Also In This Issue Related Stories: Riding Herd On The Wild West Bank • Graphic: Facts On The Ground

By James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, March 28, 2008

Riding on a crowded bus, a young Palestinian student describes to an American reporter the indignity of his daily journey that carries him to school from a refugee camp in mostly Arab East Jerusalem. It is a trip that adds a physical dimension to the deep psychological divide running through this land: He spends most of each morning waiting in a long line to pass through a gate in the newly constructed security fence while Israeli soldiers pore over residency and work documents. Meanwhile, West Bank settlers with yellow Israeli license plates commute to Jerusalem through a separate checkpoint, where they are waved through with a cursory nod.

In January, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas offered a vision of equality as he welcomed President Bush to the Palestinian city of Ramallah. "It's a historic visit that gives our people great hope in the fact that your great nation is standing and supporting their dream and their yearning toward freedom and independence and living in peace in this area, alongside their neighbors," Abbas said.

Yet hope has not caught fire with the student, a refugee in the city of his birth, despite Bush's visit. Nor has it among participants in November's top-level conference at Annapolis to discuss Palestinian statehood, or with those who met Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her recent shuttle diplomacy.

"It won't make any difference," the student said. "Nothing will change. Nothing ever changes here."

After a decade and a half of failed peace initiatives punctuated by violence and retribution, a sense of gloom has settled over this ancient crossroads. Seemingly everyone wants peace and a way out for two peoples locked in a fatal embrace, yet almost no one believes that a solution can be found. As much as any act of Palestinian terror or Israeli confiscation of land, that deep pessimism is like an undertow working against the Bush administration's Middle East peacemaking, threatening to drag down another high-profile initiative and sink the region in another wave of despair.

"The yearning for peace in the region hasn't translated into a political deal, because the process has failed to deliver for so long that a profound indifference has developed in people's minds," said Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Israeli foreign minister who helped lead his country's delegation at the 2000 Camp David summit, the last great push for a resolution to one of the world's most intractable conflicts. Because such former luminaries as Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Yasir Arafat tried and failed to reach a deal, Ben-Ami senses a perception on both sides that lesser leaders today will not succeed. "So while I commend the Bush administration for launching Annapolis, and believe it may be the last opportunity to reach a two-state solution that is rapidly losing its popularity among the Palestinians in particular, I'm not very optimistic," Ben-Ami told a recent forum at the New America Foundation in Washington. "We are stuck in a blind alley, and everything we have tried has failed."

Of course, the Annapolis peace initiative was designed as a way out of that dead end of perpetual occupation, terror, and violence. Almost 50 countries attended the conference, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, and most Arab states, their presence testifying to their interest in the outcome. At its conclusion, Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to resolve all of the issues still blocking a two-state solution by the end of 2008. After the conference, Olmert joined a number of Israeli experts who believe that the conflict is increasingly threatening the Jewish and democratic character of Israel. "If the two-state solution is shattered, the state of Israel is finished," Olmert told the Israeli media.

Olmert's predecessor as prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was the original architect of the movement that encouraged Jewish settlement in the West Bank, in keeping with dreams for a "Greater Israel" incorporating the territory west of the Jordan River and laying claim to the biblical land of Judea and Samaria, which today is home to 2.3 million Palestinians. But even Sharon realized that the dream had become a dangerous mirage because of the harsh measures required to keep peace and the likelihood that Jews would soon be outnumbered in a unified state. Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the construction of a security barrier thus reflect a harsh reality -- Israel will soon be forced to decide between remaining a Jewish state or a democracy. Absent a two-state "divorce" from the Palestinians, it cannot remain both.

Fear And Cynicism
At the bus station in downtown Jerusalem, young Israeli men and women in uniform mingle in the cafes and sweets shops, M-16 rifles slung casually over their shoulders. Pedestrians entering the mall-like station pass through metal detectors and then a separate security checkpoint, reminders of the cloud of fear that still hangs over this city.

