The New Middle East (25 page)

The vagueness of its language, and in particular the phrase ‘from territories’, still has the two sides arguing whether it meant
all
territories or just
some
territories. Resolution 338 was drafted in 1973 after the Arab–Israeli war of that year and is essentially a reaffirmation of Resolution 242. Resolution 242 embodies the idea of an exchange of land for peace.

On 13 September 1993 there was, amid much fanfare, a signing ceremony in front of President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. The agreement was between the state of Israel, represented by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat. The following year the two men, along with the Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, were awarded the Nobel Peace Price. The expectation was that the Palestinian Authority it created would last a maximum of five years, hence the word ‘Interim’ in its title. Implied in the agreement is the idea of two states. Fundamental to reaching it was the PLO recognising Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognising that the PLO represented the Palestinian people. On that day

The Government of the State of Israel and the PLO . . . representing the Palestinian people, agree that it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict, recognise their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process.

But they did not. Rabin was assassinated for his part in the deal by an Israeli ultra-nationalist religious Jew, Yigal Amir, in 1995. Arafat continued to wrangle with his successors.

Nearly twenty years later Nazar and her colleagues were still able to shout at the PA because the ‘interim’ Authority still existed. Temporary has a tendency to last in this corner of the Middle East. Mahmoud Abbas has occasionally threatened to dissolve the PA and leave the Israelis to pick up the pieces. Some Palestinians have urged him to do just that and put the dying Oslo process out of its misery. But he has never looked likely to follow through on the threat, and many people I’ve met on the West Bank believe that’s because the Palestinian leadership in general has simply got too comfortable with the few trappings of power they do have to want to give them up. Of the three architects of the Oslo accords only Shimon Peres has lived long enough to see them widely reviled by both sides. Peres is now the President of Israel and when we met in April 2013 he had just become, at eighty-nine, the world’s oldest head of state.  We sat together in his private office at his official residence, and his Nobel Prize sat on the shelf behind him. I asked him whether he agreed that the Oslo Peace Process had run its course. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘The choice is clear. Either to have one state where two [peoples] are quarrelling endlessly or two states where the two of them have good relations.’ So why, twenty years later, was there still no deal? ‘To negotiate is not a simple matter. Many people think to negotiate is to convince the other party. No, it’s a problem of convincing your own people and I’m speaking as a man who worked all his life for it. The people say “Yes we are for peace. Yes we are ready to pay the price of peace, but why do you pay so much? You don’t know how to negotiate! Why do you trust them so much? You are naïve!” And I say there are two things that cannot be achieved in life unless you close your eyes a little bit. And that’s love and peace. If you want perfection you won’t obtain either of them.’

Oslo wasn’t the last big deal; there were several other agreements and false dawns. All, like Oslo, were built around the idea of a state of Israel living alongside a state of Palestine. The foundation for each was the formula of ‘land for peace’.

In 2000, as President Bill Clinton’s time in office drew to a close, he tried to speed up the full implementation of Oslo by tackling some of the so-called final status issues like defining borders, control of Jerusalem and the right of return of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who had fled or been driven out of their homes in the 1948 war. He set out what became known as the ‘Clinton Parameters’. The talks were between the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. They failed. Clinton blamed Arafat. Unfortunately they failed in the middle of an Israeli election campaign.

A political stunt by the man who was challenging Barak in the polls, Ariel Sharon, and Palestinian frustration at the failure of the peace process sparked the Second Intifada. On 28 September Sharon made a visit to the place in East Jerusalem known to Muslims as Al-Haram Al-Sharif. It is also the location of the Al-Aqsa mosque. The Jews call the area Temple Mount. It would have been hard to find a more sensitive place to make the political point that he would never concede any of Jerusalem in a peace deal. Fighting broke out at once between police and protesters. The following day there was rioting across Jerusalem and the West Bank. The unrest barely paused for the next five years.

The second Palestinian Intifada was well under way when Ariel Sharon won the premiership in February 2001. It was thoroughly brutal, with children and other civilians being killed by both sides. The Israeli military opened fire on the Palestinians as they tried to put down the unrest. Israeli civilians were blown to pieces in buses and bars by Palestinian suicide bombers. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem said around three thousand Palestinians and a thousand Israelis died during violence between 2000 and 2005.
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The Second Intifada was nothing like the first. It reduced parts of the occupied Palestinian territories to war zones. The memories of the horror and suffering they experienced in those years at the hands of the Israeli army are the main reason why the Palestinians in the West Bank have not resorted to a third uprising despite the failures of the peace process. The Palestinian people cannot bring themselves to go through it again. The Second Intifada also marked the steady decline of the left and the peace movement in Israel. Many Israelis concluded that they couldn’t live side by side with people who had blown up diners in restaurants. Many people on both sides lost all sympathy for the suffering of the other.

The years of the violence of the Second Intifada took place while the Western world’s attention was firmly elsewhere in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. But by contrast it got a lot of attention in the Middle East, because the Arabic news network Al Jazeera was now broadcasting. People across the Arab world could watch an overwhelmingly sympathetic portrayal of the Palestinians’ struggle against Israeli occupation around the clock and contrast that with the inaction of their own leaders.

