More Rungs On Jacob's Ladder

Even in the digital age, a group of pilgrims in Israel and the West Bank is likely to end up feeling set apart from the world – hermeneutically sealed, you might say. Are those Crusader or Byzantine ruins atop Mt. Tabor in Galilee, or a combination of both (which is usually the right answer)? The cassocked monk who just brushed by us in Jerusalem's old city -- Armenian or Greek Orthodox? Does any of Queen Helena's 4th century building remain in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (yes, or so we were told; the center arch in the photo above)?

It's not that we didn't go on-line. But when we visited Wikipedia, it was to learn more about the history of the Freres Blanc, custodians of St. Anne’s Church and the pools of Bethesda, and to try to figure out which of the eight purported sites of the biblical Emmaus we had actually visited on Saturday morning.

We weren’t totally hermetic in our coenobiticality. News of pastoral crises quickly reached us – two friends’ unplanned hospital visits, another’s home being threatened by fire in Colorado Springs. We also heard in real time about the political firestorm sparked by the Supreme Court's health care opinion. But what I didn't learn until we were en route to LAX (and I opened the new issue of the Economist that had materialized on my Kindle) was that the walls bordering one of the sites we visited last week in Nablus on the West Bank, Jacob’s Well, had recently been shot up, the result of internecine Palestinian tensions.

The incident notwithstanding, I'm glad we didn't skip our Jacob's Well stop, which proved to be a favorite for several of our St. John's pilgrims. Because of Palestinian Authority reforms and improving economic conditions, the West Bank has been peaceful for the last few years. When there is talk these days of a third intifada, or popular uprising, it's about the chances of an armed struggle within the Palestinian movement between Fatah, which is working constructively with Israel, and Hamas, still officially dedicated to Israel's demise:

“There is no political horizon,” say disgruntled Palestinians. They increasingly question the point of the PA. It has failed to usher in a Palestinian state, and appears powerless to prevent Israeli military incursions or the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. “All the windows are closed, and the political elite has no keys to open them,” says Raid Nairat, an academic. The West Bank’s 30,000 security forces seem unkeen on a recent quest for reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas that would force them to share power. Their recent round-up of 150 Hamas men helped dampen hopes of a deal.

So there are some more roadblocks on the peace highway, more rungs on Jacob's ladder. It's hard to imagine Fatah and Hamas sharing power (until their goals converge), Israel making a deal with just Fatah (since it would reasonably assume that Hamas would undermine it), and Israel making a deal with a united Fatah and Hamas (unless Hamas permanently renounces jihad against Israel). A Palestinian civil war might actually be welcomed by those who think it would take the pressure off Israel to make peace. Better to hope that Hamas will be pulled to the center by its ongoing nation-building work in Gaza and the election of a Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt who is fully committed to the peace process.

Diplomatic Brotherhood

Egypt's incoming rulers, the Muslim Brotherhood, are readjusting their relationship with the two major Palestinian parties, David Kirkpatrick reports:

Brotherhood officials say that they are pulling back from their previous embrace of Hamas and its commitment to armed struggle against Israel in order to open new channels of communications with Fatah, which the Brotherhood had previously denounced for collaborating with Israel and accused of selling out the Palestinian cause. Brotherhood leaders argue that if they persuade the Palestinians to work together with a newly assertive Egypt, they will have far more success forcing Israel to bargain in earnest over the terms of statehood.

The Peril Of Palestinian Unity

As Fatah and Hamas edge toward a unity government, Ethan Bonner writes, they push creation of a state of Palestine further down the road. Israel and the U.S. don't trust Hamas, and they must be assuming that before long the Islamist party will dominate the Palestinian National Authority. One expert puts it in a regional context:

“The Arab awakening is witnessing the rise of a reformist political Islam in Egypt and Tunisia, and I believe we will see that Hamas is no exception,” asserted Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Jerusalem. “Western governments are dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and it is only a matter of time before they will meet with Hamas as well.”

