The New Middle East (26 page)

As George W. Bush had willed, the Palestinian people went to the polls to elect their legislative representatives. The expectation of almost everyone who didn’t have to live in the occupied territories was that Abbas’s party, Fatah, would win. They reached that conclusion exactly
because
they didn’t live in the occupied territories, and so they didn’t have to put up with the hopelessly inefficient and corrupt Fatah officials who were a legacy of Arafat’s rule. Abbas himself was overwhelmingly elected as the president of the PA in January 2005 because he was considered to be an honest, decent man. The same could not be said for many of the people around him. They were thieves and the Palestinian people knew it.
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Hamas ran on a platform of clean and good governance which was backed up by its long history of social-support systems modelled on the Muslim Brotherhood. It won seventy-four of the 132 seats in the legislative council. Fatah won forty-five. The Bush democratic roadshow had veered wildly off course.

The election of Hamas did three things. It marked the beginning of the end of the ‘Freedom Agenda’, it eventually led the people of Gaza into their present miserable existence, and it slowly elevated an Islamist group to the forefront of the resistance against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Hamas though, unlike the other Islamist groups on Washington’s list of terrorist groups, is not a Salafist jihadi organisation. Like the PLO it is primarily fighting for the sake of land, not God. Unlike the PLO or Hezbollah, it says it has never taken its war outside the boundaries of historic Palestine.

For eighteen months Hamas and Fatah shared power with Mahmoud Abbas as president and Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh as prime minister. It was a match made in hell, and no one expected it to last.

Months of sporadic violence between fighters from Fatah and Hamas culminated in what was effectively an all-out war in Gaza between the two sides in June 2007. It took a week for Hamas to rout the Fatah forces and secure their control of the Strip. They threw a number of the captured Fatah fighters off the roofs of tower blocks in the city. Hamas’s Mahmoud al-Zahar told me he thought there could be no genuine reconciliation with Fatah while Mahmoud Abbas is in charge because he says Abbas is too weak to ever go against the wishes of the US and Israel. ‘Why did Sharon leave Gaza?’ he said. ‘Because of our resistance. And who is delaying the withdrawal of the Israelis from the West Bank? It’s the PLO, and Abu Mazen in particular. His security is “cooperating” with the Israelis. What is “cooperating”? They are spies. Abu Mazen and his group are spies.’

After Hamas took over, Israel immediately tightened its restrictions on what was allowed into Gaza, introducing a blockade, a variant of which still persists today.

In 2008, at the tail end of Ehud Olmert’s time as Israeli prime minister, he and Abbas came close to a deal. By then, though Abbas was representing all Palestinians at the talks, he had no sway over Gaza. However the two men apparently came close to agreeing between themselves the borders of a Palestinian state. The Israelis say Abbas was given maps. His chief of staff, Mohammad Shtayyeh, told me Abbas was shown a map that he then had to scribble down on a napkin from memory and take back to his team for discussions. Olmert left office, because of a serious corruption allegation of which he was later partially cleared, before a deal could be ironed out. Netanyahu won the election and replaced him and is still there. Abbas said four years later that he and Olmert had been ‘two months’ away from a deal. For those four years there were no serious peace talks and no progress on the process at all.

Kofi Annan blames many of the failures of international diplomacy ‘on the unhealthy possessiveness that Washington has over the Arab–Israeli peace process, and its reluctance to share it meaningfully with others, even those working towards the same ends’.
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The truth is that Israel has very little time for the United Nations because it rightly considers the majority of its members to be hostile. ‘You don’t write in any applause lines when you’re writing a speech for the UN,’ joked Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speechwriter to a colleague.

While Abbas sat around waiting for peace talks to start up, the situation in Gaza for many people got harder and harder under the blockade. The public reason given for the restriction was to stop dual-use items that could be used to manufacture weapons. The private reason, articulated to me many times by senior Israel politicians and military men, was to make life unpleasant for the ordinary people of Gaza. The hope was that they would compare their lives with those of the Palestinians in the West Bank and, if they got the chance again, would vote Hamas out. A secret US diplomatic cable sent in late 2008 said:

Israeli officials have confirmed to Embassy officials on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis . . . As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed . . . on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.
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Included in the list of items refused entry at various times were light bulbs, candles, musical instruments, crayons, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, pasta, tea, coffee, chocolate, nuts, shampoo and conditioner. Canned meat has been allowed in, but not canned fruit. Gazans could sip mineral water but not fruit juice.