After four years of relative calm in Jerusalem, terror returned on March 6, when 25-year-old Ala Abu Dhaim murdered eight Jewish students at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva seminary and wounded 10 others, before being killed himself. Dhaim's sister said that he had been "transfixed" for days by news of the carnage in nearby Gaza, where Israeli Defense Forces killed more than 120 Palestinians in an offensive against Hamas militants who had been firing rockets into Israeli cities.

Dhaim chose a symbolic target. The yeshiva is a potent symbol of the national religious movement, prominent adherents of which still advocate for a Greater Israel. The vanguard of that movement is Israeli settlers who for four decades have solidified and expanded their presence in the West Bank, which Israeli Defense Forces occupied after the 1967 war.

Within days of Dhaim's attack, Olmert dispelled any doubts about the psychological link between the terror and the expropriation of Palestinian land. Olmert attempted to relieve the fury from the right wing in his own coalition government by approving the construction of hundreds of new homes in a West Bank settlement north of Jerusalem; the decision followed the recently announced construction of more than 300 Israeli homes in disputed East Jerusalem. This activity will become additional "facts on the ground" (in the parlance of Israeli leaders) standing in the way of a two-state solution that all sides say they want in theory.

And once again the extremists on both sides have at least temporarily derailed another peace initiative, extinguishing a spark of hope in two peoples frozen in the grip of mutual distrust and antagonism. No, nothing is particularly different about that.

Existential Stakes
Yet the stakes and the price of failure this time may be greater than ever before for the antagonists, for the region, and ultimately for the United States as well. The Bush administration's signature project to spread democracy in the Middle East as the long-term antidote to terror in the region is faltering badly, shaken by a wave of instability partly of its own making. With political stalemate and continued violence in Iraq; government paralysis and potential civil war looming in Lebanon; and Iran, Syria, and their extremist proxies feeling empowered, radicalism is on the march in the Middle East. That is why in his last year in office, Bush has staked much of his waning political capital on the world stage on reaching an elusive two-state solution.

The administration badly needs a shift in momentum, particularly because of the back story of the Bush administration's belated engagement in the region. Much to the chagrin of neoconservatives who held prominent positions in Bush's first term, peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not come through Baghdad, as they argued it would. Rather, it still straddles a contested divide being erected through Jerusalem and along an Israeli border that no international body recognizes.

A senior State Department official concedes that with 160,000 U.S. troops trying to stabilize nearby Iraq, and with instability and extremism threatening the democratization agenda in the Middle East, Washington's interest in finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict has never been higher.

"You can debate what the history of the last seven years has meant, but there is no denying that a lot has actually changed in the region," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "In addition to an Israeli interest in reaching an acceptable outcome that keeps it secure, there is now an increased American interest involved as well. We've all seen how this conflict galvanizes public opinion not only in the region but throughout the world. We've also got the best Palestinian leader ever in Abbas, a moderate who embraces a nonviolent solution. There is also a growing recognition among informed Israelis that their country's long-term future lies in a two-state solution. So President Bush skillfully recognized an opportunity here, and he's been willing to take bold action to seize it."

Wittingly or not, however, Bush's bold gamble that a deal can be reached in such a short time has also further raised the stakes in the volatile conflict. Dashed expectations, meanwhile, could lead to even more despair -- and thus strengthen the hands of radicals on both sides.

Dennis Ross was a chief Middle East negotiator for the Clinton administration, and he remembers the volatile emotions unleashed after the 2000 Camp David negotiations failed. "My concern all along was that the Bush administration, after disengaging from the peace process for six years, only lately became rhetorically serious about reaching a deal," Ross told National Journal. "Unfortunately, they've talked a better game than they've played, once again pronouncing transformational objectives without putting in place the means for reaching them. So, while President Bush has expressed confidence that a peace deal can be completed by the end of his term, I can almost assure you it won't be."

Ross believes that the best possible outcome is a general framework agreement on principles, signed by both sides by the end of this year, with implementation to await the next U.S. president and future Israeli and Palestinian governments. Even that limited goal will be difficult to achieve, he says.

"Right now you have the worst of all worlds, with profound pessimism on both sides," said Ross, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Psychologically, both sides are a mirror image of each other, reflecting back distrust and anger. And if the Annapolis process builds up expectations and then fails to achieve them, it will only play into the narrative of those extremists who argue that diplomacy doesn't work, only violence and force do."

