Sunday, April 13, 2008

The Father of Palestine: Into Ramallah with George W. Bush. Part III


By David Samuels

3rd part of 3

ONCE TOUTED AS THE BILL CLINTON OF THE LABOR PARTY

Later in the day, I meet with Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon in his half-empty office. Ramon has spent most of the last 15 years in the Cabinet, and was once touted as the Bill Clinton of the Labor Party, before his career was briefly derailed by a sexual harassment case. Now he is the second-ranking member of the government.

"The prime minister and the defense minister had talks with four eyes and six eyes with the president about Iran," Ramon says, using the Israeli locution for private meetings. "Those talks were very important." Before the NIE, Ramon says, he estimated the chances of a U.S. attack on Iran at 5 percent. Now he estimates the chances at 2 percent.

Bush told Olmert that he would not waste his precious last year in office on brokering a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians unless both sides were serious about reaching a deal. It is the opinion of the government of the State of Israel that a deal can in fact be reached, Ramon says. "It doesn't mean that on the first of January, 2009, a Palestinian flag will be raised over Jerusalem, " he cautions. "But we will reach a framework, a Declaration of Principles, in 2008, and that will be the agreement that will be implemented in the future."

"A SHARP GLIMMER OF UNDERSTANDING PENETRATES MY FOGGY BRAIN"

When I ask Ramon whether he shares Olmert's opinion that Israel will be "finished" if the two-state solution collapses, he cocks his head. "I say that Israel is risking itself as a Jewish and a democratic state," he says. In Ramon's view, and in the view of most members of the cabinet, continuing the occupation poses a strategic threat to Israel. "We are not doing a favor for the Palestinians," Ramon says. "This is a conflict between Israel and Israel itself."

It would be wonderful if the Palestinian government somehow gains enough strength to carry out its commitments under the road map, Ramon suggests. If not, he continues, "we have to take unilateral steps that will solve these issues."

A sharp glimmer of understanding penetrates my foggy brain. The Americans and the Israelis speak with such assurance about reaching an agreement by the end of 2008 because they are talking about a paper agreement with a paper partner to create a state that will only exist on paper.

"WE NEED TO DEFINE OUR BORDERS AND TELL THEM, 'BYE-BYE'"

If a strong Palestinian government "untainted by terror" never arises - as seems quite possible, if not likely - then Israel will withdraw from most of the West Bank anyway. "It is up to us to secure our own future," Ramon says, spreading his hands wide apart.

"We can live without peace with the Palestinians, but we can't continue to live with the occupation. We need to separate from them. We need to define our borders and tell them, 'Bye-bye, go live however you want, and peace be with you. And, if you want to keep fighting, we'll kill you until you stop.'"

Among the range of sources I speak to inside and outside the current Israeli government, no one suggests that Olmert's weak coalition is up to the task of bulldozing large Israeli communities like Kiryat Arba that are located east of any future border. No one I talked to, from politicians to generals, expects combat-hardened U.S. or British or French troops to arrive to police the West Bank.

No one wants to see the West Bank become another Gaza Strip. No one believes the badly fractured Palestinian polity is capable of meeting its commitments. Which means that most Israeli troops and settlers will stay more or less exactly where they are today. If the Palestinian security commitments will mostly exist on paper, the Israeli disengagement from the West Bank, unlike the disengagement from Gaza, will also exist mostly on paper.

"A STROKE OF POLITICAL GENIUS"

From the standpoint of its inventors, at least, the paper disengagement is a stroke of political genius that gives all the parties most of what they want. The Israelis will get international credit for committing to do in the future what they are not able to do in the present - namely, to withdraw large numbers of Israeli soldiers and settlers from the West Bank.

The fiction of an Israeli withdrawal can support the fiction of a Palestinian state run by Abbas and Fatah, whose physical security will be insured by the presence of actual Israeli troops on the ground.

The Americans can get a diplomatic success that can give added credibility to a diplomatic alliance against Iran, or peacemaking efforts with Iran, depending on how the wind blows in the next six months.

Starved of political legitimacy and government funding, settlements east of the future border will slowly wither on the vine, making an actual Israeli withdrawal - when it happens, with or without the establishment of a Palestinian state, whether Fatah or Hamas is in charge - that much easier.

IN TWO YEARS, THE P.A. MAY NO LONGER EXIST, EVEN ON PAPER

It is easy to imagine why, within the historical parameters of the conflict, any Palestinian leader worth his salt would find such a reasonable yet utterly ridiculous exercise - in which the "right of return" is finally assigned to the dustbin of history - to be an unbearable humiliation, and refuse to sign it, just as Yasser Arafat refused to sign the real-life version of the same agreement at Camp David.

Then again, in another two or three years, the Palestinian Authority may no longer exist, even on paper. The fact that the State of Israel is widely loathed does not diminish the extent to which 15 years of failed Palestinian state-building followed by the failure of the Second Intifada have turned the Palestinian national cause into a byword for gruesome terror bombings and children wearing toy suicide belts in parades.

All you need to do is spend a day driving around Israel and then through the West Bank to see the results of the last 15 years. Israel is a modern First World country whose standard of living is much higher now than it was before Oslo. The Palestinians are beggars.

"DON'T TOUCH THAT, IT'S GARBAGE"

I spend my last few days wandering the Old City of Jerusalem and getting reacquainted with Palestinians I know in the antiquities trade.

My friend Badawi's store is filled with junk, which he uses as a way to calibrate the wants of his customers and what they will be willing to pay. There are strings of silver-inlaid worry beads, engraved plates, daggers, traditional Palestinian headdresses, and other heirlooms that West Bank villagers have sold to feed their families.

"Don't touch that, it's garbage," he instructs me, when I pick up some Turkmeni rings from a bowl.

What I have learned from the afternoons I have spent sitting in Badawi's shop is that commerce is different in Middle Eastern societies than in Anglo-European societies, where commodities are stubbornly believed to have a natural price.

As a result, most Western people find prolonged negotiation to be quite stressful. They pay too much, or become flustered and walk out. Here, fantasy and desire are the acknowledged foundations of any negotiation; negotiation is a way of understanding the mind of your opponent before arriving at a price.

SPOUTING SLOGANS AGAINST THE JEWS

When we are finished eating lunch, I go across the way to visit Mahmoud, another dealer I have known for years. Bundled up against the cold, he talks about his education at St. George's School in East Jerusalem.

A year and a half ago, his son came home from school spouting slogans against the Jews, he says. After consulting with a friend, he enrolled his son in a program for cross- cultural understanding at the YMCA in West Jerusalem and paid to send him on a month-long group trip to Austria. Now his son has Jewish friends.

Still, Mahmoud watches where his son goes, and with whom. As he talks, he reminds me of the parents I have met in inner-city neighborhoods who try to keep their kids away from gangs and drugs. No one could ever convince Mahmoud that Jewish supremacy in his ancestral city is just, any more than they could convince him that the Palestinian national movement since Oslo has been anything other than a failure.

"I went to the mosque today, and the sheik was talking about the difference between legal settlement and illegal settlements," he says, in his soft voice, seeking to define the situation more precisely. "And one man stood up and said, 'There is no difference between settlements and the State of Israel. The fundamental basis of the state is illegal.'

"Now, it doesn't matter whether I agree with him or not," he continues. "But, when I was leaving the mosque, I turned to my friend and I asked him, 'What do we want? Do we want these slogans from the past, or do we want a state?' My friend couldn't answer me. This is the problem of Palestine today."

(David Samuels writes for The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New Yorker.)

Copyright - Original material copyright (c) by the author

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