ahead on the new Jewish settlement on Palestinian land. Another settlement would soon fill the near side of the valley. Israeli West Jerusalem was far away to the right, over the next hill. The clergymen, having heard the argument that the Barrier was supposed to divide Israelis from Palestinians, were mystified.
Jeff responded in his kindly way, explaining that the Wall was not just about security but also about Israel holding on to occupied Palestinian land, including all of Jerusalem.
As we stood at the foot of the Wall I heard the clerics’ disbelief, so characteristic of those who witness the facts on the ground: “How do families on that side get to the hospital? How do they get supplies, food, fuel? How do they get to see their relatives? The convent here—how do the sisters look after the community now? How does anyone... What do the kids... where do... This,” the Canadian priest said, “is an obscenity.”
And the justification of an American Israeli in the group: “You don’t understand terror, not unless you live here. The Palestinians want to kill us. They’re terrorists. It’s as simple as that.”
“What, all three million of them?” asked another cleric.
The Israeli was offended: “Like I said, you don’t understand. Nothing will stop the terror because it’s in their nature, but the Israeli left will never admit it.”
In front of the Wall you confront both the fear and the agenda. The Wall is both protection and annexation. It is the Israeli dilemma in solid concrete: the longing for security and the desire to hold on to the land and the need to maintain the Jewish state and to remain democratic—and the impossibility of having all this and peace with the people who share that land.
In the gargantuan Wall and its scale and blankness you see the desire to block out the suicide bombings that have taken so many lives. The slabs of Wall are memorials unwritten, monstrous blind tombstones, reminders of the ruin wrought by the killings. On a background of racism and misunderstanding the killings have etched lines with the colors of cruelty and brutality.
The Wall is a testament to cynical alliances25 and unquestioning support: those who might not have agreed with settlement-building but who nevertheless refused to criticize Israeli policy or to admit that one day the settlements would entrap both peoples; those who failed to encourage Israel to make the most of a Palestinian partner who had not only bought into the two-state solution but could sell it to his people, or to welcome the Arab League’s peace plan; those who said that any objections to Israel’s expansionism were an attempt to deny Israel’s “right to exist”— even while this expansionism threatened Israel’s future security and denied Palestine’s right to exist.
And the Wall is also a winding monument to the tens of thousands of lives broken by its route, those of the Palestinians now consigned to poverty and bitter dependence. There were many ways this was put into effect. In October 2003, for example, the OC Central Command declared a new “closed military area,” comprising all the land between the Barrier and the Green Line. By military decree 90,000 dunams of Palestinian land were instantly rendered out of bounds for their owners—unless, that is, they applied for, and were granted, a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration. Villagers were told that if they were to be away from home overnight—as many were, for study or for work, nurses on night shifts, for example—they could be defined as “not permanent,” and lose their right to live in their own homes. If they chose not to bow to the new permits, they would not be allowed to leave their village at all. Or, if they did leave, they would not be allowed to return.
By taking a scalpel to thousands of acres of the best Palestinian agricultural land—the “fertile basin” of the West Bank—the Barrier, or Wall, cuts away these lands from the Occupied Territories. “Behind the separation fence are thousands of personal tragedies, which are entirely invisible to the Israeli public,” wrote an Israeli commentator. “This kind of occupation perhaps doesn’t kill. Not right away, anyway,” he wrote. “But it does destroy the soul.” In the verdict of a right-wing settler, “The fence is a death sentence for the Palestinians... This fence is a mistake, it will only exacerbate the problem... you are creating more hatred instead of the possibility of living together.”26
The clerics and I moved away from the part of the Wall where some of my Israeli friends had recently protested alongside throngs of Palestinians. “The Wall crept up on us,” one Israeli friend had told me. “Our government never admitted what it was really doing, and now suddenly it’s here in the middle of East Jerusalem and carving up the Palestinians’ lives and taking their land from them.” I pictured my friends arm in arm with long-robed Palestinians and other Israeli peace campaigners, keeping one wary eye on their own troops.
The group and I then climbed to a high point overlooking the settlements growing around East Jerusalem: the spacious Jewish areas, with their clean lines and neat rows, red roofs and green gardens abutting the crumpled Palestinian areas, with the Palestinians denied the right to develop their own city or build housing units for their own growing families,* and forced out in search of cheaper accommodation. The Wall was blocking Palestinians out of Jerusalem in perpetuity.
Beyond the more heavily built-up parts of the city, the Barrier was descending like a giant cookie cutter to slice more Palestinian areas out of Jerusalem and out of their society and kinship, dropping more steel loops around villages, with an exit, or maybe two, and if those inside could get permission to pass through one exit, they might make their way to the next, and eventually to Ramallah, or to the nearest town with services, or to school. Some of the new but as yet unevacuated islands would connect to other islands by way of tunnels burrowing under settler roads. Ten-minute drives had become senseless loops of 20 or 25 miles in the wrong direction, with sometimes fatal consequences. And there would be three gates— “terminals”—to allow the few permit-holding Palestinians into Jerusalem.
“How long,” asked one of the reverend tourists, “could anyone continue living like this?”
As we looked at the Wall and the settlements, the settler-only roads, the industrial areas built to keep the land-robbed Palestinians busy, and listened to Jeff explaining their effects and the severing of Jerusalem, the other Israeli, distressed, protested: “None of this is true. None of what Jeff is telling you is true,” he said.
“But we’re seeing it,” said the clergymen, “there it is.”
