peacefare.net

Bob Marley, Israel, and Palestine

I made it home from Jerusalem in good order Saturday, just 20 hours after leaving the American Colony Hotel. Its reality was a bit shabbier than its reputation, but nonetheless welcome after a couple of weeks with our SAIS students in lesser accommodations. Fortunately, the opposite was true of Israel and Palestine: the reality is a better than their reputation.

Let’s start with security. Bad things can happen suddenly anytime anywhere, but on both sides of the quintessential Middle East conflict things were generally calm these past two weeks. Ramallah, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Nablus were no less normal than Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. A day of rage declared last week in response to President Trump’s Jerusalem decision and Vice President Pence’s visit seems to have mostly fizzled, though we did see some stone throwers on the outskirts of Ramallah. I’d be more concerned about the cold, wind, and rain in Jerusalem and the West Bank this time of year than the risk of terrorism. The State Department travel warning issued just before our trip is clearly intended to cover bureaucratic asses if something happens.

I’ve already reviewed how Palestinians and Israelis see things. Perhaps more important is how they view each other. You can get the official line at the top from the media: Israelis say they have no partner for negotiating peace, as Palestinians are still making bereavement payments to the families of suicide bombers, while Palestinians say Israel continues to blatantly violate international law in its more than 50-year occupation of the West Bank, its building of settlements, and its continuing constraints on Gaza (despite the withdrawal of its troops).

Israelis seem content with the current situation. They don’t see much of the Gaza or West Bank Palestinians, who are mostly kept on the opposite side of security fences. A very few Gaza Palestinians and more West Bankers work in Israel, especially in construction and menial jobs. Even in Jerusalem, many Palestinians keep to the eastern, Arab part of the city and to the Arab quarter. There are areas where Jews and Arabs mix a bit, especially in the Old City, and there are Palestinian citizens of Israel who are rising socially and professionally throughout Israel. Few of them are likely to prefer living in an independent Palestine, but all can describe the prejudice and discrimination they are subject to. It doesn’t take much to illicit from Jewish Israelis racist remarks about Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular.

Palestinians are holding the short end of the stick. The power imbalance is overwhelming and they know it. Israel’s vibrant economy, advanced technology, and military prowess make it a “First World” country, more akin to Europe than the Middle East. The West Bank and Gaza are poor and largely powerless, all the more so for having a customs and monetary union with Israel. The Israelis not only collect customs revenue on behalf of the Palestinians (and withhold it when they want to exert pressure), but the West Bank is unable to protect its nascent industries with tariffs or devalue its currency. Agriculture, not industry, is therefore still the mainstay of the West Bank economy. There is remarkably little Israeli investment in the West Bank except for its Jewish settlements, and of course none in Hamas-governed Gaza.

But the Palestinians still hold a trump card: their demographic growth. It may already be that there are more Arabs west of the Jordan river than Jews, but if not it will be so soon. Israel’s only option if it wants to remain a Jewish-majority state but prevent an independent Palestinian one is what the Palestinians term apartheid: a system of isolated “bantustans” in the West Bank that will govern themselves while Israel controls security, including freedom of movement, as well as the economy. The Palestinians do not think such a system can last. Some are advocating a one-state solution that will eventually be under Arab control. That, they remind, is what the Palestine Liberation Organization advocated until its 1993 recognition of Israel and acceptance in principle of a Palestinian state on 22% of Mandate Palestine.

Palestinians are fond of correcting foreigners when they ask about “the Jews.” The Jews they say come in many varieties, including those who support an independent Palestinian state and join in nonviolent Palestinian protests. The biggest problems for Palestinians come from the religious settlers in the West Bank, who are often verbally and physically abusive. But ultimately, Palestinians aver, their problems are not with Jews, whom they say they accept as one of the indigenous peoples, but rather with Israel, which refuses to allow them their state and is consequently headed in a non-democratic direction.

