The New Middle East (22 page)

Four years on, the Israeli right had moved further to the right and Prime Minister Netanyahu was uncompromising. He made a new campaign pledge ahead of the January 2013 elections for the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. The growing political strength of the hardline religious Zionist settler movement means he is probably going to keep it. He was asked in an interview with the Israeli newspaper
Maariv
: ‘Can you promise that during the next four years, no settlement will be dismantled?’

‘Yes,’ Netanyahu replied. ‘The days when bulldozers uprooted Jews are behind us, not in front of us. Our record proves it . . . We haven’t uprooted any settlements, we have expanded them,’ and he added in a swipe at the newly resurgent pro-settler party Jewish Home: ‘Nobody has any lessons to give me about love for the Land of Israel or commitment to Zionism and the settlements.’

The Israeli general election turned out to be the first for many years where the issue of the stalled peace process wasn’t much of one in the campaign at all. The election saw two parties become serious players in the Israeli political scene for the first time, one from the centre and one from the hard right, but neither made the peace process easier.

The surprise on the night was Yesh Atid (There is a Future), the party of former journalist and TV personality Yair Lapid, which won nineteen seats. But the Israeli public voted for his centrist social policies, not for a peace deal. Lapid had said he favoured resuming talks, but was equally clear that he wasn’t ready to compromise over Jerusalem or the major Israeli settlements. He used his Facebook page to say: ‘I do not think that the Arabs want peace . . . What I want is not a “New Middle East”, but to be rid of them and put a tall fence between us and them.’

Many Israeli politicians did better on polling day if they entirely rejected the idea of a Palestinian state. A key policy of the religious Zionist ‘Jewish Home’ Party, which more than doubled its number of seats in the parliament to twelve, was for Israel to annex 60 per cent of the West Bank. The party was led by the former software multimillionaire Naftali Bennett. His supporters, many drawn from the settler community, had already managed to push Netanyahu’s Likud Party to the right by ousting its more moderate MPs in the party’s primaries and then voting instead for Jewish Home at the general election that followed. After a month of wrangling, and just days before Obama’s state visit in March 2013, a new Netanyahu-led government was formed. The hard-line Jewish Home Party became part of the new coalition and Bennett joined the cabinet as economics and trade minister. He also became the first senior minister of the new government to publicly reject President Obama’s appeal for compromise made during his rousing speech in Jerusalem. ‘Giving territory to our enemies is not the answer,’ he said.
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The only party that did want to talk about a peace process was the former foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s. But at a polling station in an affluent area of West Jerusalem I watched two of her supporters try and fail for more than an hour to hand out her election material. Livni’s campaigners had blue T-shirts sporting a big picture of her with an unsmiling, grumpy-looking face. The party activists were smiling though at the parade of middle-class voters in their slumber suits and just-rolled-out-of-bed hair. The voters smiled back, but they shook their heads at the offer of a pamphlet. And the outcome of the poll showed that the nation had largely shaken its head too at the prospect of making concessions to get a deal with the Palestinians. The tight nature of the race meant her party’s six seats in the Israeli parliament were enough to get Livni a post in Netanyahu’s coalition cabinet and the position of exclusive negotiator with the Palestinians, which was unlikely to win her any plaudits from the Israeli public. She had once said privately: ‘I would join the cabinet even if it’s only to hold his shaking hand while he signs the peace deal.’ Her challenge now was trying to get Netanyahu to pick up the pen.

The reason why many Israelis do not care much about the peace process with the Palestinians on the West Bank is that they do not have as much to fear from those Palestinians any more. They have reacted to the cataclysmic unravelling of years of laborious peace negotiations by sitting on the beach in Tel Aviv, looking across the Mediterranean and pretending they are in Europe. They have the American-funded ‘Iron Dome’ anti-missile system to defend them in the skies. On the ground they have built a physical barrier to keep the Palestinians away. The Israeli government thinks it has the situation in the West Bank under control. It knows that is not true in Gaza.

Some Israelis are conflicted by the barrier because intellectually it repulses them. These people see it as a cruel collective punishment of hundreds of thousands of largely peaceful men, women and children. But they hold a guilty secret. In their hearts and in their homes, in private, they are grateful it is there. They don’t eat in restaurants any more with one eye on the door in case a suicide bomber walks in. Using public transport no longer feels like a life-or-death decision. Left-wing Israelis sometimes loudly condemn their government’s refusal to move towards a just peace with the Palestinian people, but on the barrier their voices sink to a whisper. ‘There is some kind of cognitive dissonance,’ said an Israeli woman in her thirties to me privately at a dinner in Tel Aviv, attended by a mix of journalists and diplomats.

Emotionally I think the Wall is completely wrong, and whenever I see it it moves something in me. But growing up in Israel I do remember [that period] as being horrible, frightening, going on a bus was terrible. I grew up in Jerusalem and I knew that you couldn’t go on a number 18 bus and in Tel Aviv you couldn’t go on a number 5 bus because those were subjected to [suicide] bombings. So there is the rational and the emotional and there is a huge conflict. I find myself thinking about it quite often, but the bottom line is that that sort of violence has stopped.

And what of those Palestinians in the West Bank stuck behind the barrier? Nazar was part of that noisy crowd standing in the streets of Ramallah shouting ‘Shame, shame’ and demanding their rights. Like the lady in Tel Aviv she too was in her early thirties. She was employed in the Consumer Protection department of the Palestinian Authority. What made Nazar’s protest unusual was not her anger, but whom she was angry with. She was not denouncing the Israelis with her chants, though she believed they were behind many of her woes. Nazar and the rest of the protesters were in a stand-off against other Palestinians. These men were in uniform and they were protecting the offices of the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, a former economist at the IMF, whom Nazar ultimately worked for. She and the people around her were demonstrating about the cost of living in the West Bank. ‘Everything is very expensive, we cannot live like this, we need a solution for our problems,’ she shouted to me over the noise of the loudspeaker.