There, stretching away into the distance, was the occupation’s matrix of concrete and control. The settlements, the roads, the “terminals” and the Wall were like a net thrown out over the hills and valleys of the West Bank, and the Palestinian areas choked in between. “There it all is,” said one of the clergymen. “Right there in front of all of us.”
Right in front of us, visible but unseen, is the web of concrete and denial that, by keeping control of the land and its resources, makes real peace for Israelis and Palestinians impossible. In March 2006 former US President Jimmy Carter observed that, “The preeminent obstacle to peace is Israel’s colonization of Palestine.” Noting that settlement building had expanded after 1977, despite this policy’s condemnation by Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and especially under President Clinton, regardless of his “strong efforts to promote peace,” Carter observed that Israel’s best official offer to the Palestinians so far was to withdraw a mere 20 percent of the settlements. He also warned that the “5 percent” figure given for the amount of land taken up by existing settlements, “is grossly misleading, with surrounding areas taken or earmarked for expansion, roadways joining settlements with each other and to Jerusalem, and wide aerial swathes providing water, sewage, electricity, and communications. This intricate honeycomb divides the entire West Bank into multiple fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable.”27
Like the American clergymen, I wondered how long Palestinians could put up with such constraints on their lives. Sumud is strong: despite the conditions, they are determined not to give up, saying, “We’ve learned the lessons of ‘48; we’ll never leave our lands again.” I heard from Israeli friends, as I had heard so often, that progress toward peace is being made. “We’re doing really well—why does the world give us such a hard time when we’re finally getting somewhere? Things are much better than they used to be—if only the Palestinians would face up to their responsibilities.”
“The Palestinians will have tunnels to connect between their areas. They’ll have their cities. And factories to work in.” My Israeli friend, a diplomat, always did his best to look on the bright side. “So they’ll have to drive around this settlement bloc or that settlement bloc to get across the valley—that’s not so bad.” I was looking doubtful. “Of course the gates will always be manned, some of them. If a Palestinian needs to get a sick child to the hospital, you bet the soldiers will let them through. There won’t even be any soldiers most places.” He preempted me, quickly: “And they’ll get used to not having East Jerusalem. The Arabs lost. They just have to accept that.”
But for how long, ask other Israelis, those who know what life is like in the Occupied Territories, for how long can the Palestinians accept their gated, shut-down lives and be kept quiescent? One Israeli demographer spoke of the future candidly in an interview: “When 2.5 million [Palestinians] live in a closed-off Gaza... those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam... So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the [Israeli] boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”28
We returned to New York from Gorée in 2006. The situation remained unaddressed. The following year, 2007, the fortieth year of the Israeli occupation, began with ongoing intra-Palestinian skirmishes that looked like the onset of civil war.
Alongside continuing human rights abuses, the humanitarian suffering deepened to crisis level: nearly half the population of the Gaza Strip was food insecure and increasingly malnourished. Strikes were held in protest at the sanctions, and at Israel refusing to hand over Palestinian tax revenues: government employees went without salary and the supplies with which to work for months on end. An Israeli human rights NGO reported that since the settlers were evacuated, Israel’s control over Gaza “has tightened in ways that have crippled civilian life.”29
People used to tell me that part of the problem was the vitriolic hatred, dating back decades, between Arafat and Sharon—the two archetypes of the old way of thinking, the old, violent way of doing things. By the spring of 2006, one was dead, the other moribund. New elections had brought new people to power on both sides.
Yet the numbers of dead continued to rise. In 2006, Palestinians killed six IDF soldiers and seventeen Israeli civilians: thirteen in the two suicide bombings of that year. In the same year Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, 141 of them children. Palestinian militants fired hundreds of primitive Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel, killing two Israelis and bringing down thousands of IDF missiles in return, as well as full-scale re-invasions (e.g., Operation Summer Rain in June 2006, Operation Autumn Clouds in November 2006).* Gaza’s infrastructure was pounded and its sole electricity plant destroyed when one Israeli soldier was kidnapped and two killed during a military raid. The destruction left much of the Gaza Strip with no electricity—even to pump water or power hospitals—for months.
The world paid little attention to the suffering in Gaza, even less when Hezbollah provoked Israel by an attack from across the Lebanese border in July 2006. Israel responded on a massive scale, bringing down rocket attacks on northern Israel. And this at a time when Iran was cranking up its anti-Israel language, its Holocaust denial, and, most ominously, its uranium enrichment program. Ordinary Israelis grew increasingly concerned. Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking Israelis’ deepest fears, warned: “It is 1938, Iran is Germany, and it is about to arm itself with nuclear weapons.”
Late in President George Bush’s second term, the US administration, mired in Iraq, looked about for a policy success in the Middle East as well as for support from its Arab allies, and the Israel–Palestine issue became for a time a focus of attention. American plans did not include Hamas, however, and Hamas played into this by refusing the Quartet’s demands to “recognize Israel,” “renounce violence,” and “adhere to agreements already signed by the PLO.” Pointing out that no reciprocal demands were being made on Israel, and no delineation of Israel’s final borders was proposed, Hamas continued to refuse.
The US armed and trained Fatah forces in preparation for a civil war in which Fatah would defeat Hamas, thus setting aside the unwanted, by the US, outcome of their push for democratic elections in the region: a radical Islamist party in government. Civil conflict duly began in late 2006, with more than 90 Palestinians killed, mostly in Gaza. Saudi Arabia stepped in to halt the killings and forced Fatah and Hamas to form a unity government. President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal signed the Mecca Agreement, angering both the US administration and Israel, for whom intra-Palestinian violence was apparently more congenial than the prospect of a Palestinian national unity government.