A peace deal between Fatah and Israel would've been shaky, since Hamas would have undermined it. It will be better for Palestinians if their leadership speaks with one voice. That's the good news. The bad news is that Israel will build more West Bank settlements, further eroding the integrity of a future Palestinian state, while it and the U.S. wait for Hamas to earn a place at the negotiating table by renouncing violence and recognizing, at least for the record, Israel's right to exist as a Jewish nation. In turn, Israel's hard line will diminish the likelihood that Hamas will make such concessions, enabling even more time for more settlements. So the paradox is that while factional unity might help Palestinians in the long run, it looks like the death knell for the state of Palestine.

Sacrificing One Peace For Another

As Fatah and Hamas make nice, will the Palestinians' prospective new prime minister, PNA President Mammoud Abbas, have to step even further back from negotiations with Israel to placate hardliners? The Jerusalem Post:

[S]ome Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip voiced opposition to the deal, especially the appointment of Abbas as prime minister.

“It was Hamas that won the election [in 2006] and not Mahmoud Abbas,” said a Hamas legislator who asked not to be identified. “Many people in Hamas are not happy with this agreement.”

Another Hamas legislator, Ismail Ashqar, criticized the Qatari-sponsored pact, saying it “violated the Palestinian Authority Basic Law and bypassed the Palestinian Legislative Council.”

Ashqar said the ball was now in the court of Abbas who, he added, would have to stop the negotiations and security coordination with Israel to ensure the success of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.

More Hamas

Karl Vick writes that the competing Palestinian movements have had little choice but to make friends with each other. Too bad the unity sounds more Hamas than Fatah:

When crowds in Tahrir Square toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the Palestinian faction led by [Mahmoud] Abbas lost its main patron. Mubarak strongly favored Abbas’ secular Fatah party, and as an enemy of political Islam kept a tight rein on Hamas activists in the adjacent Gaza Strip, which they governed since kicking Fatah out in 2007. Then the Arab uprisings cost Hamas a vital ally: Until recently, [Hamas leader Khaled Meshal] lived in Damascus, but Hamas is moving its headquarters out of Syria rather than side with President Bashar Assad against his population. Analysts in Gaza say Iran last year slowed or even stopped its subsidies to Hamas as punishment for not backing Assad. Bottom line: both factions lost their main state supporters just as their own people pried themselves from Arab satellite news to insist that they be heard, too.

What Palestinians demanded was that Fatah and Hamas bury their differences and form a united front against the Israeli occupation. This the factions promptly agreed to do, in a series of meetings held – not by accident – in Egypt. The new government emerging in Cairo may be dominated by Islamists, but it has pushed both sides to make up and adopt the non-violent strategy against Israel, complete with negotiations.

Just Say Yes

For a moment, imagine if Palestinians said yes to the creation of Palestine. An utterly naive proposition, I know. But instead of insisting on the chimera of “1967 borders with land swaps,” imagine if Palestinian negotiators in Amman provisionally accepted Israel's latest reported territorial offer, with the security wall essentially defining the international border and all West Bank settlements persisting as part of Israel. Many believe Israel must withdraw west of the 1967 green line, but let's assume that it won't and no one can make it do so. The concession would cost Palestine the equivalent of two-thirds of Anaheim’s land mass. If you find authorities who say it would actually be two Dearborns, the advantages of immediate statehood would be the same. What should matter is if Palestinians get enough land to run a country, settlements and all. A slightly smaller Palestine now would be infinitely better for its people and the region than a larger one in five or ten years or never.

Myriad issues would remain -- settlement security, water rights, transportation, and border crossing rights for Palestine’s citizens. If Israel balked at the PNA’s bold move, we would see which side was the stumbling block once and for all. If not, we may hope that in return Israel would stop building settlements and promise post-statehood talks on the status of Jerusalem, where Israel has the stronger claim (notwithstanding the likely presence on the holy mountain of pre-Davidic indigenous peoples). Israel thrived with its capital in Tel Aviv. For the time being, the Palestinians ought to be able to do so in historic Ramallah.

