My colleague, Saliba Sarsar (raised in E. Jerusalem), urges the uniform application of human rights to Isr/Pal as well as Egypt.
He is a VP at Monmouth University in NJ, and a professor of Political Science there, an Arab raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition.
He is also closely related to the ATFP (American Task Force on Palestine), one of our key sources of information, based in D.C.
Below is his recently published article on the subject: Thank you professor Sarsar! (JRK)
http://www.themarknews.com/articles/4025-u-s-efforts-key-to-egypt-s-transition-to-democracy
American leaders must step up to the plate and generate positive change for Egypt.
It’s time for the U.S. to take a fresh look at its relationship with the Middle East. The “Tunisian Revolution,” the “Egyptian Popular Uprising,” and the demonstrations in Jordan, Yemen, West Bank, and Gaza, among others, ought to be taken as a wake-up call.
The U.S.’s response to the crisis in the Middle East was hesitant at first but is now taking shape and becoming more constructive. By simultaneously supporting the Egyptian people in their struggle for freedom and urging Egyptian leaders to initiate a transition to democracy, the Obama administration is standing up for cherished American values.
However, the U.S. government cannot stop at the tip of the pyramid; it needs to dig deeper. In order to be better prepared for the continuing challenges facing Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, U.S. leaders need to consider several basic ideas.
First, democracy is a generational project; it cannot be achieved by quick fixes or superimposed from above. Promoting it necessitates educating citizens in democratic practices that go beyond fair, free, and frequent elections. Good governance, civil society enhancements, and the end of corruption are key elements. Egypt’s democratization will take years – if not decades – to mature, and the U.S.’s patience and support will be essential in actualizing it.
Second, there are risks to advancing democracy, as there is always the danger that those who are desperate to control power will hijack the emerging democratic system. In 1992, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Edward P. Djerejian drew attention to this dilemma: We are suspect of those who would use the democratic process to come to power, only to destroy that very process in order to retain power and political dominance. While we believe in the principle of ‘one person, one vote,’ we do not support ‘one person, one vote, one time. Egyptians must take extra care in making their electoral choices so as to prevent an Iran- or Hamas-style regime from emerging.
Third, standing for democracy and freedom in one locale necessitates standing for them the world over. In his Jan. 28 remarks on Egypt, Obama explained, “The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.” If the U.S. is to be consistent in its application of foreign policy then it must reconsider its friendships with, and interests in, countries that dehumanize or disempower their inhabitants. If U.S. leaders continue to do “business as usual” with these countries, the double standard that they expose will create a credibility gap.
Fourth, things like economic and financial interests, oil, military assistance and alliances, and ties to elites in the Middle East cannot be divorced from the reality of people’s daily lives and aspirations. Top-down politics and policies and bottom-up initiatives must be synchronized or made to complement each other. The U.S. would be wise to reach out more vigorously to civil society organizations, democratic opposition groups, and the media as it carries out its foreign policy.
Fifth, while military power provides security and is often dominant in Middle Eastern politics, human security is crucial, as it makes it possible for people to live with dignity, free from want and fear. Creating a coalition for moderation contributes to the culture of peace and can bring about internal and external stability as well as prosperity.
If the U.S. is to maintain its position as a champion of universal rights and smooth transitions to democracy, it must press hard to end the Israeli occupation and eradicate the fear that has gripped both Israeli and Palestinian societies for decades. A doable and just solution would be to have Israel and Palestine – two sovereign states – living side by side in security, peace, and prosperity. As the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) suggests, this solution would mean freedom for the Palestinians, peace for Israel, and enhanced national security for the United States.
Far from wavering, the U.S. must balance its principles and pragmatism – using its values and influence to engage others in serious democratic reform as it pursues its short-term and strategic goals. While obstacles abound, the careful guidance that the U.S. provides in an effort to generate positive change will receive much good will and trust, and will facilitate internal, regional, and international cooperation.--
Friday, February 11, 2011
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Sari Nusseibeh argues for Palestinian civil (but not political) rights
Maverick Sari Nusseibeh proposes an interim route to peace in the Middle East
Haim Watzman
The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 30, 2011 - 12:00am
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Mideast-Maverick/126057/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&u...
Sari Nusseibeh's socks match these days, he's clean-shaven, and he's a university president rather than an anarchist student or faculty union leader. But his hair, though a bit shorter and a lot grayer than it was in the 1970s and 80s, is still unkempt. Despite his establishment perch and his foothold in East Jerusalem, his head is still in the clouds. It might be the distance between his extremities that makes him the most politically incorrect political activist in Palestinian politics.
In his latest book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Harvard University Press), he brings before the English-speaking readership a bundle of musings, heresies, and paradoxes, ideas that he's published here and there in the Palestinian press and broached elsewhere in the world in talks and lectures, at academic conferences and peace symposiums. The ideas might sound strange in their departure from conventional wisdom about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the positions of leaders and pundits on both sides, but it's good policy to pay attention. In the past, Sari Nusseibeh has taken positions that his fellow Palestinians condemned—and then, a couple of uprisings and aborted peace conferences later, embraced.
Standing behind his desk at Al-Quds University's small campus in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, Nusseibeh greets me with a bashful and puzzled expression. He is frequently interviewed by foreign journalists, but he looks like he can't quite comprehend why anyone would want to discuss his book with him. I can't help being struck by the spacious office he now occupies, with its comfortable couches, armchairs, and coffee table, its walls a pleasant jumble of photographs and student artworks.