As usual, the drama of events helped silence the underlying reality: the steady erasing of a potentially workable Palestinian state. But there were significant voices raised in alarm, both in Israel and abroad. Two American professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, opened a new debate on the role of the Israel lobby in US foreign policy. Ex-US president Jimmy Carter warned of the choices in a new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, saying bluntly: “It will be a tragedy—for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world—if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail.”30 Campaigns of vilification were launched in the US against both the professors and Carter. Critics of Israel’s policies were increasingly accused of damaging Israel, putting Israel’s very existence at risk, and anti-Semitism. Most strongly criticized were Jewish voices pleading for Israel to consider the consequences of creating a “failed state” on its borders.
In return visits to Jerusalem I heard Israelis say, “Everyone knows what the solution will be”: borders based on the Geneva Accord, the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Plan, and the Clinton parameters; both capitals in Jerusalem, and a mutually agreeable land swap to compensate for Israel keeping some settlements. It was just, people said, a question of how to get to that point and of how much damage was done before that inevitable point was reached. “You only have to look at Gaza now,” said one moderate, “to see what we’re creating in the West Bank.” The Gaza Strip, purged of moderation, was seen as an uncontrolled ferment of terror, armed via tunnels supplying weapons from Egypt.
Despite the Arab League’s renewal of the Arab Peace Plan, offering peace and full recognition in return for withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, Israelis’ profound insecurities were now even more sharpened. But most Israelis, having been through so much, were unwilling to trust Palestinians, especially after quitting Gaza and being rewarded with Qassam rockets in return. The Palestinians I spoke to, in their growing despair, warned me that the Israelis had a chance with Abbas but gave him no concessions that would convince Palestinians that they could trust Israel—so the Israelis got Hamas. “Now they refuse to deal with Hamas and they’ll get al-Qaeda.” Killing hope and moderation, they said, had opened the door to the worst sort of extremists.
Palestinians I spoke to talked endlessly about separation and barriers in every aspect of their lives, about being cut off from the next village, their family, their local town; about the hundreds of IDF military raids, the almost daily bombings or killings by IDF assassination squads; about more and more Palestinians being denied access to their homes, more new measures to keep Palestinians abroad out of the West Bank and to put barriers between family members, even spouses. Thousands of Palestinians, and thousands of foreign citizens married to Palestinians, often businessmen, overwhelmingly moderate and pro-peace, now faced being permanently separated from their children, spouses, and enterprises because of new policies to refuse them entry to the West Bank.
The Wall continued to wend its way through Palestinian territory, cutting off 42 villages from their lands; Bethlehem, throttled by an eight-meter wall that chokes its life away, its water fiercely rationed as it is the rest of the West Bank; and Jerusalem, with its mosques, hospitals, churches, and businesses, now impossible to reach for most Palestinians. But most alarming were the settlements—expanding still, despite the pleas for peace, and even as it was revealed that the majority are built on private Palestinian land, and therefore illegal even under Israeli law.* And the settlers from those settlements were increasingly violent against Palestinian farmers, villagers, and schoolchildren, and increasingly unrestrained by Israeli forces.
On my visits back, I met teachers who had resorted, like so many Palestinians, to subsistence farming on the plots of land remaining to them. I met farmers who had been promised access to their lands on the other side of the Wall, but who were denied the (Israeli) permits to pass through. “Even when we do get permits,” they explained, “the gates stay locked most of the time, and they don’t open them when they say they will.” And Israeli peace campaigners try to help the farmers get through the gates but the soldiers say “no,” or confiscate their hard-won permits, on any pretext. One Israeli activist said: “No one can understand what it’s like, not unless they see it. It’s a living death for them. But how many of us are prepared to accept that they deserve anything more?”
Despite its severity, the “diet” Dov Weisglass had outlined in 2006 was not working. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet,” he had said, “but not to make them die of hunger.” The hunger was designed to persuade Palestinians to force Hamas to change its attitude toward Israel and submit to Israel’s terms, or to throw Hamas out of government. Gazans, however, are no different from any other people. During this time, we had dinner in an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side with Ethan Bronner, a New York Times correspondent, his Israeli wife, and another Israeli, one of my closest friends. My husband, a historian by training, asked the rest of us: “Can any of you think of a nation—or even an individual for that matter—that has ever become more moderate as a result of being starved? Could anyone really imagine that a people who have suffered so much, as we all agree those in Gaza have, will become less angry, or less extreme, after being deliberately made hungry by the same people they attribute their suffering to? What this policy will do is make people more extreme—and believe me, it will help ensure that Hamas stays in power.” No one demurred.
The outcome of Palestinian civil strife was the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas in June 2007 and the collapse of the Mecca Agreement’s Palestinian national unity government. The Israeli government declared Gaza Strip an “enemy entity” and limited still further the already inadequate amounts of supplies—despite signed agreement—they would permit into Gaza. Soon Israel began limiting fuel to the bare minimum to keep the Strip’s only power plant operating at subsistence level. Power was limited to a few hours each day. As the inflow of all supplies slowed, the humanitarian situation became “alarming,” according to ICRC, an organization not known for exaggeration.
By January 2008, the economic blockade was all too clearly ineffective at halting the firing of Qassam rockets fired both indiscriminately and in response to ongoing raids and military incursions in the West Bank as well as Gaza. The increase in Qassams duly led to Israel sealing the border completely. The tunnels connecting Egypt and Gaza that were the conduits for both military and humanitarian supplies were used to capacity. Within a few days the world watched extraordinary news footage as tens of thousands of Palestinians walked from Gaza into Egypt through breaches in the fence that normally held them captive (militants had planted explosives to demolish parts of the barrier to let the people out) and then returned laden with essential, and non-essential, supplies. After ten days, Egypt sealed up the breach with steel and barbed wire, and the Palestinians had to revert to using tunnels to augment their scant supplies.