In October 2012 the Israelis lost a long legal battle to keep secret an embarrassing document that showed they had meticulously calculated ‘the point of intervention for prevention of malnutrition in the Gaza Strip’. In it they worked out the minimum daily calorie intake needed for the adults and children there.
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I used to have regular private conversations with Israeli officials in which they constantly complained about the way the media reported the restrictions. They were very defensive because even they thought some of the restrictions were indefensible. The conversation normally ended when I asked: ‘So why do you ban coriander?’ They never had an answer for that, something that was publicly acknowledged only after many of those restrictions were lifted. ‘We never understood why the Ministry of Defence actually forbade coriander to enter Gaza,’ said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. ‘It did reflect some kind of petty interference with items that seemed of little note.’
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The restrictions were eased, though the blockade continues, after the Israelis in May 2010 bungled a raid on a Turkish boat, the
Mavi Marmara
. The boat was part of a flotilla trying to symbolically break the blockade. The vessel was intercepted by Israel’s IDF. Instead of disabling the boat they tried to board it by abseiling from helicopters. This meant one by one their men dropped into an angry mob that began to beat them up as they landed on deck. In the chaos that followed the IDF shot nine of the activists dead. That refocused the world’s attention on the situation in Gaza. A UN inquiry found that Israel’s soldiers had faced ‘significant, organised and violent resistance’ but added that the decision to board the ship and the use of substantial force was ‘excessive and unreasonable’.
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The flotilla was the latest in a series of campaigns by often European pro-Palestinian activists which had gained momentum after the Gaza war of 2008–9 when the IDF attacked the Strip because of rockets being fired into Israel. That conflict, like the one in 2012, was launched in the middle of an election campaign for the Israeli Knesset. However during that three-week war, in addition to airstrikes, Israel also launched a ground invasion. Human rights groups say that more than fourteen hundred Palestinians, including three hundred children, were killed. Thirteen Israelis were also killed in the conflict.
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Gaza in a material sense is not as bad as other parts of the Arab world I have seen. What makes Gaza one of the most depressing places to be on earth is its isolation from the real world. In July 2010 the British prime minister David Cameron said: ‘Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.’
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Under international law, Israel is still the occupying power in Gaza, although it no longer has a permanent military presence there.

But at that stage Israel held the keys to just three sides of this ‘prison’. The full blockade could only be sustained because Egypt under Mubarak kept its border with Gaza locked too. He did not want to see a strong Islamist group like Hamas emerging on the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing because he did not want them inspiring their co-Islamists on the Egyptian side. ‘Who wants Gaza?’ Israel’s then chief of staff, Gabby Ashkenazi, asked me with a laugh in 2010 soon after the
Mavi Marmara
fiasco. ‘We don’t want Gaza. Mubarak doesn’t want Gaza. No one wants Gaza!’ At least he was honest; the so-called champions of the Palestinian cause were not.

‘Huge hypocrites’ was how someone in the United Nations described the Arab world’s dealings with the Palestinians to me before the 2011 uprisings. The Arab states used the descendants of the 1948 refugees as a political stick to publicly beat Israel on the world stage. They used oil in 1973 when it was the Arab armies getting a pounding, but they didn’t use it to pressure America to get a better deal for the Palestinians. At home they often treated their uninvited Palestinian guests with the kind of contempt Europeans reserve for the traveller or Gypsy communities. Entire generations of Palestinians have now grown up with refugee status. All were encouraged to keep their Palestinian identity by refusing them anything else, even though many refugees have never set foot in the land from which that identity derives. In Jordan they were given citizenship. In Syria they were given the chance to participate and work almost as citizens. In neighbouring Lebanon, with its even more fragile balance between religions and sects, they were not. It is a shock to walk around the slums the Palestinian refugees in Beirut are still forced to live in.

Even though their forefathers were farmers, the generation in exile are thoroughly urbanite. Barred from the safety net of government jobs, they had to make their way in the cut-throat world of the private or informal sector. Many flourished, and in places like Jordan the fact that they have been so successful and have become so wealthy has increased tensions with the state. In fact despite the best efforts of almost every actor in the region the Palestinian people have shown an ingenuity and creativity in business that has been sorely lacking in the people that have ended up representing them in politics.

‘The Israel–Palestinian conflict is quite easy to understand,’ a diplomat once told me as we stood looking over the Mount of Olives on a hot summer’s day in Jerusalem. This was the place where Jesus once prophesied the end of days. On this day though we were discussing a phenomenon that seemed to have already outlived its usefulness: the peace process. ‘It’s a competition for victimhood,’ spat the diplomat. He was referring to the perpetual struggle between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to win international opinion. And it is a game to which many of the players seem addicted.

From 1994 to 2011 the European Union donated around €5 billion in assistance to the Palestinians. Over the same period the US government has committed $4 billion to the Palestinian Authority.
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This has paid, among other things, for the institutions of the state the PA is building and the people it employs to run everything from security to social welfare. But the Palestinian Authority is still often lurching from one funding crisis to the next. Things are made worse if it’s had a recent spat with Israel. In a system worked out around the Oslo peace accords, Israel collects tax revenues on the PA’s behalf, so it will sometimes withhold them to punish it for its political manoeuvring.
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In 2013 the online ‘CIA World Fact Book’ stated: ‘Israeli closure policies continue to disrupt labour and trade flows, industrial capacity, and basic commerce, eroding the productive capacity of the West Bank economy.’ Which partly explains the contrast in the ‘Fact Book’ between its being able to credit Israel, among a long list of industries, with ‘aviation, communications, computer-aided design and manufactures, medical electronics, fiber optics’, but listing the
entire
range of West Bank industries as ‘small-scale manufacturing, quarrying, textiles, soap, olive-wood carvings, and mother-of-pearl souvenirs’.

The small amount of industry is supplemented by thousands of projects employing thousands of people supported by international NGOs on the ground and NGOs overseas. They range from ‘Doctors without Borders’, which says on its website that its ‘teams provide medical care, short-term psychotherapy and social assistance and referral to people affected by violence and conflict in the West Bank’, through to ‘Clowns without Borders’, who were presumably encouraging the locals to find the funny side of life on the West Bank at a circus school in Nablus.