I first met Nusseibeh in the early 1980s, when he was a philosophy instructor at Birzeit University, near Ramallah. The university, then housed in a set of worn, cramped rooms around a walled courtyard in an out-of-the-way village, was both a ray of light for young Palestinians seeking to advance themselves through education, and a hotbed of impatient and militant Palestinian nationalism. Nusseibeh, with his beard, jeans, and sandals, looked much like his radical students. But he talked a different language. His students wanted action; he wanted to think. They sought firm spiritual and ideological foundations in clear-cut doctrines, whether Marxism or Islamic fundamentalism. Nusseibeh represented the intellectual tradition of the Western enlightenment, focused on the happiness and welfare of the individual rather than the destiny of the nation.
It wasn't that he was stuck in the ivory tower—one could hardly picture Birzeit's shabby campus that way, and the trip there and back inevitably meant passing by Israeli settlements and encountering Israeli Army roadblocks. His colleagues chose him to lead their faculty and employee union in its fight not only to increase salaries but also to institute democratic governance. He also helped lead the fight against Order 854, an Israeli military decree that threatened faculty members with deportation if they refused to cooperate with the Israeli administration. Those activities required coordination with the PLO leadership through its headquarters in Amman, Jordan.
Since contact with the PLO was a criminal offense under Israeli law, Nusseibeh and others developed a way of smuggling important documents in and out of the West Bank, as he describes in his 2007 memoir: "Messages were written in minuscule script on both sides of very thin paper. The message was carefully folded into a small tight roll. ... This was then wrapped in a layer of protective paper taken from the inside lining of a cigarette packet. Finally, it was rolled up into a piece of plastic cut from a shopping bag. Once the message was properly wrapped, the skillful smuggler lit a match, blew it out, and used the glint from the dying flame to melt the plastic together at both ends. Now the capsule was ready to be swallowed."
One of the main reasons Nusseibeh's Birzeit colleagues chose him to represent them was that he was one of the few who was not associated with one of the many Palestinian political factions. But his independent streak got him into trouble as well.
In 1977, when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his unexpected peace overture to Israel, nearly all Palestinian leaders and writers condemned him as a traitor to the cause. But Nusseibeh, then a graduate student at Harvard, was enthusiastic. Later, back in Jerusalem, he took part in back-channel negotiations with officials linked to the government of Israel's hard-right nationalist Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir—for which, in 1986, he got beaten up by a group of Birzeit students. Yet in the end, the Palestinian leadership and public came to realize they had to negotiate with Israel.
Nusseibeh still displays little respect for convention, whether of ideas or of protocol. I'm interviewing him, but he asks the first, wistful question, about the conflict that his people and mine have been locked in for a century: "So do you think there is any hope for our situation?"
Gloomily, he remarks that we're at a dead end. But then, brightening a bit, he notes that the desperation of the dead end can be an inspiration for new perspectives and original ideas.
More likely than not, press coverage of the new book will focus on one provocative idea that Nusseibeh suggests. He offers it as an interim way of improving the lot of the Palestinians in the West Bank without threatening the Jewish character of the Israeli state. It also might be a way, he thinks, of getting around the continuing debate over how many countries ought to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The prevailing view among both Israelis and Palestinians since the early 1990s has been that a Palestinian state should come into existence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, alongside Israel. But, in frustration over the failure to reach such an agreement, increasing numbers of Palestinians are arguing that there should be only one state, for both Jews and Palestinians. That idea is a nonstarter for nearly all Israelis, even those who have long advocated accommodation with the Palestinians. They see it as a plan for denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and self-defense.
Since neither the two-state nor one-state proposals seem to be going anywhere, Nusseibeh has a new idea. He proposes that the Palestinians should be granted full civil, but not political, rights under Israeli law. In other words, their status would be much like that enjoyed by their compatriots in East Jerusalem today. Israel imposed its own legal system on East Jerusalem right after occupying it, the rest of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967. It was a step that many, both in Israel and in the international community, took to be tantamount to annexation. East Jerusalem's Arab residents are not citizens of Israel; they cannot vote in Israeli national elections or be elected to office. But as legal residents they enjoy, in principle at least, equality under Israeli law, and are eligible for all government entitlements and services. Yet Nusseibeh stresses that this is not a plan that he sees as the answer to the current impasse in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, nor one he intends to promote in particular.
"I don't have a message in the book. It's more that I was given an opportunity to put my reflections down on paper. A lot of stuff in there is questions, things I haven't worked out properly," he explains. "I hope people who read it will be able to think about it, raise more questions, that it will allow them to find new ways of going forward."
In a lot of ways then, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? is, as one might expect from a university president who still teaches undergraduate philosophy courses, more of an educational project than a polemic. It's meant to get people to think, not give them answers. So it combines an analysis of the history and current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with musings on the nature of identity, the concept of justice, and the proper role of the state.
The 600-page Ph.D. dissertation that Nusseibeh wrote at Harvard delves into the thought of Avicenna, the 11th-century Islamic polymath and philosopher who, according to Nusseibeh, stressed man's metaphysical freedom and rejected inherent identities of the self or the nation. But, tellingly, Nusseibeh's account of his discovery of and engagement with Avicenna and other Islamic philosophers, in his memoir Once Upon a Country (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), appears in a chapter titled "Monticello." There he describes how he was moved to tears during a visit, in the mid-1970s, to the estate of Thomas Jefferson. And he notes that the obelisk marking the founding father's grave omits mention of his service as secretary of state, vice president, and president. Instead, it cites as his memorable achievements "the authorship of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia." One could hardly characterize Nusseibeh better than by saying he is an Avicennist in the West and a Jeffersonian in the East.