In June 2008, Hamas signed a truce with Israel with both parties agreeing to abjure violence against each other. Hamas would stop firing rockets at Israeli territory and prevent militants from doing the same, and Israel would cease military incursions and targeted assassinations. Although by Israeli intelligence agencies’ assessments Hamas had performed well, IDF attacks continued, and on November 4, 2008, the military invaded Gaza, killing six members of Hamas. (This went virtually unreported in the US.) Nevertheless, Hamas offered to renew the six-month hudna (truce) if Israel would ease the blockade of Gaza. Israel refused. The blockade worsened.
By the end of December 2008, Israelis were exasperated by the nagging fear of incoming rockets fired from the Gaza Strip. Sixteen Israelis, four of them children, had been killed by Qassam rockets since attacks began in 2001. Over 4,500 rockets had been fired, terrorizing the population within their striking distance. Many had fled.
By the end of the IDF’s response to the militants’ rockets, Operation Cast Lead, in which Gazans came under fire from the unleashed force of Israel’s arsenal, but with no option to flee, more than 1,400 Palestinians had been killed. More than 300 of the dead were children. Thirteen Israelis were killed, four by friendly fire. Six months after the offensive, thousands of Gazans remained without running water and homeless, with Israel refusing to allow entry of basic foodstuffs like pasta and other essential supplies into Gaza, let alone building materials to rehouse the bombed and homeless. No exports were allowed out. And rockets were still falling on the Israeli town of Sderot, though in diminished numbers.
Operation Cast Lead looked different from New York. The coverage we saw and read there appeared to be that of a wholly different war from the war being described by email, blog, local correspondents, and any media other than most American sources. This was nothing new; it was the filter through which people in the US are normally shown the conflict. The filter filtered not just the military campaigns, it also distorted the ongoing policies engendering Palestinians’ despair and preventing peace, if any of that was covered at all. The accelerating campaign to cement Israel’s hold over East Jerusalem,31 for example, which threatens that aspect of final status negotiations, was covered in the New York Times by a story about the creation of parks out of “wastelands” in East Jerusalem without mention of Israel’s policies that prevent Palestinian communities from developing their city.32
It was not just the details of the military campaigns: the restraints on media coverage, the justifications of self-defense, etc., the build-up and ultimate trigger point provided so obligingly, and unseeingly, by Palestinian militants, the blocking of ambulances and relief to the wounded, the rewriting, both at the time and afterward, or the block on independent investigation of possible war crimes. It had all happened before, most dramatically with the attacks on the West Bank, the IDF’s Operation Defensive Shield, in April 2002. Only this time there were so many more dead and injured, and the extent of devastation was so much greater. Gazans had been bombed many times in the past but now the outcries abroad against the reports of the IDF firing on ambulances, shelling hospitals, using white phosphorus in civilian areas, and of whole families left to watch each other die in bombed-out buildings were loud and impassioned, as were the voices raised in denial, defense, and justification. Truckloads of medical supplies, many assembled by Israeli humanitarian groups, were sent through the gates into the Strip to help the wounded, but this only emphasized that the recipients were a people locked inside a veritable cage, dependent upon those whom they regard as their jailers to feed and supply them, and unable to find any shelter when those who hold the keys decide to bomb them. Not only unable to find any shelter, unlike any other war-affected population the world over, they were unable to flee the bombardment, owing to the barbed wire and minefields that hem them in on three sides (the Israeli naval blockade taking care of the fourth). And predictably, the passivity of the international community was so destructively the same.*
And considerable resentment on both sides exists toward the international community. One Israeli diplomat pointed out the self-perpetuating nature of the situation, singling out those on the international peace conference circuit “whose career is built on the conflict and therefore don’t want it solved because they’ll be out of a job. Much of the international machine is like this—have you thought how many people will be out of a job when the conflict is over—it may be only subconscious, but it is a factor.” Greg, a Palestinian political scientist, was more specific, “There’s a failure of international law, yes. So many Palestinians say, for example, ‘After the International Court of Justice ruled that the Wall was illegal, we ask—what happened? All 25 members of the EU endorsed the ruling, but Israel carries on building the Wall, and settlements are expanding faster than ever, and the economy’s worse than ever because of internal closure.’ You can understand the guy in the street saying, ‘Look, when will you ever understand, this thing you call the language of law and justice, it doesn’t apply to us. The only time people see us is when we make noise.’”
The smokescreen suited us all because it is too uncomfortable to contemplate what we are watching—helping—set up. Easier to concentrate on more immediate problems.
But hiding behind smokescreens does not help Israelis or Palestinians. After two Intifadas most Israelis are convinced that the occupation is not good for them and they want an end to it.
One balmy May morning I drove to Ramallah to see my friend Rita before leaving the “situation” once more, as it is only too easy to do if you have a foreign home to go to. The air in the city was strangely still, despite the heavy bustle of people and vehicles. Rita looked out of her office window at the near hills and the Israeli settlements spreading over them. Music was playing across the street. She reminded me of the inequality between the sides and of how well it was hidden. Of course, everyone wants peace. “But, before peace can come we need justice, and the formula that everyone talks about in the West is peace without justice. There can be no peace without justice: recognizing that my mother’s narrative is actually correct, that we were kicked out of our homes, that she wasn’t lying. Saying ‘I’m sorry.’ And then we can look at issues in rational ways so that, for example, the ‘right of return’ is not actually to Haifa, or the village of our forefathers, but a symbolic and practical one.”
