LONDON: This should be a rare moment of hope. On Friday night, Israel got a new government and in a few days it will be treated to a US presidential visit, the first of Barack Obama’s second term. You’d think that, like jump leads applied to a car whose battery died years ago, this double jolt of electricity would inject some life into the long-stalled quest for Israeli-Palestinian peace. And yet, to recall Obama’s one-time slogan, you’ll find almost no one who expresses hope for any change.
Expectations for this week’s visit are rock bottom. Even those well-disposed towards Obama say he’ll be coming to Israel as a tourist, seeing the key sights and shaking a few hands, with no initiative to launch, no plan to unveil. As one Palestinian salesman in Ramallah told the Global Post, “I know he’s coming, but he’s coming for nothing.”
Expectations for the new government are scarcely brighter. It’s not only that the prime minister remains the same Binyamin Netanyahu, a man whose belief in, and commitment to, what used to be called the peace process is slim to nonexistent. The makeup of his coalition, which took nearly two months to assemble, suggests paralysis is the best we can hope for. Some will have been heartened by the appointment of the relatively dovish Tzipi Livni to oversee negotiations with the Palestinians. But realists say she’ll be no more than a public face, charged with making nice in foreign capitals, holding endless rounds of talks, enabling Netanyahu to say Israel is doing its bit, while achieving precisely nothing.
That Livni and her tiny six-seat party are destined to be a fig leaf is confirmed by the merest glance at the coalition arithmetic. Even if she were somehow to make a breakthrough, that would necessarily require Israeli concessions which would be instantly vetoed by the more powerful Jewish Home party headed by Naftali Bennett. Elected on a promise to annex 60 per cent of the West Bank and having ruled out a Palestinian state for the next 200 years at least, Bennett will block any deal that the two sides could plausibly make.
So yes, there are more amenable faces — chief among them the surprise star of the January election, the TV host and columnist Yair Lapid — but in practice there will be little change affecting the core conflict. The hawks still have the best seats at the top table, Bennett reinforcing both a Likud party whose newest intake has shifted sharply to the right, and the faction loyal to the scandal-plagued ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, who is himself a West Bank settler. Put simply, there is no meaningful move this coalition could make towards the Palestinians without falling apart.
The newly weakened PM, now answerable to Bennett and Lapid, will instead be compelled to focus inward. Lapid was elected on a domestic platform, promising action on the economy and “sharing the burden”, code for ensuring that ultra-orthodox Jews — their parties absent from the ruling coalition for the first time in years — lose their current exemption from military conscription.
After the social protests on the streets of Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011, Israeli politicians have received clear instructions from the electorate: take care of the home front. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are beset by their own, more familiar troubles: the weakness of Mahmoud Abbas and the enduring division of Hamas and Fatah, which makes Gaza ever more distant from the West Bank.
The result is that this conflict is as stuck as ever. That notion can sound comforting: if the status quo holds, then at least things aren’t getting worse. But it’s a delusion. There is nothing static about this status quo. As Hagai El-Ad of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel puts it, when things seem to be standing still they are always changing, most obviously through the creation of “facts on the ground”, the expanding Israeli settlements on the West Bank. The more of those there are, the harder it will be to turn that land into a future Palestinian state.
It’s too late to change Obama’s itinerary, but perhaps not too late to influence the in-flight entertainment on Air Force One. It’s a long journey, so the president should have time to see two films, both Oscar nominees. The first is not Les Miz or Argo, but 5 Broken Cameras. Shot by an amateur Palestinian film-maker in the West Bank village of Bil’in, it is a powerful eyewitness account of the everyday reality of the occupation, from unarmed villagers clashing with Israeli soldiers to Bil’in’s cherished olive trees set aflame by nearby settlers.
That will show the president what this stuck situation is doing to the occupied. But then he should watch The Gatekeepers to see what it is doing to the occupier. This remarkable film consists chiefly of interviews with six former heads of Israel’s security agency, the Shin Bet. The men speak with astonishing candour of past operations, explaining in brutal detail how they took on the terrorist enemy, whether in an interrogation cell or by a bomb dropped from the sky. They are hard men, one smiling with pride as he recalls the ingenious elimination of Hamas’s top bomb-maker via a cell phone packed with explosives. “It was clean,” he says, “elegant.” These are not men to hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
Yet asked to assess the bigger picture, each one is crystal clear. “You cannot make peace using military means,” says Avi Dichter. “For Israel, it’s too much of a luxury not to speak with our enemies,” says Carmi Gillon. “There is no alternative to talking,” says Avraham Shalom. Each one of these warriors concedes that their work is ultimately futile, that Israeli security will only be achieved by a negotiated accommodation with the Palestinians.
These men, who guarded the very gates of Israel, have come to understand that force only buy you time — and that time is running out. Weary, they declare that 46 years of occupation has corroded the soul of the nation they have devoted their lives to protect. “We’ve become cruel,” says Shalom, perhaps the hardest of these hard men. “To ourselves, but mainly to the occupied population.”
As his plane heads towards Ben-Gurion airport, Obama should reflect on that. If he actually means the words he’ll spend several days repeating — about the great friendship between the US and Israel — if he truly cares about Israel, he cannot come as a mere tourist. He must come with a message. He should listen to those who understand this occupation best, because they understand that it has to end.
By arrangement with the Guardian