Sari Nusseibeh was born in February 1949 to one of Arab Jerusalem's leading families. Israel and its Arab neighbors were negotiating the armistice agreements that ended the war that Israelis call the War of Independence and that Palestinians call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. But he wasn't born in his own city. His mother and siblings had fled to Damascus during the hostilities. His father, Anwar, a leading member of the Palestinian national leadership, who lost a leg in the war, was serving as a member of the Palestinian government-in-exile in Cairo. Following the armistice, the family reunited in what was then the Jordanian half of the divided city of Jerusalem.
After his indifferent career at St. George's, the Anglican school to which many members of the city's elite sent their children, Sari Nusseibeh's parents sent him to Rugby, the prestigious British boarding school—but he ran away. In the end, he ended up at Oxford a year after the Six-Day War, in which Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan; occupied large swathes of their territories; and put the Nusseibehs, like the rest of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, under Israeli rule. He was 18, and had already been recruited into Yassir Arafat's Palestinian nationalist Fatah movement, which soon gained control of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Nusseibeh plunged headlong into the radicalism of the 60s and into pro-Palestinian activity. He handed out Fatah fliers and went to meetings. But he soon tired of that, and his political activity turned in a more intellectual direction. He made friends with Israeli students—in particular, with Avishai Margalit, now one of Israel's best known philosophers—and debated the conflict at a teahouse.
"It was easy to discuss politics with Avishai," Nusseibeh writes in his memoir, "because we both had sufficient distance from events back home to scoff at the bugle-blowing victors (his side) and the caviling complainers (mine)."
This independent streak led him to do things that no other young Palestinian dreamed of doing. After the war, Israel's borders were closed and Palestinians from the territories who had been out of the country when the war broke out had to sneak across the Jordan River to get home. Nusseibeh published an open letter in the London Times demanding that Israel allow him to return home openly. He was invited to the Israeli Embassy in London and he went, even though his Palestinian friends thought he should tear up the invitation from the enemy. A few days later, he boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Later, he attended an ulpan, one of the intensive Hebrew-language courses that Israel gives for new immigrants, and worked one summer as a volunteer on a kibbutz. At Oxford he fell in love with and married Lucy Austin, daughter of the philosopher of language John Austin.
After completing his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1978, Nusseibeh returned to Jerusalem and, true to type, took a teaching position at Birzeit and another at the Hebrew University. At Birzeit and other colleges and universities in the West Bank and Gaza, factions associated with Fatah, the Islamic movement, and several Marxist-nationalist splinter groups fought out student government elections that, because they were the only elections that Palestinians could vote in at the time, served as barometers of the political weather in the occupied territories. They were also closely watched by the Israeli army and security services, which periodically closed down the campuses in response to student demonstrations.
"The student atmosphere on the campuses then was one of independence, confidence, commitment, and strength of conviction," Nusseibeh recalls. "If you compare it with the situation now, you see it has become transformed. It's upside down, literally."
Many students, he says, are now in the employ of one of the numerous security organizations run by the Palestinian Authority, the self-governing body set up in the 1990s under the terms of the Oslo Accords. Like the classical political philosophers, Nusseibeh sees education as key to creating a just and virtuous state. As a university chief, a teacher, and a writer who frequently publishes articles in Palestinian newspapers and magazines, he sees his main role as encouraging his countrymen to think critically and independently.
What Is a Palestinian State Worth? seems almost deliberately designed to raise the hackles of everyone who reads it. It's not quite clear who its intended audience is. (When I ask Nusseibeh what reader he had in mind when he wrote it, he says—ironically? resignedly?—"Myself.") It is clearly part of Nusseibeh's larger educational project of getting his fellow Palestinians to question their assumptions, rather than adhere fruitlessly to outmoded categories, concepts, and political positions. His people, he argues, should use the moral force of nonviolence to transform, not defeat, their Israeli adversaries. And precisely because the Palestinians are weaker and under occupation, he argues, they have the power to do this.
"It's the paradox of being on top," he explains. "In a wrestling match, you have one contender down on the floor kicking and biting, and another one on top trying to hold him down. It looks as if the one on top has power and the one underneath is the victim. The one on top can never trust the one underneath. But the one underneath can afford to trust because he's underneath anyway." The victor fears losing his supremacy by trusting his rival, but the underdog can afford to trust his oppressor because he has nothing to lose, Nusseibeh explains.
And while he still thinks that the best recipe for coexistence is a two-state solution, one in which a Palestinian nation-state comprising the West Bank and Gaza Strip would exist side by side with the Jewish state of Israel, he stresses in his book that a state should not be an end in itself. "There is no need for us to have a separate or so-called independent state," he writes. A state is only a means of achieving collective well-being, of transforming oppression into freedom, he argues. And the Jewish and Palestinian states should exist only as long as they serve that purpose. Indeed, they might be the best way of allowing the two nations to evolve slowly toward a state of Jeffersonian ideals, one in which all citizens are equal and free regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or national identity.
The suggestion that the Jewish state might be just a way station toward some other political arrangement will ring alarm bells with Israelis. Most of the country's leaders and citizens fear that the Palestinian leadership's consent to set up a Palestinian state alongside Israel is merely tactical, and that the ultimate goal is to overwhelm Israel militarily or demographically and subsume it into the Arab world. And most Israelis, even fervent supporters of accommodation with the Palestinians, look at the Middle East and conclude that Jews living in an Arab state would almost certainly not enjoy equality, democracy, or physical security.