She was echoing the words of an Israeli friend of mine, now a member of the Knesset, at dinner in Tel Aviv the previous night. He had gone further: “Israel—the government—is not yet willing to recognize that the Palestinians are here to stay,” he said. “It’s carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing, and is unwilling to look within, to realize there’s a problem inside Israeli society. As long as the US supports this, it is, ironically, giving support for the destruction of Israel—and the Israel lobby is certainly not to the benefit of Israelis. The Palestinians gave up so much already and even that is not good enough. They at least have learned, painfully, that Israel wants land, not peace.”
“Only an outside force for peace can work, and an outside force means the Americans. I tell you, American inaction has been criminal to Israel, and anyone involved in this obstruction of peace is doing harm to Israel, and to Israeli kids, and to Israeli soldiers and to Israeli mothers. Bush, Elliot Abrams, all the big shots were part of this bloodbath of Jews and Arabs. As long as we have the American shield, we can just tell the world: ‘go to hell.’ It’s not just a tragedy, it’s a sin.” His anger reverberated, but was cut off by the appearance of our waitress, who recognized my friend, and they bantered flirtatiously until he asked her, “What about the future, what do you think?” Her young face fell, and she said sullenly, “There is no future,” and walked away.
In Ramallah a flurry of cultural events was in evidence: concerts, plays, operas, and visiting choirs, Mozart’s Requiem. “Yes,” said Rita, “it’s about solidarity, the outside world coming to perform, saying we know you’re here, suffering, but you’re not unheard.” She described a production of The Magic Flute: the Ramallah audience was mixed, some were long-time opera lovers, but many others came for the solidarity, knowing nothing. “The place was packed, and there was a standing ovation like I’ve never seen after any opera anywhere in the world. There was such heady excitement, such exhilaration that events of such good quality were happening again, right here in Ramallah.”
“Siege, isolation, incapacitation, we all feel them. A small proportion of us go into a black area of stress-related disease, but the rest of us are both highly distressed and highly resilient. We depend on each other; resilience is collective. Every day is highly stressful, every day you wake up and you don’t know if you can get your child to school, if you can get yourself to work. In the afternoon you don’t know if your child will get home safely. It’s grinding. My way out is music. I don’t know what I’d have done without music, and YouTube—there’s this one tenor from the fifties...”
I left Ramallah after visiting Rita and a couple of other equally resilient friends, and drove the short distance back to Jerusalem. There I caught up with a number of Israelis working tirelessly, and despite real dangers, to end the occupation. One, Amiel, was a professor at Hebrew University who still carries an IDF bullet inside him. He had been demonstrating, peacefully, against settler attacks on Palestinian farmers in the West Bank when he was shot, but was unable to bring the shooter to justice because of a “lack of evidence.” Another, Ezra, was a plumber who was later found guilty of “assaulting” two Israeli police officers while in the West Bank defending a Palestinian farmer’s home from demolition by the IDF. When 140,000 letters in his defense and supporting his anti-occupation activities were sent to the Israeli Ministry of Justice, the only justification that could be found for his accusal and conviction was that he “provokes local residents.” For these “provocations,” always nonviolent, he has been repeatedly threatened, beaten, and arrested, and even outed as a gay man.
Mikhail, someone else I went to see, was a clean-cut, handsome man in his late twenties. A former IDF officer, he is now an official in Breaking the Silence, an organization that strives to explain the problems underpinning the conflict as they, the fighters on the front line, have encountered them. “Israelis, and maybe the international community, are not aware of the gravity of the problems, not only on the Palestinian side, but also on the Israeli side. Like, what does ‘occupation’ really mean? It’s much deeper than any map. A majority of Israelis don’t understand the meaning, or aren’t even aware, of the facts. I was very much the victimizer, part of the ‘shooting and crying.’ It’s often said that we have no choice. That’s just not true—we’re obligated to refuse if an order goes against our conscience. The whole idea of this country was so that we could be in charge of our own destinies. I want to burst the bubble that I was sent to defend Israel—I wasn’t. Whether we like it or not it’s our call—we’re the occupiers.” He smiled wearily, adding, “Obviously it’s a bit more complicated getting out than it was getting in.”
The author, lawyer, and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh, whom I had visited in Ramallah, emailed me to say he was irritated by a conversation I had told him about with Amos Oz. The writer had been eloquent to me about “the wonderful spectacle of debate in Israel; the arguments about the real significance of Jewish heritage, morality, and political and metaphysical good and evil.” It was never just about land, he said. “The occupation only evolved the argument. There are as many blueprints and master plans as political individuals—that’s the beauty of it. There was never the one dream of the founding fathers and mothers. When I look at what we have, I see a warm-hearted, temperamental, materialistic, noisy and passionate people, culturally vivacious, bursting with creativity, guilt-ridden, and endlessly argumentative. I love it. Self-righteous and hypocritical, feeling sorry for itself—about the occupation—yes, our share in it.” But Oz’s recommendations of economic assistance for the Palestinians were characteristic, in Raja’s view, of “a classic liberal’s position akin to a white South African during apartheid proposing that the South African situation could be resolved through keeping everything as is [the apartheid system] and just infusing enough money to make everyone happy. It is so typical of people who want to feel good while remaining faithful to the establishment; refusing to see the cause of the problem and looking for solutions that retain the evil edifice while appealing to the largesse of others (America) to finance the poor and silence their resistance.” He bemoaned the widely touted theory that, “With money they will forget their inferior status, and what they lost, and all will live together happily ever after. It is simply so annoying. In a way regimes such as Israel’s would not be able to survive without the likes of Oz constantly beautifying all that is ugly and blurring the truth by fine distracting words.”
