Jerusalem. Nearly 200,000 Israelis now live there. This ring essentially seals
off East Jerusalem from Bethlehem, Hebron, and Palestinian villages to the
south.
One of the last pieces to snap into place was Har Homa, a settlement built
between Jerusalem and Bethlehem on a hill known to the Palestinians as Jabal
Abu Ghneim. I recall seeing the hill from Bethlehem in 1996. By then, Israeli
chainsaws and earth-moving equipment had already sliced lines into the hill's
conifer forest, giving it what looked like a bad haircut. Palestinian
activists, desperate to hang onto this part of the West Bank, had
set up a 24-hour emergency camp, pledging not to abandon their peaceful protest
until Israel withdrew its claims.
Today, the trees are gone, replaced by long rows of new white houses for
Israelis. "This is the last resort from which you can establish the umbilical
cord between Bethlehem and Jerusalem," said Jad Isaac, director of the Applied
Research Institute, a Palestinian think-tank in Bethlehem. "So the construction
of Har Homa destroys the peace process. Unless Har Homa is totally destroyed
and returned to the Palestinians, there is no peace."
For Bethlehemites like Isaac, the wedge of Har Homa and the other East
Jerusalem "suburbs" effectively renders moot Palestinian aspirations for a
contiguous state. If any doubt about this lingered, Israel's separation wall
put an end to it.
Driven into the land at the northern end of Bethlehem is the eight-meter-high
concrete curtain with two narrow, single-file pedestrian lanes running beside
it. Each is about 50-meters long, framed by steel bars from concrete floor to
metal ceiling. These give the few Palestinians with permits to travel from
Bethlehem the inescapable feeling of moving through a cattle line. (Actually,
Palestinians prefer a poultry analogy, calling the lanes ma'aatet al-jaaj,
a chicken-plucking machine.) When I walked through the line, emerging near the
southern edge of Jerusalem, I gazed back on the northern face of the wall,
stunned at a banner unfurled beneath the gun turret and watchtower. From the
Israeli Ministry of Tourism, it proclaims in Hebrew, English and Arabic, "Peace
Be With You."
4. How can you build a viable state by negotiating only with the weakened
representative of one Palestinian faction? Even if the
obstacles outlined above were to miraculously disappear, George Mitchell's work
could be badly crippled by an outdated American strategy of dealing only with
Fatah and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Long backed by Americans as a Palestinian
"moderate", in the wake of the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza, Abbas has lost
virtually all credibility among his people. (As of January 9, he also
technically ceased being the Palestinian president.)
Despite the death and destruction of these past weeks, Hamas is increasingly
seen by observers in the region as gaining strength in the West Bank, while
firmly holding power in Gaza. "The Islamist movement is going to come out of
this war strengthened politically vis-a-vis its rival Palestinian factions,
including Fatah, and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah," wrote the shrewd
political analyst and former Palestinian labor secretary Ghassan Khatib in a
commentary for bitterlemons, a website run by Israeli and Palestinian analysts.
He added, "The Israeli war on Gaza, which increased public sympathy with Hamas
… [has] further shifted the balance of power against Fatah in the West Bank and
left the Palestinian Authority very vulnerable politically."
Indeed, some West Bankers, who hold no brief for Hamas, are echoing the words
that many Lebanese said of Hezbollah in the wake of the 2006 war in Lebanon:
"They put up a resistance for 22 days - [the] Fatah leadership did and said
nothing," the Palestinian-American journalist Lubna Takruri wrote me from
Ramallah this week. "People in the West Bank are still smoldering that while
they were watching all these worldwide protests here, Fatah forces were
preventing the Palestinians from protesting against the Israelis at
checkpoints. This was huge. It made people feel like the PA [Palestinian
Authority] was doing Israel's work for them, while Israel handled business in
Gaza."