Most Israelis will also not be pleased that the Israelis that Nusseibeh mentions time and again in the book are radicals and outsiders who are seen even by many in the country's peace camp as hostile to the Jewish people's right to self-determination. He suggests, citing Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, that the Arabs who lived in Palestine before the British conquest, rather than the Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 20th century, were probably the descendants of the region's ancient inhabitants. Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, is an avowed anti-Zionist whose book was condemned by nearly all Israeli reviewers, of all political stripes, as awful scholarship and unoriginal polemic. His Tel Aviv University colleague Anita Shapira summed up the book by saying "there is something warped and objectionable in the assumption that for Jews to integrate into the Middle East, they, and they alone of all the peoples in the region, must shed their national identity and historical memories and reconstruct themselves in a way that may (perhaps) find favor with Israeli-Palestinians." The mere mention of Sand, in the first chapter, as a respectable scholar is likely to make many Israeli and pro-Israeli readers put the book down at once.
Nusseibeh also makes much of Israeli peace activists such as Uri Avneri and Abie Nathan, colorful but not particularly influential radicals on the fringe of Israeli society. Nathan, for example, was the nascent Israeli peace movement's leading stunt man. In 1965 he flew his own airplane from Israel to Egypt with the goal of delivering a peace petition to Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser (Nasser refused to see him and had him deported). He staged hunger strikes to protest the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and was jailed for meeting with Yasir Arafat and other PLO leaders.
Nusseibeh clearly admires such figures because they were willing to say things and take positions that lay far outside their own community's consensus.
"These are the unsung heroes," he stresses. "Contrary to how many people think about them, that they are peripheral, one should look upon them as the visible points on the surface, underneath which something much more important and significant is happening. They are the human face, evidence of a deep human element that is not necessarily evident in Israeli society."
Nusseibeh seems to hope that Al-Quds University will produce some Palestinian versions of Avneri and Nathan—people who can see beyond the conventions and tropes in which the rest of their society is caught.
And he thinks that this is sorely needed right now. While large majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians claim to support a two-state arrangement, they vote for political parties that work against that goal—the Palestinians for the Islamicist movement Hamas, and the Israelis for the Likud and other parties that promote Israeli settlement in the West Bank. All the efforts of the leaders of both countries, and of the international community, to achieve a two-state solution have failed.
In despair, many Palestinians have abandoned the idea of two separate states—they demand a single state, comprising all the territory of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, in which the majority would rule. Israelis point out that demographic trends are such that the Palestinians would soon be the majority, and that that would be the end of Jewish independence and self-determination.
That's why Nusseibeh is floating ideas like giving the Palestinians civil but not political rights.
"I'm not talking about a solution," he asserts. "It's not like going to the supermarket and they're out of two-states so you pick up a one-state. It looks like we are stuck, so the question arises: What are we to do?"
The question, he says, is what is the best alternative for the Palestinians, and for the Israelis too, under the current circumstances?
"Ideally, one would like to be guided by humanist principles. One should try to bring about as much equality as possible, given differences. I'm not a magician, but I think that human beings are capable of being creative and coming up with imaginative solutions if required," he explains.
Despite the current deadlock, there is cause for optimism, he thinks.
"Regardless of the fact that the Camp David talks collapsed, if you look at the relations of Jews and Arabs, we've come a long way toward finding some way to reach out for some mode of coexistence," he says. "It didn't work, but it was nevertheless an immense step forward, if you contrast where we were before."
At similar junctions in the past, Nusseibeh has been condemned by his fellow Palestinians as a traitor to the cause and dismissed by Israelis as, at best, a lone moderate Palestinian voice among the wolves and, at worst, a fanatic in dove's clothing (during the first Gulf War, in 1991, Israeli forces jailed him for 90 days without filing charges; according to press reports, he was suspected of spying for Iraq). When he teamed up in 2003 with the former chief of the Israel Security Agency (popularly known as the Shin Bet), Ami Ayalon, on a grass-roots peace initiative called "The People's Voice," he was condemned by other Palestinians for agreeing to a clause stating that Palestinian refugees would not be able to return to their former homes in Israel.
"People haven't reacted so far to this idea," Nusseibeh says, referring to the possibility of granting the Palestinians civil but not political rights in Israel. "But if you ask around, they'll tell you that I'm a person who has crazy ideas. I'm an optimist. I see things going in a good direction. Except I can't tell exactly what that direction looks like."
Haim Watzman is a Jerusalem-based writer and translator whose most recent book is A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). He blogs at southjerusalem.com.
Haim Watzman
The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 30, 2011 - 12:00am
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Mideast-Maverick/126057/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&u...
Sari Nusseibeh's socks match these days, he's clean-shaven, and he's a university president rather than an anarchist student or faculty union leader. But his hair, though a bit shorter and a lot grayer than it was in the 1970s and 80s, is still unkempt. Despite his establishment perch and his foothold in East Jerusalem, his head is still in the clouds. It might be the distance between his extremities that makes him the most politically incorrect political activist in Palestinian politics.
In his latest book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Harvard University Press), he brings before the English-speaking readership a bundle of musings, heresies, and paradoxes, ideas that he's published here and there in the Palestinian press and broached elsewhere in the world in talks and lectures, at academic conferences and peace symposiums. The ideas might sound strange in their departure from conventional wisdom about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the positions of leaders and pundits on both sides, but it's good policy to pay attention. In the past, Sari Nusseibeh has taken positions that his fellow Palestinians condemned—and then, a couple of uprisings and aborted peace conferences later, embraced.