My final journey in the West Bank was to the south. “If you want to see the future for Israel,” Mikhail had advised me, “go to Hebron.” Here, Genesis tells us, Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah as a burial site for his family; Abraham was buried there, as were Isaac and Jacob. “Hebron,” Mikhail said, “is where it all began.”
And here, he said, is how it might all end as well: “The settlements are destroying Israel.” I wondered what he meant, since Hebron is almost unique—apart from East Jerusalem—in that Israeli settlers in Hebron are living in the heart of a Palestinian community.
An Israeli friend, Ari, offered me a ride. We drove toward the ancient city through the fertile West Bank valleys along roads prohibited or restricted for Palestinians, past the 24-foot-high wall strangling Bethlehem, beside perfect vineyards, laden donkeys, and scores of young children.
Once inside the city we visited a vast Herodian edifice, the Tomb of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and so on). Inside, a young Israeli soldier sat awkwardly on a metal chair, absorbed in his hand-held electronic game. He replied cheerfully to my friend’s questions: no, he didn’t know anything about the tombs he was guarding. Around him, other Jews prayed alone or in groups, whispering their invocations. Beyond a dividing wall, Muslims were also praying.
Outside in the warm spring air all was quiet. Unearthly quiet. A couple of Israeli policemen at their watch post eyed Ari and me with weary stares until we tried to leave by way of the wrong exit. “No, no, that’s for Palestinians,” they objected.
My companion, who was 82, explained in Hebrew that there could be no harm and we would end up in the same place even if we did go the “Jewish” way around. They were immovable. We walked around.
As we did, we saw that the street was boarded-up and dead. “This can’t be the street I remember,” said Ari, and he headed off to ask a soldier, holed up in a concrete pillbox, the name of the street. The soldier had no idea: “I don’t know the name of the street. All I know is that the Arabs have to walk on one side, the Jews on the other. And I have to keep them apart.”
But it was the street that Ari remembered. “They’ve killed it,” he said, shocked. “They’ve killed this town.”
We walked through more empty streets, every storefront shuttered in metal and bolted, splashed with burns and graffiti. It was unnerving, standing in the stilled meat market, knowing that not long ago there was a noisy community of thousands living, working, and thriving here. But now it was empty and abandoned, partly demolished. Even more unnerving, in the stillness, was knowing that there were many unseen eyes—and cameras—on us: settlers wondering whose “side” we were on, Palestinians locked inside their houses, soldiers knowing they have to keep everyone apart, and international observers—officials, church groups—who watch and monitor, but cannot intervene.
The revered Palestinian negotiator and physician Dr. Haider Abdel Shafi had told me how he had lived in Hebron as a child and would light candles on the Sabbath for the Jewish family who lived next door. The Jewish and Palestinian communities of Hebron maintained essentially good relations until the advent of Zionism, of which the Jews of Hebron were not a part. But in 1929, 67 Jews were massacred by Palestinians in the ongoing wave of nationalist struggle taking place in Palestine at the time. The remainder of the Jewish Hebron community was evacuated by the ruling British, and most of their descendants have decided not to return.
Not so, however, a small group who established a “return” after the 1967 war. Since then, relations with the Palestinians of Hebron have been violent and lawless, causing repeated problems for the Israeli government.
A system of “separation” was instituted after Baruch Goldstein, a settler and Brooklyn doctor, murdered 29 Muslims praying in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994. The Israeli government almost removed the tiny settler community from the city of 150,000 Palestinians, but then rejected the idea. Instead, “sterile buffer zones” were created—that is, zones that are “free” of Palestinians—which widen with every clash, allowing the gradual takeover of territory.*
Apart from enforcing segregation, the IDF in H2 uses various methods of control to keep the peace, including boarding up Palestinian houses and shops and imposing curfews. It has been impossible to maintain economic life under these conditions. Curfews may last for two weeks before the army allows a two-hour break to let Palestinians out of their homes in order to stock up with supplies before curfew is slapped on again. Between 2002 and 2003 there were 500 days of curfew. The Jewish community is not put under curfew.
When there is violence between the communities—well documented, largely by Israeli organizations, since the 1970s—it is up to the Israeli army and police to intervene. Unlike Palestinian violence toward settlers, settler violence toward Palestinians rarely results in arrests, let alone prosecutions. The latter is a frequent, and distressing, occurrence. I met the headmistress of a Palestinian school that comes under regular attack from settlers, especially young ones: she described the failure of the Israeli police to protect her staff and students, and how they have to rely instead on support from Christian volunteers from abroad.
All along one street the IDF has barred and bolted every door—all to Palestinian homes—from the outside. When they need anything the inhabitants have to climb out of the top floor and clamber over the roofs at the back of each building in order to reach the outside world. If someone is ill, medical help has to come the same way. The dead too, are carried out over the roofs.
As a result of the separation, the control and repression, and the violence in the context of two systems of law, 30 to 40 percent of Palestinians have left this part of Hebron during the last ten years. Some would call this ethnic cleansing.
“There is a military policy that is causing the Arab population to leave the center of Hebron,” Haggai Alon, an advisor to the Israeli defense minister, said in an interview with Ha’aretz.33 “But that is not the policy of the State of Israel. The problem is that under military rule the spirit of the commander is stronger than anything else.”
