The New Middle East (27 page)

The Oslo accords were supposed to lead to one Palestinian state. Events by now have conspired to create two very different Palestinian entities. The one in the West Bank offers the Palestinians a normal-ish life, though the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal told me sarcastically in 2010 from his old headquarters in Damascus: ‘Fayad is building up a better system for a people inside a prison.’ But this was not the view shared by the wider international community. Instead they saw the West Bank as an opportunity for the Palestinians to show that they could build the institutions of a viable state, with law and order and good governance, and which, through negotiation, would lead to a state of Palestine.

As life got worse in Gaza under the blockade, life improved for the Palestinians in the West Bank, because millions of dollars of aid money created a false economy. It bought acquiescence from much of the population still worn out by the two Palestinian intifadas. Even Israel’s most senior military figures doubt there will be a third one. The people on the West Bank were given cheap loans and they used them to buy new homes. These homes soared in price, and just like people in the West the people in the West Bank used that rise in value as an asset to get more loans, and then bought new things and fell deeper in debt. The story is familiar. It has been told in every Western economy over the last ten years, but the circumstances in the West Bank are very different. There houses prices went up because in most of the West Bank, Palestinians don’t control where they can and can’t build – the Israelis do.

Under the so-called Oslo 2 peace accords, signed between Israel and the Palestinians, the West Bank is divided into three areas: A, B and C. The Palestinians have almost total control over Area A, which includes their main urban centres, and partial control over Area B. But in the remaining 62 per cent of their land known as Area C Israel retains near-exclusive control, including over law enforcement, planning and construction. This is the area where the most rapid expansion of Jewish settlements has taken place. It was this area that the Jewish Home Party campaigned in the 2013 elections to annex. Around 325,000 Israeli settlers live in some 135 settlements and around 100 outposts in Area C.
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There are also 150,000 Palestinians living there. The Israeli government dismisses the settler numbers by saying they occupy only a tiny proportion of the land. That is true, but to protect them and the roads they drive on Israel insists on controlling a much larger area. The United Nations states that:

Most of Area C has been allocated for the benefit of Israeli settlements, which receive preferential treatment at the expense of Palestinian communities . . . Palestinian movement is controlled and restricted by a complex system of physical and administrative means. These include the Barrier, checkpoints, roadblocks, and a permit system, which undermine livelihoods and access to basic services, as well as the ability of humanitarian organisations to deliver assistance.
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The daily grind of dealing with the occupation leaves Palestinians on the West Bank with a perpetual sense of frustration and humiliation.

Seventy per cent of Area C is included within the boundaries of the regional councils of Israeli settlements and is therefore off limits for Palestinian use and development.
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Most Palestinians can’t get planning permission. If they do build homes without it these are regularly demolished and the families are forcibly evicted.
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Because the amount of land available for Palestinian housing is restricted it artificially inflates prices.

Population pressure meant the same was true even in the Gaza Strip, where in some places a square metre of land just before the war in 2012 could cost up to twenty thousand dollars.
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The most expensive bits of land are where the international organisations are based, because developers think those areas are less likely to be bombed. The few who could afford the prices had often made their money getting around the blockade by going under it. They built huge tunnels across the border into Egypt’s Sinai through which they smuggled foodstuffs, fuel and livestock. If someone had the money they could get an entire car dragged through them too. The border with Egypt at Rafah was a mass of small tents. Under each one was a huge tunnel. They were a remarkable sight, and if you were good at digging the tunnels could make you a millionaire.

The tunnels were also the military lifeline for Hamas, which used them to bring in guns, ammunition and rockets to attack Israel. Before the Arab revolts they also brought in suitcases full of cash from Hamas’s then financial backers in Syria and Iran. Without cash the organisation would grind to a halt, so Israel took a particular delight in hitting the moneymen. ‘They are in a very bad economic situation. They need money,’ a member of the Israeli cabinet told me a few months into the Arab Spring. ‘Certain deliveries of money [to Hamas] were intercepted by us. One of them by targeted killing operations. The money was in a certain car and we exploded it.’

Hamas in the post-Arab Spring era doesn’t have to play cat and mouse with the Israeli drones to get hold of cash any more. The month before the war, in October 2012, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, became the first head of state to visit the Strip since Hamas took power. He brought with him a pledge of $400 million for building projects. Gaza today looks like a huge building site. The Emir’s visit was an acknowledgement of the new reality. The Islamist Hamas, which had much more in common with the policies of Qatar than Fatah did, was on the up. That was something that was not lost on Israel. ‘It’s odd that he interferes with the Palestinians’ internal conflicts and chooses to offer his support to Hamas,’ said an Israeli Foreign Ministry statement. ‘With this visit, Qatar has thrown the chances for peace under the bus.’
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If that was an accurate description of what dealing with Hamas meant for the prospects for peace, then Israel had certainly helped nudge them into the road.

The year before the Emir’s visit the Israelis agreed to swap more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners in return for the release of one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been captured and held for five years by Hamas. The huge disproportion in the numbers was an illustration of how much the Israeli people wanted Shalit back. Most Jewish Israelis have to send their children to do military service, and so Shalit’s capture resonated with parents across the land. The deal was a milestone because it proved that Israel could deal with Hamas when it thought it was in its interests. And in the zero-sum game of Palestinian politics the swap boosted Hamas and made the PA look impotent. Again Israel acted for short-term political gain. The Israelis wanted to punish Abbas for attempting an always jinxed bid for full state membership status for the Palestinians at the United Nations. A successful bid would have given Palestine all the rights and recognition of any other country at the United Nations, instead of being a territory. But creating a new country would have required Security Council approval, which the Palestinians would not have got.