Standing behind his desk at Al-Quds University's small campus in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, Nusseibeh greets me with a bashful and puzzled expression. He is frequently interviewed by foreign journalists, but he looks like he can't quite comprehend why anyone would want to discuss his book with him. I can't help being struck by the spacious office he now occupies, with its comfortable couches, armchairs, and coffee table, its walls a pleasant jumble of photographs and student artworks.
I first met Nusseibeh in the early 1980s, when he was a philosophy instructor at Birzeit University, near Ramallah. The university, then housed in a set of worn, cramped rooms around a walled courtyard in an out-of-the-way village, was both a ray of light for young Palestinians seeking to advance themselves through education, and a hotbed of impatient and militant Palestinian nationalism. Nusseibeh, with his beard, jeans, and sandals, looked much like his radical students. But he talked a different language. His students wanted action; he wanted to think. They sought firm spiritual and ideological foundations in clear-cut doctrines, whether Marxism or Islamic fundamentalism. Nusseibeh represented the intellectual tradition of the Western enlightenment, focused on the happiness and welfare of the individual rather than the destiny of the nation.
It wasn't that he was stuck in the ivory tower—one could hardly picture Birzeit's shabby campus that way, and the trip there and back inevitably meant passing by Israeli settlements and encountering Israeli Army roadblocks. His colleagues chose him to lead their faculty and employee union in its fight not only to increase salaries but also to institute democratic governance. He also helped lead the fight against Order 854, an Israeli military decree that threatened faculty members with deportation if they refused to cooperate with the Israeli administration. Those activities required coordination with the PLO leadership through its headquarters in Amman, Jordan.
Since contact with the PLO was a criminal offense under Israeli law, Nusseibeh and others developed a way of smuggling important documents in and out of the West Bank, as he describes in his 2007 memoir: "Messages were written in minuscule script on both sides of very thin paper. The message was carefully folded into a small tight roll. ... This was then wrapped in a layer of protective paper taken from the inside lining of a cigarette packet. Finally, it was rolled up into a piece of plastic cut from a shopping bag. Once the message was properly wrapped, the skillful smuggler lit a match, blew it out, and used the glint from the dying flame to melt the plastic together at both ends. Now the capsule was ready to be swallowed."
One of the main reasons Nusseibeh's Birzeit colleagues chose him to represent them was that he was one of the few who was not associated with one of the many Palestinian political factions. But his independent streak got him into trouble as well.
In 1977, when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his unexpected peace overture to Israel, nearly all Palestinian leaders and writers condemned him as a traitor to the cause. But Nusseibeh, then a graduate student at Harvard, was enthusiastic. Later, back in Jerusalem, he took part in back-channel negotiations with officials linked to the government of Israel's hard-right nationalist Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir—for which, in 1986, he got beaten up by a group of Birzeit students. Yet in the end, the Palestinian leadership and public came to realize they had to negotiate with Israel.
Nusseibeh still displays little respect for convention, whether of ideas or of protocol. I'm interviewing him, but he asks the first, wistful question, about the conflict that his people and mine have been locked in for a century: "So do you think there is any hope for our situation?"
Gloomily, he remarks that we're at a dead end. But then, brightening a bit, he notes that the desperation of the dead end can be an inspiration for new perspectives and original ideas.
More likely than not, press coverage of the new book will focus on one provocative idea that Nusseibeh suggests. He offers it as an interim way of improving the lot of the Palestinians in the West Bank without threatening the Jewish character of the Israeli state. It also might be a way, he thinks, of getting around the continuing debate over how many countries ought to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The prevailing view among both Israelis and Palestinians since the early 1990s has been that a Palestinian state should come into existence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, alongside Israel. But, in frustration over the failure to reach such an agreement, increasing numbers of Palestinians are arguing that there should be only one state, for both Jews and Palestinians. That idea is a nonstarter for nearly all Israelis, even those who have long advocated accommodation with the Palestinians. They see it as a plan for denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and self-defense.
Since neither the two-state nor one-state proposals seem to be going anywhere, Nusseibeh has a new idea. He proposes that the Palestinians should be granted full civil, but not political, rights under Israeli law. In other words, their status would be much like that enjoyed by their compatriots in East Jerusalem today. Israel imposed its own legal system on East Jerusalem right after occupying it, the rest of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967. It was a step that many, both in Israel and in the international community, took to be tantamount to annexation. East Jerusalem's Arab residents are not citizens of Israel; they cannot vote in Israeli national elections or be elected to office. But as legal residents they enjoy, in principle at least, equality under Israeli law, and are eligible for all government entitlements and services. Yet Nusseibeh stresses that this is not a plan that he sees as the answer to the current impasse in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, nor one he intends to promote in particular.
"I don't have a message in the book. It's more that I was given an opportunity to put my reflections down on paper. A lot of stuff in there is questions, things I haven't worked out properly," he explains. "I hope people who read it will be able to think about it, raise more questions, that it will allow them to find new ways of going forward."
In a lot of ways then, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? is, as one might expect from a university president who still teaches undergraduate philosophy courses, more of an educational project than a polemic. It's meant to get people to think, not give them answers. So it combines an analysis of the history and current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with musings on the nature of identity, the concept of justice, and the proper role of the state.