For Palestinians already fractured by decades of exile, occupation, and deprivation, the stakes are particularly grave. They are at an inescapable fork in the road now, with the secularist but weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority of Abbas nominally ruling the occupied West Bank, and the radical Islamists of Hamas controlling Gaza. Any breakdown in the Annapolis peace initiative will almost certainly weaken Abbas and his Fatah organization. The Palestinian body politic would then be further pushed down the path of violent resistance where Arafat initially steered them -- and where Hamas still awaits.

"By far the most powerful narrative among Palestinians today is that the Faustian bargain they made beginning with the [1993] Oslo peace process has failed," said Daniel Levy, a Middle East expert at the New America Foundation in Washington. "For more than a decade, their officials have been making nice with the American side and talking to the Israelis, and it hasn't brought them anything. With Hamas in power in Gaza, it's also very hard for Abbas to reach a moment of truth in negotiations, because he doesn't have the legitimacy to implement a peace agreement that involves tough compromises. That should cause real fear in anyone who supports a two-state solution."

Threats From Within
For Israelis, too, the stakes this time could prove existential. The settlement movement's dream of a Greater Israel poses a basic threat to Israel's fundamental Jewish character, and thus to Zionism itself. Today, Jews make up 75.7 percent of Israel's population. But if the West Bank and Gaza were subsumed into a Greater Israel, Jews would represent only about half of the population, and that figure would steadily decline, in view of the high birthrates among Arabs.

"Even Sharon recognized that if the Palestinians ever stop fighting for independence from Israel and instead started fighting for annexation and equal rights and an end to apartheid, then that will be the end of the Jewish state," says Akiva Eldar, the chief political columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, and co-author of the recent book Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories.

"I am not optimistic we can reach a peace deal this year as the Americans have called for, but I am worried that we are running out of time to do it," Eldar told NJ. "Time is working against us in terms of Iran getting stronger. Time is working against us politically, with the peace camp in Israel becoming weaker and weaker, and polls showing that we will elect a right-wing government in next year's elections. Time is working against us in terms of people becoming more and more frustrated. More kids are refusing to serve in the army in the occupied territories, and more members of the elite class are thinking about getting an American visa and leaving this mess to the extremists and losers on both sides of the conflict."

In addition, some official reports and press investigations have concluded that decades of occupation and land confiscation under the umbrella of settlement activity have corroded Israeli democracy. In a 2005 study of illegal settler "outposts" in the occupied territories commissioned by Sharon, for instance, lawyer Talia Sasson observed both the 120 acknowledged settlements (viewed as illegal under international law) and more than 100 outposts. Sasson's report confirmed that the main problem was not that West Bank settlers were acting outside the law but rather that illegal outposts were being built with the full complicity, funding, and support of Israeli government agencies run by officials sympathetic to the settler movement.

Many experts add that the IDF's focus on occupation and counterinsurgency has badly degraded the conventional fighting skills and esprit de corps of the vaunted military service -- as the 2006 war in Lebanon demonstrated.

Opposing Narratives
Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories is only one half of a circular and contested narrative -- of biblical homesteading rights, of exile and redemption, of terror and neocolonialism -- but it is essential to understanding the Palestinian psyche. During the nearly 15 years of the "peace process" that began in Oslo, the number of Israeli settlers living in the occupied territories more than doubled to 270,000. That number doesn't include 180,000 Israelis who have moved into formerly Arab East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after the 1967 war.

Ziad Abu Amr is president of the Palestinian Council on Foreign Relations, and many other Palestinians share his view that the settlement issue is central to the peace process. "President Bush has called on the Israelis to freeze all settlement activities, and yet the settlement activity does not stop; so this is a litmus test of the seriousness of both the Bush administration and the Israeli government," Amr said in an interview. "Frankly, if Israel cannot muster the will to stop at this juncture, when we are in the run-up to negotiating final-status issues and the whole peace process that President Bush said was his top priority is now at stake, then who can believe that Israel would actually dismantle the settlements once a deal is reached?"