Early signs strongly indicate that the Obama team will continue the strategy of
propping up Abbas, with credibility destroying "help" from the Central
Intelligence Agency, while refusing to deal with Hamas until it recognizes
Israel. Clearly the Hamas charter is despicable: It describes the Jews as
aspiring to "rule the world", and declares that the elimination of Israel would
be a historic parallel to the defeat of the Crusaders by Saladin.
American and Israeli officials have, however, ignored more subtle signals from
Hamas - which was, after all, brought to power in free and fair elections -
that it would abide by the expressed will of the Palestinian people for
co-existence with Israel. One of the strongest signals was the 2006 "Prisoners'
Document," initiated by leaders of Hamas and the imprisoned former Fatah leader
Marwan Barghouti, that called for negotiations with Israel in pursuit of peace.
The Bush administration, siding with the Israelis, who insisted that there was
"no partner for peace", chose to ignore such signs and so undermined any
efforts toward a Fatah-Hamas unity government.
It would be disastrous for Mitchell to go down this same road. Hamas is here to
stay. These last weeks, Israeli dreams of defeating it in Gaza have been
shattered, and any attempt to deal only with the rickety shell of Fatah will
ensure that the US obtains the same bleak results. The fact is: engaging Hamas
will be a much better way of keeping the rockets silent.
5. Given these immense obstacles, is a viable, contiguous, sovereign Palestinian
state even possible anymore? And, if not… Given the
overwhelming odds facing a two-state solution, a strong American negotiating
presence will be necessary, of a sort not seen since - well, ever. The hallmark
of the past eight years (and to a large extent the previous eight Bill Clinton
years) has been an utter lack of American pressure on Israel. This has been in
no one's interest, including Israel's.
Ehud Olmert, who in 2008 spoke - apparently sincerely - of Israel's need to
withdraw from "most or all" of the West Bank settlements, received no support
from Washington for saying so. In the vacuum of American leadership, Olmert
capitulated to the settlers' bloc in his ruling coalition. Hence, the arrival
of yet more Israeli facts-on-the-ground on the West Bank. This American
administration has to do much better.
The past 16 years have also been marked by an inability to see the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict through anything but Israeli eyes. Now, Mitchell
will, hopefully, bring a willingness to understand six decades of tragedy
through two sets of aspirations: this will be essential if a just, lasting
piece is to be forged. This will also have to include confronting one of the
most vexing issues of all, that of the 4.4 million Palestinian refugees and the
insistence of many of them that they be allowed to return to their original
homes in what is now Israel. This is, of course, a red line for Israelis who
insist that the "right of return" would mean the end of their state.
Essential for Mitchell in all of this will be an openness and a creativity
absent from American diplomacy since the violent birth of Israel and the
Palestinian catastrophe in 1948. Increasingly, small groups of Palestinians, a
handful of Israelis, and even motivated outsiders like Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi, are looking at co-existence anew, by exploring the possibility of a
third way. The alternatives differ sharply: some call for a one-state solution;
others for a binational state; others for an Israeli-Palestine confederation or
a Middle East Union.
The words "single state" spark a visceral fear among many Israelis who see
this, too, as the end of the Jewish state. But the dreams of what Albert
Einstein called the "sympathetic cooperation" between "the two great semitic
peoples" are rooted, in large part, in the history of progressive Zionists,
who, like Einstein and the great Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, believed in
their bones in a just co-existence. Buber advocated a binational state of
"joint sovereignty", with "complete equality of rights between the two
partners", based on "the love of their homeland that the two peoples share".
For many, the two-state solution remains, in the words of former US Middle East
negotiator Aaron Miller, author of The Much Too Promised Land, "the
least bad alternative". But should Mitchell take an honest look at the immense
obstacles now involved in a two-state solution and determine that they are
insurmountable, he would do well to remain open to other possibilities, and
bear in mind the words of Albert Einstein.
"No problem", said Einstein, "can be solved from the same level of
consciousness that created it."
Sandy Tolan is the author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and
the Heart of the Middle East, and associate professor at the Annenberg School
for Communication at the University of Southern California.
(Copyright 2009 Sandy Tolan.)
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