The 600-page Ph.D. dissertation that Nusseibeh wrote at Harvard delves into the thought of Avicenna, the 11th-century Islamic polymath and philosopher who, according to Nusseibeh, stressed man's metaphysical freedom and rejected inherent identities of the self or the nation. But, tellingly, Nusseibeh's account of his discovery of and engagement with Avicenna and other Islamic philosophers, in his memoir Once Upon a Country (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), appears in a chapter titled "Monticello." There he describes how he was moved to tears during a visit, in the mid-1970s, to the estate of Thomas Jefferson. And he notes that the obelisk marking the founding father's grave omits mention of his service as secretary of state, vice president, and president. Instead, it cites as his memorable achievements "the authorship of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia." One could hardly characterize Nusseibeh better than by saying he is an Avicennist in the West and a Jeffersonian in the East.
Sari Nusseibeh was born in February 1949 to one of Arab Jerusalem's leading families. Israel and its Arab neighbors were negotiating the armistice agreements that ended the war that Israelis call the War of Independence and that Palestinians call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. But he wasn't born in his own city. His mother and siblings had fled to Damascus during the hostilities. His father, Anwar, a leading member of the Palestinian national leadership, who lost a leg in the war, was serving as a member of the Palestinian government-in-exile in Cairo. Following the armistice, the family reunited in what was then the Jordanian half of the divided city of Jerusalem.
After his indifferent career at St. George's, the Anglican school to which many members of the city's elite sent their children, Sari Nusseibeh's parents sent him to Rugby, the prestigious British boarding school—but he ran away. In the end, he ended up at Oxford a year after the Six-Day War, in which Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan; occupied large swathes of their territories; and put the Nusseibehs, like the rest of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, under Israeli rule. He was 18, and had already been recruited into Yassir Arafat's Palestinian nationalist Fatah movement, which soon gained control of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Nusseibeh plunged headlong into the radicalism of the 60s and into pro-Palestinian activity. He handed out Fatah fliers and went to meetings. But he soon tired of that, and his political activity turned in a more intellectual direction. He made friends with Israeli students—in particular, with Avishai Margalit, now one of Israel's best known philosophers—and debated the conflict at a teahouse.
"It was easy to discuss politics with Avishai," Nusseibeh writes in his memoir, "because we both had sufficient distance from events back home to scoff at the bugle-blowing victors (his side) and the caviling complainers (mine)."
This independent streak led him to do things that no other young Palestinian dreamed of doing. After the war, Israel's borders were closed and Palestinians from the territories who had been out of the country when the war broke out had to sneak across the Jordan River to get home. Nusseibeh published an open letter in the London Times demanding that Israel allow him to return home openly. He was invited to the Israeli Embassy in London and he went, even though his Palestinian friends thought he should tear up the invitation from the enemy. A few days later, he boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Later, he attended an ulpan, one of the intensive Hebrew-language courses that Israel gives for new immigrants, and worked one summer as a volunteer on a kibbutz. At Oxford he fell in love with and married Lucy Austin, daughter of the philosopher of language John Austin.
After completing his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1978, Nusseibeh returned to Jerusalem and, true to type, took a teaching position at Birzeit and another at the Hebrew University. At Birzeit and other colleges and universities in the West Bank and Gaza, factions associated with Fatah, the Islamic movement, and several Marxist-nationalist splinter groups fought out student government elections that, because they were the only elections that Palestinians could vote in at the time, served as barometers of the political weather in the occupied territories. They were also closely watched by the Israeli army and security services, which periodically closed down the campuses in response to student demonstrations.
"The student atmosphere on the campuses then was one of independence, confidence, commitment, and strength of conviction," Nusseibeh recalls. "If you compare it with the situation now, you see it has become transformed. It's upside down, literally."
Many students, he says, are now in the employ of one of the numerous security organizations run by the Palestinian Authority, the self-governing body set up in the 1990s under the terms of the Oslo Accords. Like the classical political philosophers, Nusseibeh sees education as key to creating a just and virtuous state. As a university chief, a teacher, and a writer who frequently publishes articles in Palestinian newspapers and magazines, he sees his main role as encouraging his countrymen to think critically and independently.
What Is a Palestinian State Worth? seems almost deliberately designed to raise the hackles of everyone who reads it. It's not quite clear who its intended audience is. (When I ask Nusseibeh what reader he had in mind when he wrote it, he says—ironically? resignedly?—"Myself.") It is clearly part of Nusseibeh's larger educational project of getting his fellow Palestinians to question their assumptions, rather than adhere fruitlessly to outmoded categories, concepts, and political positions. His people, he argues, should use the moral force of nonviolence to transform, not defeat, their Israeli adversaries. And precisely because the Palestinians are weaker and under occupation, he argues, they have the power to do this.
"It's the paradox of being on top," he explains. "In a wrestling match, you have one contender down on the floor kicking and biting, and another one on top trying to hold him down. It looks as if the one on top has power and the one underneath is the victim. The one on top can never trust the one underneath. But the one underneath can afford to trust because he's underneath anyway." The victor fears losing his supremacy by trusting his rival, but the underdog can afford to trust his oppressor because he has nothing to lose, Nusseibeh explains.
And while he still thinks that the best recipe for coexistence is a two-state solution, one in which a Palestinian nation-state comprising the West Bank and Gaza Strip would exist side by side with the Jewish state of Israel, he stresses in his book that a state should not be an end in itself. "There is no need for us to have a separate or so-called independent state," he writes. A state is only a means of achieving collective well-being, of transforming oppression into freedom, he argues. And the Jewish and Palestinian states should exist only as long as they serve that purpose. Indeed, they might be the best way of allowing the two nations to evolve slowly toward a state of Jeffersonian ideals, one in which all citizens are equal and free regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or national identity.