Of course, a competing narrative on Arab terrorism is essential to understanding the Israeli psyche, and it goes like this: Israel tried to negotiate peace with Arafat, and the old guerrilla leader responded with arms smuggling; periodic terror attacks; and the 2000 intifada, with its massive escalation of suicide bombings. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 and was rewarded with a buildup of Hezbollah fighters and rocket attacks on its northern border. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip, resulting in its takeover by the extremists of Hamas and near-daily rocket attacks from Gaza. If Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank as part of a two-state deal, what's to keep the territory from becoming a launching pad for rocket attacks into nearly all of the major urban areas in Israel, including Tel Aviv?

Former negotiator Aaron David Miller has witnessed firsthand how Israel's insecurity over Palestinian violence has consistently thwarted progress toward peace.

"In all the years I worked this issue, I can tell you we never really had an honest discussion with the Israelis on settlements. But every time we wanted to come down hard and pressure them on the issue, Arafat would be exposed working with terrorists to blow Israelis up, and everything fell apart," said Miller, who spent nearly 20 years as a Middle East negotiator for six U.S. secretaries of State and is a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. His new book is The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for an Arab-Israeli Peace. "Similarly, today you have a divided Palestinian house, with a weak Abbas and Fatah barely in control of the West Bank, and rockets coming out of a Hamas-dominated Gaza. Olmert would look ridiculous making difficult concessions for peace under those circumstances."

The Bush administration, seeing that the violence in Gaza threatened to scuttle its peacemaking efforts, recently relaxed its staunch opposition to any dealings with Hamas, which the State Department lists as a terrorist group. Although the United States and Israel are not willing to talk directly to Hamas, the U.S. has quietly supported Egyptian-brokered talks aimed at reaching a cease-fire.

Elements of a cease-fire will probably have to include a halt to rocket attacks by Hamas and an Egyptian-monitored end to the smuggling of weapons into Gaza, in return for Israel's lifting its viselike grip on border crossings and halting targeted killings of Hamas officials. Many experts believe that Abbas will eventually have to open direct talks with Hamas to achieve a negotiated settlement. The alternative of an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza and open warfare has little backing among Israelis, the majority of whom support direct talks with Hamas, according to polls.

"I think the Bush administration changed its mind on at least indirectly engaging with Hamas, because they realized the Annapolis initiative was doomed as long as Gaza was burning," said former Foreign Minister Ben-Ami. "Israel should also empower Abbas to negotiate with Hamas, so they can reach a cease-fire and attempt to solve this internal Palestinian divide by gradually incorporating Hamas into the wider peace process."

The alternative would be a "shell peace agreement" signed by a leader, Abbas, who lacks legitimacy in a fragmented Palestinian society, while ignoring the volcanic social forces that led to Hamas being elected in the first place, Ben-Ami said. "I do not believe that would be a wise path to take. The truth is, Hamas can't deliver stability and consolidate its rule over Gaza without a cease-fire, nor can Abbas deliver a peace deal without a cease-fire. So they have common interests here."

As part of his 2003 "road map" for Middle East peace, Bush acknowledged that building an effective Palestinian security force was essential to achieving a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel. Senior U.S. officials concede, however, that the program to stand up indigenous security forces languished, suffering from a woeful lack of resources, personnel, and leadership focus at the top levels of the Bush administration. Now the administration is moving to reinvigorate a program to train and equip Palestinian security forces as a way to strengthen the hand of Abbas and the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank.

"To be honest, the 'road map' was broken before we even started, because as part of the 'confidence-building measures,' it required the dismantling of the terrorist networks by Palestinian security forces, who were clearly not up to the task," said a senior U.S. military official involved in the new initiative, noting that Hamas fighters in Gaza quickly routed some of the first Palestinian security forces trained under the 45-day program. "How much confidence did that inspire?"

Training and equipping a Palestinian guard will stretch well beyond the Bush presidency, Pentagon sources say. "Palestinian security forces need to have the will and the skill to succeed, and right now we judge they have the will but they still lack training, equipment, and competency," said the senior U.S. officer. "We're also having some frank discussions with the Israelis about a realistic goal being sustained, incremental movement toward a more professional Palestinian force. Because if the Israelis take an 'all or nothing' attitude toward the readiness of the Palestinian security forces, then how serious can they be about resolving this conflict?"