I understand President Abbas and Fatah would run afoul of their Islamist cousins, Hamas, by abandoning the green line and immediate access to a Jerusalem capital. The Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, plans to step down soon, some say because he has his eye on a bigger job. Would that be Abbas's? In Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu has to worry about his obstructionists, too.

But it's not just extremists who are delaying peace. Significant swathes of both populations aren’t sure they want two permanent states. Israel expresses its ambivalence, its resentment over having to cede land to Arabs and fear of what will happen to its security if it does, by continuing to build settlements on occupied territory. Palestinians expressed theirs by spurning prior Israeli concessions and letting the Obama peace initiative fizzle over the secondary issue of settlement construction. Many Palestinians, perhaps a majority, still don't believe Israel has a right to exist, and they may be thinking that someday soon, it won’t. Watching events in Egypt, they may expect that the Arab spring will give way to a winter gale of Islamist hostility toward Israel. Until the Amman talks, to increase the external pressure on Israel, Abbas had been focusing not on negotiations but UN recognition. Many Palestinians who do favor two states believe a demographic reunification of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs will eventually put an end to the Jewish nation.

Which is why a security wall state, or any other breakthrough anytime soon, is a fantasy. Palestinians and their advocates find it more advantageous to invoke the international consensus against the occupation, proclaim the illegality of settlements, and continue to make comparisons to apartheid (prevalent in the Arab, Muslim, and haredim worlds against women but not in Israel against Arabs). Israel and her friends prefer to talk about the Palestinians as an invented people who are Jordan's problem, remind critics that Israel won the West Bank in a war provoked if not started by Arabs, and reliably promise that it would win the next one against any nation or group that dislikes its negotiating tactics. But none of the maps and legends, the endless game of historical, geographical, rhetorical tit for tat, would matter if both sides were fully committed to having two permanent states – because if they were, the states would probably exist.

The Israel Paradigm

On Dec. 21, Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" featured an interview (podcast available here) with Anthony Shadid of the New York Times, who has covered the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world and was held prisoner by Qaddafi's forces in Libya. His accounts of getting in and out of Syria and the terrifying incident in Libya, where his driver was killed, are riveting. He spoke movingly about watching history unfold in Tahrir Square and throughout the region:

I think when you look across the Arab world, absolutely, but even elsewhere, this idea of old kind of paradigms coming to an end and that people are searching for something that can represent them better, that's more meaningful to their lives, that somehow maybe transcends these older institutions that have held sway over so many places for so long - interestingly, I mean just as a kind of footnote here, or even, you know, a side note here, is that you often hear this from Islamists. When I was talking to Rashid al-Ghannushi, a very prominent Tunisian Islamist leader, he made the very same point to me, that what he was seeing going on with Occupy Wall Street, with the Arab Spring, was that, you know, people were looking for ideologies that were different. Of course he was volunteering his ideology as a replacement, but I think that sense of things coming to an end is very powerfully felt in a lot of places right now.

Here's the challenge, as Shadid sees it:

Are these new systems of politics that emerged in, say, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, you know, Bahrain, Yemen, any of those countries, are they going to revolve around this access of citizenship, or are these societies going to divide along, you know, I think more kind of basic notions of sect or ethnicity or other notions of identity that feel very exclusive?

Although it wasn't mentioned in the 40-minute interview, Arabs actually don't have to look far for inspiration. Israel is multiethnic and democratic. While it's a majority Jewish state, Arab citizens, whether Muslim or Christian, worship as they choose, vote, and own property, as do women. It has a strong secular sensibility. Some 10,000 demonstrators took to the streets this week to protest plans by Israel's ultra-orthodox minority, the haredim, to subjugate women. The more that emerging Arab polities resemble Israel, enabling freedoms that have been scarce or nonexistent in Arab countries so far, the better off their people, and especially their women, will be. As for Palestinians living under occupation on the West Bank, they're the least free in Israel but still among the freest in the region. They'll be worse off if an independent Palestine follows the old Arab paradigm instead the new Israeli one. Here's hoping that as Fatah and Hamas grow closer, the Palestinian movement doesn't lose its taste for democracy and gender equity.