The suggestion that the Jewish state might be just a way station toward some other political arrangement will ring alarm bells with Israelis. Most of the country's leaders and citizens fear that the Palestinian leadership's consent to set up a Palestinian state alongside Israel is merely tactical, and that the ultimate goal is to overwhelm Israel militarily or demographically and subsume it into the Arab world. And most Israelis, even fervent supporters of accommodation with the Palestinians, look at the Middle East and conclude that Jews living in an Arab state would almost certainly not enjoy equality, democracy, or physical security.
Most Israelis will also not be pleased that the Israelis that Nusseibeh mentions time and again in the book are radicals and outsiders who are seen even by many in the country's peace camp as hostile to the Jewish people's right to self-determination. He suggests, citing Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, that the Arabs who lived in Palestine before the British conquest, rather than the Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 20th century, were probably the descendants of the region's ancient inhabitants. Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, is an avowed anti-Zionist whose book was condemned by nearly all Israeli reviewers, of all political stripes, as awful scholarship and unoriginal polemic. His Tel Aviv University colleague Anita Shapira summed up the book by saying "there is something warped and objectionable in the assumption that for Jews to integrate into the Middle East, they, and they alone of all the peoples in the region, must shed their national identity and historical memories and reconstruct themselves in a way that may (perhaps) find favor with Israeli-Palestinians." The mere mention of Sand, in the first chapter, as a respectable scholar is likely to make many Israeli and pro-Israeli readers put the book down at once.
Nusseibeh also makes much of Israeli peace activists such as Uri Avneri and Abie Nathan, colorful but not particularly influential radicals on the fringe of Israeli society. Nathan, for example, was the nascent Israeli peace movement's leading stunt man. In 1965 he flew his own airplane from Israel to Egypt with the goal of delivering a peace petition to Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser (Nasser refused to see him and had him deported). He staged hunger strikes to protest the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and was jailed for meeting with Yasir Arafat and other PLO leaders.
Nusseibeh clearly admires such figures because they were willing to say things and take positions that lay far outside their own community's consensus.
"These are the unsung heroes," he stresses. "Contrary to how many people think about them, that they are peripheral, one should look upon them as the visible points on the surface, underneath which something much more important and significant is happening. They are the human face, evidence of a deep human element that is not necessarily evident in Israeli society."
Nusseibeh seems to hope that Al-Quds University will produce some Palestinian versions of Avneri and Nathan—people who can see beyond the conventions and tropes in which the rest of their society is caught.
And he thinks that this is sorely needed right now. While large majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians claim to support a two-state arrangement, they vote for political parties that work against that goal—the Palestinians for the Islamicist movement Hamas, and the Israelis for the Likud and other parties that promote Israeli settlement in the West Bank. All the efforts of the leaders of both countries, and of the international community, to achieve a two-state solution have failed.
In despair, many Palestinians have abandoned the idea of two separate states—they demand a single state, comprising all the territory of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, in which the majority would rule. Israelis point out that demographic trends are such that the Palestinians would soon be the majority, and that that would be the end of Jewish independence and self-determination.
That's why Nusseibeh is floating ideas like giving the Palestinians civil but not political rights.
"I'm not talking about a solution," he asserts. "It's not like going to the supermarket and they're out of two-states so you pick up a one-state. It looks like we are stuck, so the question arises: What are we to do?"
The question, he says, is what is the best alternative for the Palestinians, and for the Israelis too, under the current circumstances?
"Ideally, one would like to be guided by humanist principles. One should try to bring about as much equality as possible, given differences. I'm not a magician, but I think that human beings are capable of being creative and coming up with imaginative solutions if required," he explains.
Despite the current deadlock, there is cause for optimism, he thinks.
"Regardless of the fact that the Camp David talks collapsed, if you look at the relations of Jews and Arabs, we've come a long way toward finding some way to reach out for some mode of coexistence," he says. "It didn't work, but it was nevertheless an immense step forward, if you contrast where we were before."
At similar junctions in the past, Nusseibeh has been condemned by his fellow Palestinians as a traitor to the cause and dismissed by Israelis as, at best, a lone moderate Palestinian voice among the wolves and, at worst, a fanatic in dove's clothing (during the first Gulf War, in 1991, Israeli forces jailed him for 90 days without filing charges; according to press reports, he was suspected of spying for Iraq). When he teamed up in 2003 with the former chief of the Israel Security Agency (popularly known as the Shin Bet), Ami Ayalon, on a grass-roots peace initiative called "The People's Voice," he was condemned by other Palestinians for agreeing to a clause stating that Palestinian refugees would not be able to return to their former homes in Israel.
"People haven't reacted so far to this idea," Nusseibeh says, referring to the possibility of granting the Palestinians civil but not political rights in Israel. "But if you ask around, they'll tell you that I'm a person who has crazy ideas. I'm an optimist. I see things going in a good direction. Except I can't tell exactly what that direction looks like."
Haim Watzman is a Jerusalem-based writer and translator whose most recent book is A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). He blogs at southjerusalem.com.
Friday, January 28, 2011
J Street Policy on Isr Settlement Issue before the UN
Dear Friend,
In a carefully worded statement, J Street advocates for the US NOT to veto the resolution making the rounds of UN Security Council members, urging better US initiatives to create "borders" and "security arrangements" for Israel and Palestine.