The Second Intifada ended only after Arafat was dead.

The man who replaced him, Mahmoud Abbas, finally declared a ceasefire with Sharon in February 2005. Sharon did two things that have fundamentally changed the political and physical landscape in the conflict. In 2002 he began to build the barrier that snakes around and often encroaches into the Palestinian territories. In 2004 he announced a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

These were profound shifts in policy for the right-wing Sharon. They both struck at the core of the debate in Israel about what the priorities of the state of Israel are. What should come first, the land of Israel or the people of Israel? The hard-line religious Zionists consider the boundaries of Israel to have been set by God, and so for a politician to decide where Israel begins and ends is a blasphemy. The centre and what remains of the dwindling left thinks it is the people of Israel that matter most, so building the barrier and withdrawing from the occupied territories if peace can be assured becomes their priority.

The barrier is now a defining factor in the conflict, even though Sharon said: ‘The fence is a security rather than political barrier, temporary rather than permanent.’
³³
But even today, people can’t agree what to call it. Journalists say simply the ‘separation barrier’, because that’s what it does. The Israelis call it the ‘security fence’ because that’s how it makes them feel and most of it is fence and barbed wire. The Palestinians call it the ‘
jidar al-fasl al-’unsun
’, Racial Segregation Wall, because that’s how it makes them feel.

Whatever people call it, the barrier more than anything else has changed the dynamic of the peace process. The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in 2004 that said where it deviated into occupied West Bank territory it was illegal.
³⁴
That’s true for 85 per cent of the barrier. Israel said the court had no jurisdiction in the matter. The barrier had a calamitous effect on employment for Palestinian men because those who worked in the Israeli construction or agricultural industries lost their jobs. Israel ended up importing labourers all the way from Thailand to pick fruit and vegetables while thousands of Palestinians a kilometre away sat idle. The pull-out from Gaza also led to the slow ascent of Hamas over Fatah in the Strip. The rise of Islamist forces in Gaza who regularly fire rockets into Jewish communities living on the other side of barrier persuaded many Israelis that a similar pull-out from the West Bank would lead to the same result. This mistrust will only be further entrenched over time. Most Israelis now never set foot inside the West Bank and so have no idea how much it has changed since the years of the Second Intifada. Their children grew up amid the suicide bombings of that period and are generally more right-wing than their parents. Many Palestinians living on the West Bank or Gaza grew up mixing with ordinary Israelis on beaches or restaurants in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Their children have not had these experiences. They’ve rarely seen an Israeli who isn’t carrying a gun.

Sharon was cursed by the right for his decision to pull out of Gaza. It was welcomed by President Bush, who wrote later that Sharon ‘as the father of the settler movement’ was making a ‘bold move’. In April 2004 the two men swapped letters to put on record a quid pro quo. Sharon outlined his plan, and in return Bush wrote a letter to Sharon implying that he would support some of the larger Jewish settlements in the West Bank staying with Israel under any future deal. ‘In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, 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,’ he wrote.
³⁵
The then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan thought the Gaza pull-out was ‘the right thing, done the wrong way’ and he wrote later: ‘The barrier was built with both a security
and
a political purpose in mind. The same was true of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza.’
³⁶

When Ariel Sharon suffered a serious stroke in 2006, which left him in a permanent coma, some Israeli religious extremists considered it divine intervention for his actions in Gaza. But during the final years of his active life, he was not the only player trying to shape events on the ground.

The Saudis came up with a plan in 2002 promising full Arab recognition for Israel if it went back to the 1967 borders. That got no further than 2003’s ‘roadmap’ drawn up by the ‘Quartet’ made up of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. The reality of the Quartet, a former member of the Envoy’s team told me, was that ‘We were in Disneyland and Tony Blair was Mickey Mouse.’ The Quartet made no progress on a peace deal either. The Palestinian Authority leadership regarded Blair as biased towards Israel, and in private they constantly lobbied for his replacement.

The ‘roadmap’ was preceded by George W. Bush becoming the first US president to explicitly call for the creation of a Palestinian state in 24 June 2002. At the same time he called for the Palestinians to dump Yasser Arafat as their leader. That prompted George W. Bush’s mother to call him disapprovingly ‘the first Jewish President’.
³⁷
This was because the son was more willing to take Israel’s side than the father. George H. Bush had taken a much tougher line with Israel during his presidency, opposing loan guarantees to Israel because of its settlement building.

Bush Junior though always had Israel’s interests at heart, a fact initially made easier by his loathing of Yasser Arafat. Arafat embodied in Bush’s mind what the ‘War on Terror’ was being fought for, even though Arafat was fighting for turf, not for God. ‘The President was disgusted with Yasir Arafat, whom he saw, accurately, as a terrorist and a crook,’ wrote his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
³⁸
With Abbas at the helm, Bush later sponsored another round of talks in Annapolis, but they too came to nothing.

‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if democracy in the Middle East sprung first from the rocky soil of the West Bank?’ asked George W. Bush of his staff in June 2002.
³⁹
Instead his hopes floundered on the rocky soil of Gaza four years later because his push for elections produced a result he did not want and led to a fundamental split within the Palestinian opposition movement.