The Endgame
One of the enduring tragedies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a chief frustration to those who have tried to end it, is that the contours of a two-state resolution have long been clear. Bridging the deep psychological divide to get there has been the problem. As Miller of the Wilson Center put it, "It's not facts on the ground that are the greatest obstacle to peace, but rather facts in the mind and the absence of political will."

The blueprint of a two-state resolution was evident at Camp David in 2000, and in the Taba negotiations that followed in 2001. The same basic outline reappeared in the Geneva Initiative of 2003. Each plan envisioned returning Israel to approximately its pre-1967 borders, with the incorporation of several large settlement blocks in a one-to-one exchange for Israeli land elsewhere. Each called for a divided Jerusalem serving as the capital of both states, in exchange for the Palestinians waiving the right of refugees to return to Israel, with compensation for their lost property and homes to be determined in negotiations. In the final deal-maker or deal-breaker, some dilution of sovereignty over the Temple Mount will have to be reached that assures both Jews and Muslims access to their holy sites, possibly under international custodianship. Any two-state arrangement will almost certainly reflect those general guidelines.

When that time nears and talk turns to Jerusalem, the phone is likely to ring in the downtown offices of Danny Seidemann, just as it did in the run-up to Camp David. A wiry and intense lawyer, Seidemann is by his own reckoning the best mapmaker of Jerusalem in all of Israel, although he concedes that the honor comes mainly through default. For much of the past 40 years, the mantra of Israeli officialdom was "Jerusalem, the undivided capital of Israel," and diplomats who dared broach the subject of its division soon found themselves out of a job. However, as a private lawyer who argued Jerusalem land claims and confiscations numerous times before Israel's Supreme Court, Seidemann became intimately aware of the glass walls separating Palestinian and Jewish sections and enclaves in the city.

"We already know the future borders of Jerusalem: Where Israelis walk today will be Israeli, and where Palestinians walk will be Palestinian," he said. "So 95 percent of the future borders of a divided Jerusalem are already understood. The final 5 percent, however, will require enormous political will to delineate."

Seidemann describes these as the best of times and the worst of times for longtime advocates of a two-state peace, with the news of the day provoking wild swings between hope and despair. "It's great weather for schizophrenics," he adds with a wry smile.

On the plus side, Camp David and Taba broke a long-standing taboo about discussing difficult final-status issues such as the division of Jerusalem and limiting the right of return of Palestinian refugees. The Annapolis initiative has eliminated the sequential nature of the "road map" that drew the process out in a way that allowed extremists to hijack it almost at will. The Gaza withdrawal and dismantling of Israeli settlements there has proven that "facts on the ground" can be reversed. The Arab League initiative of 22 nations offers Israel the tantalizing possibility of peace with most of its neighbors: In exchange for Israel's withdrawal from occupied lands and a two-state solution, it would get normal relations with the treaty signers. The ticking demographic time bomb has focused the minds of Israeli leaders.

Seidemann says that the security fence also offers irrefutable evidence that Israel cannot digest the occupied territories on the other side of that barbed-wire border. Nor can anyone who looks at its snaking path across the countryside doubt that the two-state solution is a divorce rather than a marriage. "We don't need rabbis and imams and priests today, so much as we need divorce lawyers," he said. "But the gap in Israeli public opinion between what was once considered politically impossible and now looks historically inevitable is closing."

Working against all of those signs of progress, however, is the dark wave of cynicism spreading across this land, dimming hopes for a just peace. Seidemann sees it as fitting that the question of whether hope is extinguished or reignited may be decided in this historic crossroads of cultures.

"You know, we need to listen to this wise old city, because Jerusalem can become the place where civilizations meet as opposed to clash, where we ultimately redefine Western and Muslim relations," Seidemann says. "My nightmare is that it can also become the next Beirut or Baghdad as the bleeding interface of Islam and the West. That's why I think we've never been closer to catastrophe than right now. But we've never been closer to success either."

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