Both Palestinians and Israelis should not forget Bob Marley’s message:

Israeli advantages

I wrote a couple of days ago about the current Palestinian narrative. Today I’ll try to describe the Jewish Israeli narrative, though that is more difficult because there is a far wider range of views. The Palestinians seem to me to have become a nation (that is: a community with a common language, culture and beliefs about their identity, even though most are Muslim and a small percentage Christian) but failed to complete their state, partly due to Israeli resistance. The Jews have built an impressive state that dominates both in Israel inside the 1967 borders and outside them, but their nation is less fully formed. My liberal Judaism, to which most American Jews adhere, is a small and sometimes barely tolerated minority in Israel.

Many Israeli Jews believe their presence in the West Bank and the (not complete) blockade of Gaza are security necessities. They attribute the decline of terrorist attacks in Israel to the security barrier, which they like to call a fence (they claim it is 92% fence and only 8% wall). They are pleased with the recently unveiled capacity to detect and destroy tunnels Hamas and others dig into Israel from Gaza. Even Israeli Jews who would like to see withdrawal from the West Bank in order to allow the creation of a Palestinian state emphasize that the Jewish settlements there constitute a small percentage of the land area: some say less than 3%, others less than 6%, as it depends on what you count.

There is little doubt though that someone in Jerusalem is planning the settlements and infrastructure (roads, electricity, water) for a permanent presence in the West Bank, especially but not only in the territory near Jerusalem that the Israelis have formally annexed. The settlements already break up the areas the Palestinian Authority controls or administers into more than 150 enclaves (islands). Some are connected by tunnels, but not most. The right-wing parties that participate in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government want to expand the population living in the West Bank to one million, while legalizing many outposts that are currently considered illegal.

Some claim that the settlements built on state or privately owned land are legitimate. This relies on a claim that Israel is the successor state to Jordan, the British mandate, and the Ottoman Empire in the territory it controls, a claim that has been neither agreed nor adjudicated so far as I am aware. Some also believe legitimate settlements should be able to stay under Palestinian sovereignty after final status is decided. That is difficult to imagine in practice, but there are certainly Israeli Jews putting it forward in theory.

When talking about the Palestinians, many less liberal Israeli Jews–and for that matter American ones–betray an attitude that can only be described as discriminatory, or worse. One carefully explained that the more Orthodox Jewish settlements outside the 1967 borders were built to give poor Haredim more acceptable living conditions than in the crowded neighborhoods of West Jerusalem. There is little concern or funding for the crowded Palestinian neighborhoods, and certainly no building of new towns for them near Jerusalem. Another cited his settlement’s good relations with its Arab neighbors–a laudable achievement–in terms that suggested their social and cultural inferiority. Americans should be familiar with these attitudes: in a more virulent form, they now occupy the mind of the current inhabitant of the White House when it comes to Mexican and African Americans, not to mention all of Africa and Haiti.

Israeli Jews both inside and outside the 1967 borders find the current situation tolerable. Most have little contact with Arabs, apart from those who do construction or menial jobs. Intellectual interchange with Palestinians is now mostly limited to a Jewish elite that sympathizes with their desire for self-determination. The fence/wall is not only physical but psychological and cultural. The costs of securing (the Palestinians would say occupying) the West Bank and blockading Gaza are tolerable. Tuesday’s “day of rage” against Trump/Pence proved eminently manageable. The Israelis exploit the water and other resources of the West Bank with abandon, training their soldiers in its nature parks and raiding supposedly Palestinian-secured areas at will while denying building permits.

There is an enormous power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians: politically, militarily, and economically Israel is overwhelmingly dominant. Its per capita GDP is perhaps 20 times that of the Palestinians outside the 1967 borders. The Palestinians have no army and apart from their police no legitimate weapons. Their state is largely dysfunctional and their security forces beholden to the Israelis. The Palestinians say the West Bank and Gaza live under an apartheid system in the making, or some say already made. The Israelis see these asymmetries as advantages to be exploited.

What has God got to do with it?

I gave a much shortened version of this talk on the role of religion in the Israeli/Arab conflict this afternoon at DACOR Bacon House, a club for retired US Foreign Service and military officers: What Has God Got To Do With It? Comments/suggestions would be much appreciated.