Being viewed with distaste by its neighbors and relegated to the global doghouse for dragging its feet on Palestine doesn't make Israel in particular or democratic values in general less worthy models. On the contrary, it's a helpful lesson for democrats in training. We may feel that Benyamin Netanyahu's hardline policies are wrong and that the wisest step for Israel in the wake of the Arab spring would be to set up a Palestinian state as quickly as possible. That Israel's elected government doesn't agree is a reminder that while despots, to whom we hope Arab nations are saying goodbye forever, don't have to listen to their people, elected leaders do.

With Influence Comes Responsibility

David D. Kirkpatrick, writing in the New York Times about Egypt's assertive regional moves: Bringing Fatah and Hamas together, promising to end the Gaza blockade, and improving relations with Iran:

Egyptian officials, emboldened by the revolution and with an eye on coming elections, say that they are moving toward policies that more accurately reflect public opinion. In the process they are seeking to reclaim the influence over the region that waned as their country became a predictable ally of Washington and the Israelis in the years since the 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

"Say Goodbye To Palestine"

Martin Peretz says the upheavals in the Arab world and the pact between Fatah and Hamas have doomed the peace process:

There are no subtleties to the political and religious aims of the people who now govern Gaza. It is a febrile Islamist movement, allied with Iran and with Syria. It has murdered many more Arabs than it has killed Israelis—but not for wont of trying. A Fatah spokesman has assured the Palestinian masses that Salam Fayyad will not be a member of the interim government that should emerge from this pact. If you are hopeful about peace you are crazy. Barack Obama has thus far said nothing. It is very hard to comment when, day after day, one illusion after another, one delusion after another crumbles in the sands.

Say goodbye to Palestine. At least for the foreseeable future. And even if the General Assembly recognizes the fable for a fact.

Peace Amid Chaos?

As the "Economist" sees it, the Arab revolution of 2011 has increased the chances of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. First, it redeemed Hamas, since Egypt's new leaders no longer oppose it because of its links to the now-respectable Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt just brokered the deal between Hamas and Fatah. Now the speculation: Hamas may join Fatah in endorsing the two-state solution, increasing pressure on Israel to make peace. Still hanging fire: Israel's security in a more volatile and perhaps hostile region.

Salam Dunked

Twinned with the stunning announcement of a Fatah-Hamas unity pact is the troubling news that the able Palestinian prime minister who put the West Bank on the road to statehood is no longer welcome in office:

The deal brings with it the risk of alienating the Western support that the Palestinian Authority has enjoyed. Azzam al-Ahmad, the Fatah negotiator, said that Salam Fayyad, the prime minister in the West Bank who is despised by Hamas, would not be part of the interim government. It is partly because of Mr. Fayyad, and the trust he inspires in Washington, that hundreds of millions of dollars are provided annually to the Palestinian Authority by Congress. Without that aid, the Palestinian Authority would face great difficulties.

The announcement was sure to fuel a debate on whether Mr. Netanyahu had done enough in his two years in power to forge a deal with the Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas and Mr. Fayyad, widely considered the most moderate leaders the Palestinians have ever had.

