The European Council on Foreign Relations

Impressions of Israel and Ramallah…

Date: 25th July 2011  |  Author: Nick Witney,

Categories: Middle East and North Africa,
Tags: jerusalem, jerusalem , palestinine, ramallah, west bank , israel

I've just returned to London after a fascinating GMF study tour to Israel (and Ramallah). Here are a few impressions:

Israelis

Things are going well in Israel. The economy is prospering (and major off-shore gas fields will start producing in two years). Bars and restaurants are relaxed and crowded. There is a striking absence of visible security presence, even in, say, the old city of Jerusalem. The Netanyahu/Lieberman coalition is quarrelsome, but securely in the saddle.

Of course, Israelis – or at any rate the politicians, officials and analysts we mostly met - worry. The Arab Spring is generally foreseen to end badly, with hostile Islamists in power. The nuclear threat from Iran looms large. The Palestinians’ push for UN recognition of their statehood in September is seen as part of a dangerous international campaign to ‘delegitimise’ Israel.

None of these worries add up to anything approaching an incentive to do a deal with the Palestinians. No Israeli we met seemed to think that resolution of the conflict was on the cards for the foreseeable future – the way forward, like it or not, would lie through ‘conflict management’. Nor was there much doubt that the conflict could indeed be managed; having defeated the suicide bombers, and stemmed most of the missile attacks, there seemed a basic confidence that whatever new wave of non-violent protest occurs in the occupied territories in the autumn, Israel will be able to see that off too.

As for the longer term – well, who knows? Few seemed much concerned about a Palestinian demographic challenge in the absence of a distinct Palestinian state. More seemed disposed to hope that the Arab Spring might loosen up the artificial post-colonial boundaries in the neighbourhood, creating a new set of Arab geographies and identities into which Palestinians might be absorbed. Meanwhile, wait and see was the obvious course. Economic development on the West Bank was giving the Palestinian leadership an increasing stake in not rocking the boat. The continued expansion of settlements was not, to Israeli minds, a real problem: Obama had indeed embarrassed Mahmud Abbas by making an issue of it – Abbas was realist enough to know that, through all the long years of negotiations, settlement had continued without preventing talks.

So, though no-one would tempt fate by saying so in terms, on the evidence of our conversations most Israelis think they are ‘winning’ - or may even have won. There is effectively no domestic pressure on Netanyahu to compromise on settlements, on sharing Jerusalem, or on anything else.

Palestinians

Palestinians think Israelis have won, too – at least for now. Polling shows a major shift of support away from ‘armed struggle’ to non-violent protest. A majority expect to take part in such protests this autumn. A majority also doubt that much good will come of it. They do, however, expect the Authority, assuming a positive outcome at the UN, to come home and start to somehow ‘exercise sovereignty’ on the West Bank. It is not easy to see how further disillusionment will not follow.

So Palestinian hopes shift to the longer term – either (if you are PM Fayyad) through the ‘Monnet method’ of continued economic development of the West Bank, or through growing international pressure (eg the BDS – boycott, divest, sanction – movement) on Israel, to which the UN statehood vote and subsequent protests are meant to contribute. There is of course tension between these two strategies – and Fayyad evidently thinks that raising the temperature through going to the UN risks undoing his work.

Israel’s ‘legitimacy’

With a peace process which is either dead or in a deep coma, the diplomatic arm-wrestle for votes at the UN is intense. Israelis condemn a campaign of ‘delegitimisation’. There seem to be two elements to this concept. First, Israelis worry that manipulation of world opinion could one day see them cast in the role of apartheid South Africa as international pariah. (Hence their readiness to ban domestic boycott advocacy with new legislation which is widely seen as undemocratic.) They fear that Palestinian statehood at the UN could allow the ICC to be used against them – fears sharpened by the recent instance of a retired Israeli general forced to leave London in a hurry to avoid arrest for ‘war crimes’ under ‘universal jurisdiction’.

The other aspect of ‘delegitimisation’ concern is manifested in the renewed demands to be recognised as a Jewish state. As one member of the Knesset explained it to us, as long as Palestinians cling to the notion of a ‘right of return’ they are not accepting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. So outsiders are wrong to see the conflict as basically about dividing territory: it is fundamentally about rights. And there can be no final peace until Palestinians concede not only that Israel is a reality which they had better come to terms with, but that Israeli rights trump theirs.

Two vignettes of complexity:

-- at the long-established Gush Etzion settlement bloc outside Bethlehem, we were told that day-to-day relations with Palestinians were just fine. Two days later the Jerusalem Post carried a photo of an Israeli soldier holding a cocked gun to a Palestinian’s head in an adjoining Arab village. Yet the photo had been taken by an Israeli human rights group: and the IDF spokesman’s reaction made plain that the soldier is heading for big trouble.

-- a smart Israeli Arab woman (‘Palestinian citizen of Israel’) criticised Lieberman’s recent proposal that the ’67 borders could be redrawn to transfer certain Arab population centres in Israel proper into the Palestinian entity. Why object? we asked – no-one has to move home, and Palestinians get to live under Palestinian authority. Because I am a citizen of Israel, she said, with all my networks on this side of the border – and (implied) why would a modern woman want to live in an Arab patriarchy? And we’ve had enough of being treated as pawns in someone else’s game.

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