Even though it was doomed to failure, Hamas wasn’t happy either with the PA’s bid, which held out the vague hope of progress through non-violent resistance. And Hamas needed something to stem the growing frustration with its rule. It was running out of money and started introducing unpopular taxes on cigarettes and other consumer goods that produced a general backlash. The people of Gaza were also weary of living under the constant threat of Israeli airstrikes just so that a few young extremists could show off their revolutionary credentials by firing rockets into Israel. Both the Israeli and the Hamas leadership had something to gain politically, and both wanted the PA to lose.

So Israel dealt with its devil. It negotiated via the Egyptians with Islamists bent on its destruction. The man Israel arranged Shalit’s release with, and who walked the young soldier to the border crossing, was Ahmed Jabari. It was the assassination of Jabari on 14 November, as he was driven down Omar Muktar Street, Gaza’s main thoroughfare, that led to the eight-day war in 2012.

The PA’s weakened position after the kidnap deal and the Gaza conflict was acknowledged by its prime minister, Salam Fayyad: ‘[The] Palestinian Authority stands for a non-violent path to freedom – we have not been able to deliver, it was Hamas that was able to release over 1,000 prisoners, to get this much attention. I think it’s absolutely important to recover from this – but we need to be honest with ourselves.’
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‘The weakness of Abbas with his negotiations with Israel is that he is not backed by anyone. He is just waiting for [help from] the United States or the international community but he has no teeth,’ Ghazi Hamad, who is Hamas’s deputy foreign minister and one of its more moderate voices, told me just before President Obama made his 2013 trip to Israel and the West Bank.

So Israel, they don’t care about him, they say ‘OK, we can negotiate for ever with him.’ But Hamas, we have some cards in our hands, for example when you have the Shalit card you can get your prisoners from Israel, you can push them to give concessions. When you have rockets or missiles, even though they are primitive, sometimes you can exert pressure on Israel.

The reality the PLO found itself in led to promises at the end of 2012 that the international community ‘will work urgently . . . to restart the peace process before the window for a two-state solution closes’.
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But ‘urgently’, like ‘temporary’, is a word that has also lost its meaning here. And the voices of moderation are being drowned out by a cacophony of those on the two extremes. It is their voices that have become the engine of this conflict. Words have become more dangerous than the rockets and missiles. They are used by each side, but perhaps most viciously and irresponsibly by their unaccountable supporters and lobby groups worldwide to dehumanise the other. Over time the words used to justify violence seem to have corroded the sense in both peoples of right and wrong when it comes to the way they wage war.

During the last war I heard the news of a bomb attack on a civilian bus in Tel Aviv, which badly injured several people, being greeted by celebratory gunfire in Gaza city. Then over the loudspeakers in the mosques it was described as a ‘victory from God’.

On the other side, despite the already disproportionate loss of life among the Palestinians, Israel’s right wing was not satisfied. Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad, who is a major in the IDF, wrote during the conflict: ‘We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.’
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The then interior minister in Israel’s ruling coalition, Eli Yishai, said: ‘The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years.’
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Many Israelis would distance themselves from this kind of jingoism, but the state also works hard to persuade the Israeli public of the justification of its actions. ‘Unbelievable but true: 111 Israelis wounded today,’ wrote the IDF spokeswoman Avital Leibovich on her official Twitter account during the height of the war. ‘Unbelievable’ was a fair assessment: the Israeli ambulance service’s own figures on that day reported that eighty-two of those ‘wounded’ were suffering from what they called ‘anxiety’. On another day sixteen casualties were reported. The ambulance service said nine were ‘anxiety’ and six had ‘bruises’.

The IDF also took great pains to find good reasons why so many civilians had died in the conflict. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on 22 November that two-thirds of the by then 158 people killed by Israel were civilians. Leibovich tweeted that only a third of the dead were ‘uninvolved’ in terror. Six Israelis died during the conflict, four of them civilians.

The worst single incident of the conflict was the bombing of the home in central Gaza’s Nasser district where a mid-ranking Hamas policeman called Mohammed Dalou lived with his extended family. He was an unlikely target for such a massive airstrike. Mohammed and the nine other members of his family in the house died. So did two neighbours. Among those killed were five women and four children. The dead spanned three generations; the youngest was one-year-old Ibrahim Dalou. At the time of the strike I was reporting from Gaza’s Shifa hospital when it suddenly burst into chaos as bloodied and screaming children began to arrive. Minutes later I was on the street they had just come from, watching a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to dig more survivors out of the rubble. Much of the Dalous’ home had been flattened into a deep crater. Around the section that wasn’t, rescuers were trying to use a crane to lift up the top floor to get to the collapsed rooms underneath. There was a brief moment of hope when seven-year-old Sarah Dalou, dressed in a pink top and grey track pants, was pulled out from beneath. But it quickly grew clear, from the way her small body hung limp in the arms of the man who held her, that she was dead.

The Dalou house was where the visiting Arab ministers went to express their fury against Israel over the loss of civilian life. It became in the Arab world a symbol of what it saw as Israeli aggression. The bombing was a PR disaster for Israel, made worse by the fact that the IDF for days could not get its story straight. Human Rights Watch said the strike on the family was unlawful.
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In private Israeli government officials admitted to me from the start that the bombing of the Dalou home was a mistake. Six months later that was confirmed by the Israeli Military Advocate General who said the deaths of the family were ‘regrettable’ but that there was ‘no basis to open a criminal investigation or to take any additional measures’ against the IDF personnel involved in the air strike.
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