Rhetoric In The Name Of Realism

Stephen M. Walt identifies himself as "a realist in an ideological age." Any conception of authentic foreign policy realism requires terminological precision. And yet in an article about Turkey's dismay at Israel's actions during the Gaza War last December and January, Walt refers to "Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza," even though Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

Realism also entails the willingness to appreciate several sides of a question simultaneously. Walt falls short of that measure as well. His terminology in a related blog post today is different; he says Israel is "controlling" Gaza. That it is, but only because Gaza is now occupied by a faction of the Palestinian movement which is dedicated to Israel's destruction and which provoked December's Israeli invasion by launching rocket attacks. Israel's response to the attacks was disproportionate. It was wrong and also tactically unwise for the Palestinian National Authority and the U.S. to have briefly colluded in trying to squelch a report about alleged Israeli excesses. But Walt's calling the Gazans "defenseless" begs the question of why they fired rockets at Israel. His own answer is also convoluted:

[B]ecause Israel continues to occupy the West Bank and Gaza and refuses to allow the Palestinians to have a state of their own, it faces continued resistance from groups like Hamas, including the firing of rockets at Israeli towns.

If Hamas ceased its aggression and acknowledged Israel's right to exist, the momentum leading to a Palestinian state would be irresistible. In other words, Walt has it exactly backwards. The purpose of Hamas' resistance and attacks is to perpetuate Israel's occupation of the West Bank and prevent a comprehensive peace. What exactly is the point of pretending otherwise in the name of realism?

Hat tip to Mike Cheever

Withering Gaza

It looks as if the Obama administration erred in pressuring the Palestinians to try to squelch temporarily a report on Israeli abuses during the Gaza war. U.S. policy should be aimed at building up the Abbas/Fatah government, not making it look like a toady of Washington and Israel in the eyes of the Palestinian people.

"Hamas Is Crazy"

We St. John's pilgrims ended up visiting Bethlelem a day earlier than planned because Canon Iyad Qumri got a hint about the massive security effort being mounted for Fatah's first-ever party conference inside the West Bank. From the "Economist," a vaguely optimistic conference postmortem:

National elections are set for January 2010. The new Fatah leadership will still face a strong challenge from Hamas, but even before the conference in Bethlehem Fatah had been enjoying a surge in popular support in the West Bank. This was due partly to the improved economic situation and also to the increased calm on the streets, attributed to the intensive American training of the PA’s security forces. Israel’s massive onslaught on Hamas-controlled Gaza earlier this year also seems to have validated Mr Abbas’s more moderate approach. “I like Fatah more now,” said a young man who was selling roast chicken in the market in front of the Nativity church in Bethlehem. “There are a lot of scary things going on in Gaza. Hamas is crazy. Palestine is Fatahland.”

Singing Together

As if proximity were the same as insight, after being in Israel and the West Bank for nearly two weeks one is tempted to be reckless and try to say something oracular about the problems between the Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, I'll stick to being almost strictly anthological.

The atmosphere in the Holy Land is certainly less tense than during my first pilgrimage in June 2007, during which Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip. In the months that followed, experts worried that the radical Islamists were in the ascendant over the more moderate Fatah. This year, Hamas seems increasingly marginalized, while Fatah is drawing on its more youthful members to reform from within as PNA President Mahmoud Abbas focuses more systematically on the needs of his people (though the rhetoric from the recent Fatah conference was harsh enough to startle conservative and liberal Israelis alike).

In 2007, Israeli checkpoints -- erected after the rash of suicide bombings known as the second intifada began in 2000 -- seemed to be choking West Bank commerce. This year, key checkpoints have been dismantled within the last few months. When we St. John's pilgrims visited Ramallah, headquarters of the Palestinian National Authority, to see St. Andrew's Episcopal Church and its energetic young vicar, business was said to be booming. There were also no complaints when we visited the Middle East's only microbrewery in the Christian town of Taybeh on the West Bank.

Spirits are also high because of the Obama administration's pressure on Israel to limit the expansion and growth of settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, though I worry what may happen if Israel digs its feet in, high hopes are dashed, and a consensus develops that President Obama devoted too much energy to an intractable problem too early in his administration. The issue could end up being radioactive for the next couple of Presidents.

