Optimism is back on the table
HAVIV RETTIG GUR
THE past decade has been a difficult one for Middle East optimists. From the jaws of victory in 2000, the Palestinians somehow snatched defeat.
In response to massive Israeli withdrawals, to the total absence of Israeli soldiers from Palestinian towns, and to an Israeli offer to share sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the autocratic Palestinian government of Yasser Arafat in October 2000 launched the bloodiest terror campaign endured by any democracy in recent decades.
The Israeli response was unambiguous. While the world’s experts opined on the impossibility of defeating guerilla terror through military means, the Israel Defence Forces did just that.
In the process, the Palestinians, who could not control their corrupt leadership or their fate, grew ever more convinced that the Israelis were hopelessly militaristic and brutal. The Israelis, meanwhile, came to view the Palestinians as hopelessly dysfunctional and barbarically violent.
Ever since, anyone speaking earnestly about peace was seen by both sides as too foolish to be trusted, a clown who did not grasp the agonies and cruelties of the conflict.
Such was the view of some regarding the optimistic new American President Barack Obama, a view quickly confirmed by the disastrous ineptitude with which his administration handled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in its first eight months.
In case you didn’t follow too closely, the cornerstone to this policy was an American demand that Israel freeze all growth in settlements. Not the growth of settlements -— the Netanyahu government already agreed to a freeze of territorial expansion -— but a demographic freeze, a stoppage to population growth.
What the Israeli government was supposed to do with the approximately 1000 children born each year in West Bank settlements was not made clear.
Worse, the Obama Administration stipulated that this included not just far-flung Jewish settlements surrounded by Palestinian villages, but also generations-old Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem.
Instead of strengthening Israelis’ desire for peace, the Obama Administration ruined Israelis’ faith in the basic competence of the American interlocutor.
This policy was even more damaging for the Palestinians. By the time Obama inevitably backtracked from this demand, the Palestinians had already adopted it as a precondition for talks.
Thus they were left with the choice of publicly conceding to the Israelis over settlements — a domestic political catastrophe — or being seen as the obstacle to peace talks.
It was a bad start to what was supposed to be a new lease on life for the peace process.
Luckily, American mistakes are less important to the prospects of Middle East peace than Israeli and Palestinian action. And some positive developments on the ground seem to be overtaking the diplomatic bungling at the top.
During the past year, the Netanyahu government publicly endorsed a Palestinian state — though, like Iceland and Costa Rica, it will be disarmed; Fatah grew more terrified of a Gaza-style Hamas takeover than of peace with Israel; the Israeli government began dismantling the “national priority” system of financial benefits for the settlements — benefits originally intended to help poor periphery towns; and a large percentage of the West Bank’s roadblocks were taken down, which, together with Israeli investment, led to a racy seven per cent economic growth in the West Bank.
A large part of the credit for these achievements goes to the Palestinian government itself, led by US-trained economist Salaam Fayad, who committed his administration to development and transparency and has been hard at work retooling the Palestinian armed forces from loose-knit anti-Israel guerillas into a civil police force. For the first time in a long time, the Palestinian Authority’s armed forces in Jenin are giving out traffic tickets instead of plotting terror raids across the Green Line.
For the first time in a long time, optimism looks set to become a reasonable response once more. Israel has already withdrawn from 85 per cent of the land it conquered from Egypt and Jordan in 1967, and can withdraw once again if it won’t face attacks from the abandoned territory.
With Israeli overtures and American support in place, the ball is now squarely in the court of the Palestinian leadership. Let us hope that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the grizzled Palestinian radical of yesteryear, does not reject out of hand all that his prime minister has achieved and the real possibility for independence that now lies on the table.
Haviv Rettig Gur is the Jewish world reporter for The Jerusalem Post. Haviv also blogs regularly at HavivGur.com.
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