‘Hunger is disloyal,’ Salam Fayyad’s boss, Mahmoud Abbas, said of the protests. He was quoting from a Palestinian proverb about hungry people thinking only about food. But, he said, the protest meant that a Palestinian Spring had begun, ‘and we are in line with what the people say and what they want’.
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In one sense he was right, because the issues the protesters were shouting about were very similar to those of ‘Bread, dignity and social justice’ that I heard during the uprisings in Egypt. Where he was wrong was in thinking that his administration was on the same side as those people. And the International Monetary Fund told him these were scenes he might as well get used to. It warned that the situation in the coming years was likely to get worse: ‘Looking ahead, with persisting restrictions, financing difficulties with aid shortfalls, and a stalemate in the peace process, there is a high risk of a continued economic slowdown, a rise in unemployment, and social upheaval.’
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‘I can’t imagine what will happen to my children,’ Nazar told me. ‘They will finish their education and they will not be able to live here, they may have to emigrate to another country. There are no jobs for the new generation. They just get their degree from the university and stay at home. This is a big problem.’ It is exactly the problem that led to the Arab revolts. The Palestinian youths in the West Bank are also highly educated young people with very few opportunities to reach their full potential. But the fear of the generation of Palestinians who came before them, which fought in the two uprisings or ‘intifadas’ against the Israeli occupation in 1987 and again in 2000, is that their children are going to vote with their feet. What really worries them is the direction they’ll take. They believe it will not be towards the Israeli checkpoints and military bases that dot the West Bank, but to the border with Jordan and beyond. The people who exhausted themselves against the army of Israel are worried that the next generation in the West Bank will give up on the state of Palestine without a fight.

Dr Khaleel Rashmawy was the manager of the bus company in the southern West Bank town of Beit Sahour. His business had been hit hard by a surge in fuel prices. His buses run on the roads around where the Second Testament says an angel told shepherds about the birth of Christ. The area is close to Bethlehem, and like Bethlehem is largely made up of Palestinian Christians. It is also a community from which an exodus is taking place away from the Holy Land. ‘The big problem is emigration. Families are leaving the country,’ Dr Rashmawy told me. ‘If this situation continues there will be a collapse, the [Palestinian] government will be demolished. Now the question is not how to fight the occupation, now the question is how to stay in the country.’ That increasingly means that the people who are identified as fighting the occupation are not the secular moderate Palestinian Authority but the Islamist militant groups in Gaza, the largest of which is Hamas.

‘We ask ourselves, where is the Arab Spring in the West Bank?’ This question did not come from a Palestinian, it came from a man sitting with me on the other side of the Green Line, or Armistice Line, which marks the ceasefire position from the 1948 war between Israel and the Arab nations. He was a senior commander in the country’s army, the Israeli Defence Force, IDF, and he was paid to care what happens in the West Bank so that the people on the beach just down the road from his headquarters in Tel Aviv didn’t have to. The commander told me:

We ask ourselves what are the differences between Tahrir and Manara Square in Ramallah. And there are a lot of differences, but this might be a strategic shift in the West Bank. Our interest from the military point of view is to secure relative stability in order to give the political echelons on both sides the freedom to decide whether they want to go forward with some [peace] treaty.

That is a question that has been hanging in the air for decades. The conversation has only been held with the Palestinian groups who have renounced violence. They had been persuaded that if they gave up their arms then the world would work to give them a state. But they have seen the land upon which it was supposed to be built riddled with illegal Israeli settlements. They were promised a middle-class dream they suddenly could no longer afford. Meanwhile most Israelis, most of the time, felt they were already at peace without having to negotiate anything with the PLO.

It was an irony not lost on the region that during the first term of the Obama presidency the Israelis, even if by remote control, indulged in more successful negotiations with the ‘bad’ Islamist Palestinians running Gaza than they did with the ‘good’ moderate Palestinians running the West Bank. The PLO had given up their guns, recognised the state of Israel, swapped their fatigues for suits and ended up shuffled into irrelevance. Hamas in Gaza had done none of the above. It regularly fired rockets into Israel. It allowed violent hardline Salafist groups to operate on its turf, though it also used an equal level of violence to control them. And after the Arab revolts Hamas garnered more and more political support from Sunni Islamists outside. They were by far the greater threat to Israel and thus could not be ignored. The wider changes in the Middle East undermined the long campaign by the West and Israel to isolate and physically contain Hamas. The political influence within the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation shifted away from the West Bank and towards Gaza.

President Obama began his first term seemingly determined to make Israel deal seriously with the moderate Palestinian leadership. Instead he allowed short-term domestic political opportunism in Israel to undercut America’s long-term regional interests. The reputation of Mahmoud Abbas, the man whose credentials he had sought to embellish with that first phone call during his first full day in the White House, was in tatters by the time President Obama took the oath for the second time. The Palestinian groups on the West Bank, who had forsaken violence, were eclipsed by those in Gaza who had not. The Palestinian people were still not much closer to a proper state of their own than they had been when the conflict over the land began in earnest in 1936.

The state of Israel came into existence when the British Mandate for Palestine, which covered the areas of present-day Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, ended on 14 May 1948. The British Mandate was part of the European powers’ broader administration over areas of the old Ottoman Empire that had ruled the Middle East since the sixteenth century but then collapsed as a consequence of the First World War. The Transjordan part of the British Mandate, which is now just called the Kingdom of Jordan, was granted limited autonomy in 1923.