Two years ago as now, the settlements are the dominant issue. I'd thought most of their residents were hard-core religious or secular Zionists. But one of my fellow pilgrims, over lunch with an Israeli friend, learned that he and his family had moved into the West Bank's third largest settlement in the 1990s not because they were zealots but because housing prices were low. Needless to say, he doesn't believe the settlements should be removed, but he does believe that the security wall should be removed for the sake of ensuring the viability of a nation of Palestine on the West Bank. That means that Israeli settlements might ultimately be on Palestine's territory, just as about 1.5 million Arabs live in Israel. Most Israelis are not especially defensive about how their government treats its Arab citizens. How would a Palestinian government treat Israeli settlers?

And who knows if that Utopian outcome -- two nations living side by side, one predominantly Jewish, the other predominantly Arab -- is even possible? This article, published yesterday, suggests that many if not most Palestinians still haven't accepted the unavoidable reality of a Jewish state. This one, published as our pilgrimage began, expresses the perspective of Israelis who know that Palestinians are suffering but want to see more confidence-building steps from Arabs and especially Arab-led regimes in the region.

That's why the militant rhetoric from the Fatah conference is so offensive to most Israelis' ears. But what do they expect? From a purely tactical perspective, Fatah can't sound too soft, or Hamas might gain the upper hand again. To paraphrase the late John Mitchell, Israel should probably pay more attention to what Palestinians do than what they say. Besides, just as the conference got underway, Israel gave its critics plenty of inspiration by evicting two Israeli Palestinian families from their homes in Arab east Jerusalem and putting Israeli Jewish families in their places. This happened just a few blocks from our pilgrim guest house at St. George's. We could still see the barricades around the houses and their former residents huddled under trees on the sidewalk to get away from the burning sun. Settlements in the West Bank are provocative enough. Settlements in east Jerusalem, which Palestinians envision as their capital, might spark a new descent into violence.

For what it's worth, we pilgrims prayed that wouldn't ever happen -- that people's exhaustion with war and terrorism, Obama's pressure on the settlements, the West Bank's new economic energy as Israel removes the checkpoints, and the influence of moderates on both sides all mean that a peace based on the two-state concept is again within reach.

But can people who have hated and hurt each other for generations share the same territory? Do they even want to try? Daniel Rossing, director of the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations, met with our pilgrim group several evenings ago. Someone asked him about Jerusalem, which Israel claims as its capital. It says it will never give up the east side for Palestine's, no matter if there's a state on the West Bank or not.

In response, Rossing drew on an analogy dear to our pilgrim hearts. In the 19th century, six Christian denominations had amply demonstrated that they couldn't come to peaceable terms about how to administer their holiest site, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Finally the Ottoman Turks brokered a complex power-sharing agreement called the Status Quo, which essentially governs this most wonderful and mysterious of churches today. Ironically enough, a Muslim family unlocks and locks the door each day. "We're not going to solve Jerusalem by cutting the baby in half," Rossing told us. "We're going to have to find some way to share it, something similar to the Status Quo, an arrangement so minutely complicated that no one can possibly understand it. All we will be able to do is obey it."

I wasn't sure what he meant until we visited the Holy Sepulcher for the last time this morning, after walking the Stations of the Cross. As Roman Catholic priests and monks began a solemn high mass at 7:30 at the front of the Edicule, believed to enclose the tomb of Jesus Christ, we could hear someone else chanting from the other side. It was a Coptic priest conducting his own service in a small chapel on the back of the same structure. As two priests chanted, one in Latin, the other in the ancient Coptic tongue, my first reaction was that someone should be quiet until the other's service was over. I even flirted with the idea that that the priests were trying to drown each other out. But no. They were just doing what they believed they should, in their own way, in the same small, sacred space, in apparent conflict except for the amazing fact that they probably do it the same way every single morning. They are content to live peacefully in the ambiguity. We should all be so wise.


In the original version of this post, I erred in saying that Hamas had secured control of the West Bank in June 2007 and that the Coptic priest was chanting in Arabic.