Alon’s job, he told Israeli journalist Meron Rapaport, “is to ensure that the official statements made by the Israeli government regarding its policy toward the Palestinians are in fact implemented.” Instead, he says, “the IDF is setting a route for the fence that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state and is allowing itself to evade High Court orders to change the route. The army is carrying out an apartheid policy that is emptying Hebron of Arabs, setting up roadblocks without anyone knowing where and how many, Judaizing the Jordan Valley, and cooperating openly and blatantly with the settlers.”
We met the Hebron settlers’ spokesman, who immediately said that he recognized Ari. Ari Rath, editor of the Jerusalem Post for 15 years, had given a lecture in 1974, in which he had talked about repentance. David Wilder, the settler spokesman, reminded him. Behind the spokesman’s head was a map. Its subtitle asked, “Don’t the Arab states have enough land of their own?” The shaded “Arab” areas on the map included Iran and Turkey.
We listened as David explained: “The Arabs are trying to exterminate us,” and that “all this acquiescence only encourages them to take more and more. I believe in the two-state solution,” he said: “We get Israel. They get something else. If peace is so sublime why doesn’t Egypt give the so-called Palestinians the Sinai?” Like Mikhail, he too saw Hebron as a model, but from a different point of view: “if Jews aren’t allowed to live here in Hebron, why would the billion Arabs, who don’t want us, leave us alone anywhere?”
Ari tried to reason with him. In doing so he mentioned the right of return, whereupon the response was a furious, “That’s post-Zionist nonsense. The Arabs in ‘48 packed their bags of their own accord. For us it was all about survival. There is no connection.” Ari said later that he could have cited all the evidence about the Palestinian exodus, or the moral issues, or the legal... but he didn’t. It is easier to leave extremists to the comfort of their mythologies.
Ari drove me back to Jerusalem. He played Verdi’s Requiem and we talked, full of gloom, about Mikhail’s prediction. Ari was taken aback by the vehemence of the settlers’ views, and their impact. Israel had celebrated its 60th birthday in June 2008. If Hebron is the future, with its dual system of law, separation, oppression, and ethnic cleansing—and the fragmentation of the West Bank makes this outcome virtually inescapable—what will Israel’s 70th birthday look like?
The year 2000, when we arrived in Jerusalem, was a key moment. Peace, however fictional, still seemed realizable. The situation was simmering but had not yet blown up, exposing fully the failure-myths of Oslo. We walked into it a month before the situation declared itself at crisis point, and watched flurries of last-minute attempts to respond before the diehards and extremists at home took hold. What I had done was witness one dramatic chapter in an ongoing process. Like so many others, I had thought I was seeing something new, and I thought that I would see things change, but I was wrong on both counts.
As long as it remains easier to reach heaven than the end of the street—or the field, or school, or hospital, or the next-door village, let alone Jerusalem, the City of God—then no security measure yet devised will stop people seeking a gruesome shortcut to end their hell on earth. As Rita said, there can be no peace without justice, but the willingness to make peace exists. It’s real, but drowned out.
Now, with a new president in the US, there is hope that the situation will be addressed at last. Not just the smokescreen of events and the accompanying excuses and delaying tactics that have become so familiar, but the real situation that lies behind it. How many times do Israelis and Palestinians have to prove themselves unable to reach peace alone? How many more times will the international community allow the bar to be reset knowing that the setting is designed to be unreachable and therefore only a ruse to prolong the process? For how much longer is peace to be a “process” only, and all the while entrenchment on both sides, both in concrete and in hatred, allowed to fester, making peace ultimately all the harder?
Days after President Barack Obama’s inauguration a bilateral group of ten high-level former government officials, including Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, presented to him a report entitled, “A Last Chance for a Two-State Israel-Palestine Agreement.” There can be no understating the importance of its title, timing, and intent.
This is surely the last chance indeed, if it is not already too late. If such an agreement is not reached, the prospects for Israelis and Palestinians are grim: a continuation of the status quo, the “microcosms” General Gilad had so genially described back in 2002, putting people into pens and screwing down their lives, is palpably unsustainable. At best, this would mean a series of mini-Gazas in the West Bank, centered on the main Palestinian cities, isolated from one another and from independent life, existing on handouts from Israel or the international community. And throughout, especially where the enlarging settlements encroach on Palestinian homes, the ordeal of “Hebronization” would be imposed.
Dr. David Kimche said to me in 2007: “The two-state solution is the one thing that can save us from the eventual end of Zionism. We have to be told in the plainest language possible that the two-state solution is US policy and that the US will do everything possible to achieve it. Not just an afternoon tea sort of speech made by President Bush, but a statement of US policy; that they want to achieve it, and in order to achieve it the US will really push for it.” Dr. Kimche, diplomat, scholar, and writer, was once deputy head of Mossad. “The majority of Israelis would welcome action by the US on this. The problem with that majority is that they don’t believe it’s possible. That’s the crux of the problem. Neither we nor the Palestinians think the other will ever make peace. The US could make it possible. And it could be solved by an active policy by the international community. Our government would object, in all probability, but it’s important enough for the international community—the US in particular—to insist on doing it. It’s not just a question of helping Israel or the Palestinians. Quieting down this region goes far beyond the issue of the Israelis and Palestinians.”
As advised and as Dr. Kimche hoped, President Obama has indeed launched a concerted drive to resolve the conflict. From the start of his term in office, he has engaged the issue. On the first day of his tenure as president he contacted the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. Naming Senator George Mitchell as his special envoy, on day two, the president signaled that his intentions were serious. In interviews with Arabic media, visits to the Mideast, and a powerful speech in Cairo, Obama pronounced a shift in US policy toward evenhandedness that has been widely welcomed across the world.
He has moved on to a list of demands: of Israel, an end to settlement building; of the Palestinians, a return to negotiations; of both sides that the terms of the road map and the conditions of the Quartet must be met; and of the Arabs concrete gestures toward normalization and to build on the Arab peace initiative. He has made clear the conviction that advancing the peace process and bringing about the establishment of a Palestinian state is essential to Israel’s welfare and security. It is self-evident that the same applies to the Palestinians.
One Jerusalem Post writer pointed out that although settlements had neither ensured the dream of Jewish sovereignty as far as the Jordan River, nor prevented the world—or the majority of the Israeli public—from accepting the inevitability of a Palestinian state, they had succeeded in making the implementation of the two-state solution as difficult as it has ever been. But, he added, “Obama’s is the first US administration to see it for what it is, rather than be blinkered by the ‘freeze’ terminology sold to it by Israeli officialdom.”34
Indeed, fully aware of the blocking techniques, President Obama confronted the settlement question squarely, insisting on a total freeze. As pointed out by many Israeli commentators, the official US position on settlements has always been clear: “Obama did not invent a new American policy. The United States has long held that the settlements are illegal; the same is true for the status of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights...” readers read in Ha’aretz, “The Americans are sticking to the same road map drawn up seven years ago, it’s just that Israel apparently didn’t notice that the Palestinians have fulfilled the first article in the document almost completely. Military action against Israel has stopped, even from the Gaza Strip, and an increasingly effective Palestinian force in the West Bank is taking action against terror organizations. Israel, in contrast, has not met its road map obligations and continues to argue over the terms of the agreement—as if it never adopted it...”35
Opposition to Obama’s strategy, inevitably, has already mobilized. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, objected strongly to Obama’s demand to stop settlement building, and even more so when the administration objected to Israeli construction of settler apartments in East Jerusalem, after which American officials said that Washington does not differentiate between East Jerusalem and unauthorized outposts.36 In the US, Obama will confront strenuous opposition. Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, predicts that Obama “will face growing criticism from pro-Israel pundits and publications, and politicians who depend on campaign contributions from Israel’s backers will press him to moderate his stance. Many of Israel’s supporters will defend the special relationship because they believe that the two countries’ interests are synonymous, and because they believe that even mild pressure on Israel might jeopardize its security.”
Difficult though the task may be, President Obama could benefit from recent domestic shifts. Whereas the American Jewish community is overwhelmingly liberal and progressive, its leadership has not necessarily reflected the views of the majority on the question of Israel and the Palestinians—those who are supportive of Israel, but not of “Greater Israel” or its territorial ambitions. Until now, those moderate voices have not been adequately represented. A recent poll found that a majority of Jewish Americans (approximately 70 percent) support President Obama’s moves, and a two-state solution that includes a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem with some limited “right to return.” In addition, a strong majority opposes settlement construction. Increasingly, Jewish Americans see the truth of Ehud Olmert’s words about Israel’s future when he warned that if there is no two-state solution Israel will “face a South-African-style struggle... and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.” New and existing pro-peace organizations are now providing the forum, structure, and voice of this majority: J Street, Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek v’ Shalomare and the Israel Policy Forum, all of which are committed to a two-state solution and support strong American leadership to end the conflict, urging Israel to change tack before it’s too late.
With all these encouraging developments within the US can we now, with a US president who not only sees the realities but seems to be prepared to act on them, dare to hope for a just solution? And if a just solution is agreed upon, will it be implemented and enforced?
Or will the cowardice of the past decades that we have all demonstrated, myself included, continue to block us from confronting the conflict with honesty? And, if so, at what cost to Israelis and Palestinians, and their children?
* From the start of the second Intifada in 2000 to October 2005, according to the Middle East Policy Council, the dead numbered 975 Israelis and 3,695 Palestinians. By November 2008, these numbers had increased to 1,065 dead Israelis and 5,200 Palestinians. Operation Cast Lead (December 2008–January 2009 in Gaza) added 13 and more than 1,300 respectively.
* On January 25, Hamas won 74 of 132 seats in the PLC, with 44.4 percent of the vote to Fatah’s 41.4 percent. The remaining 14 percent was won by other secular parties supporting the two-state solution.
* The Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Yakir Segev, revealed that in 2008 only 18 permits were issued for building in the Palestinian parts of the city, home to some 270,000 Palestinians. It was the Municipality’s policy of granting so few permits that was driving Palestinians to construct illegally. “To get a construction permit in East Jerusalem you have to be more than a saint,” said Segev.
* Humanitarian officials were not alone in commenting on the cynicism of these operation titles— “summer rains,” for example, with its gentle and verdant imagery, actually signified a rain of artillery shells and missiles.
* Commissioned by the Sharon government, the Sassoon Report (March 8, 2005) revealed the depth of government involvement in settlement and outpost construction in “blatant violation of the law” and concluded that “drastic steps” were needed to rectify the situation.
* In 2007 one former Israeli foreign ministry official told me that during the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon the ministry had waited for the international community to call a halt to the bombing. “We kept saying, ‘Surely it will come today, surely.’ But it never came,” he said, in amazement.
* Under the 1996 Hebron Agreement the city was divided into H1, under Palestinian control, and H2, under Israeli control. H2 is home to 500 Jews and 40,000 Palestinians.