The key paragraphs (in bold) are the three at the bottom of this post. JRK
Following the introduction of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement expansion, J Street released a new policy statement:
J Street shares the growing global frustration at the lack of progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and at the Israeli government’s continued expansion of settlements beyond the Green Line.
J Street grounds its work in a deep commitment to the security, survival and character of the state of Israel as the democratic homeland of the Jewish people. As a pro-Israel organization and as Americans, we advocate for what we believe to be in the long-term interests of the state of Israel and of the United States. Ongoing settlement expansion runs counter to the interests of both countries and against commitments Israel itself has made.
For over forty years and across eight Presidential administrations, the United States has made it crystal clear that Israel needs to stop building settlements over the Green Line. As President Obama put it in his June 2009 Cairo speech, “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”
Our opposition to settlement expansion does not contradict our belief that ultimately some Jewish settlements and a clear majority of settlers on the West Bank close to the Green Line, and the Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, will be incorporated within the borders of Israel in return for swaps of equivalent land with the state-to-be of Palestine.
It pains us that against its own self interest and despite clear warnings from the United States and the rest of the international community, the Netanyahu government has nonetheless chosen to continue expanding settlements, rendering a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly hard to achieve.
The Resolution introduced in the United Nations Security Council this week condemns Israel’s ongoing settlement activity and calls on both parties to continue negotiating final status issues in an effort to resolve the conflict in the short term.
These are sentiments that we share and that we believe a majority of Jewish Americans and friends of Israel share.
We would urge the government of the state of Israel to recognize that it is in Israel’s own interest to stop further building over the Green Line, and to immediately sit down with the United States and the Palestinians to establish a border and security arrangements that define where it can and cannot continue to build.
Barring that, we urge the Obama administration to put forward quickly, and with strong international support, its own bold, proactive diplomatic initiative, including ideas for establishing borders and security arrangements.
The lack of movement on the diplomatic front has created the vacuum from which the present Security Council Resolution has emerged. By asserting clear leadership in a serious effort to reach a two-state resolution of the conflict, the United States can likely defer immediate consideration of this new Resolution by the Security Council.
Our preferred outcome would be Israeli or American action that averts the need for such a Resolution. However, if the Resolution does come to a vote, we urge the Obama administration to work to craft language, particularly around Jerusalem, that it can support condemning settlement activity and promoting a two-state solution.
While we hope never to see the state of Israel publicly taken to task by the United Nations, we cannot support a U.S. veto of a Resolution that closely tracks long-standing American policy and that appropriately condemns Israeli settlement policy.
In a carefully worded statement, J Street advocates for the US NOT to veto the resolution making the rounds of UN Security Council members, urging better US initiatives to create "borders" and "security arrangements" for Israel and Palestine.
The key paragraphs (in bold) are the three at the bottom of this post. JRK
Following the introduction of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement expansion, J Street released a new policy statement:
J Street shares the growing global frustration at the lack of progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and at the Israeli government’s continued expansion of settlements beyond the Green Line.
J Street grounds its work in a deep commitment to the security, survival and character of the state of Israel as the democratic homeland of the Jewish people. As a pro-Israel organization and as Americans, we advocate for what we believe to be in the long-term interests of the state of Israel and of the United States. Ongoing settlement expansion runs counter to the interests of both countries and against commitments Israel itself has made.
For over forty years and across eight Presidential administrations, the United States has made it crystal clear that Israel needs to stop building settlements over the Green Line. As President Obama put it in his June 2009 Cairo speech, “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”
Our opposition to settlement expansion does not contradict our belief that ultimately some Jewish settlements and a clear majority of settlers on the West Bank close to the Green Line, and the Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, will be incorporated within the borders of Israel in return for swaps of equivalent land with the state-to-be of Palestine.
It pains us that against its own self interest and despite clear warnings from the United States and the rest of the international community, the Netanyahu government has nonetheless chosen to continue expanding settlements, rendering a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly hard to achieve.
The Resolution introduced in the United Nations Security Council this week condemns Israel’s ongoing settlement activity and calls on both parties to continue negotiating final status issues in an effort to resolve the conflict in the short term.
These are sentiments that we share and that we believe a majority of Jewish Americans and friends of Israel share.
We would urge the government of the state of Israel to recognize that it is in Israel’s own interest to stop further building over the Green Line, and to immediately sit down with the United States and the Palestinians to establish a border and security arrangements that define where it can and cannot continue to build.
Barring that, we urge the Obama administration to put forward quickly, and with strong international support, its own bold, proactive diplomatic initiative, including ideas for establishing borders and security arrangements.
The lack of movement on the diplomatic front has created the vacuum from which the present Security Council Resolution has emerged. By asserting clear leadership in a serious effort to reach a two-state resolution of the conflict, the United States can likely defer immediate consideration of this new Resolution by the Security Council.
Our preferred outcome would be Israeli or American action that averts the need for such a Resolution. However, if the Resolution does come to a vote, we urge the Obama administration to work to craft language, particularly around Jerusalem, that it can support condemning settlement activity and promoting a two-state solution.
While we hope never to see the state of Israel publicly taken to task by the United Nations, we cannot support a U.S. veto of a Resolution that closely tracks long-standing American policy and that appropriately condemns Israeli settlement policy.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Officials Oppose Co-Existence
Israel wants to enforce what Americans would call "segregation". Keep Arabs and Israelis separate. Make sure people understand their "place". And stay there.
Apparently, this is the goal of the present Jewish democracy. How can the US continue to "support it"? JRK
Israel's 'disobedient women' questioned over illegal trips for Palestinians
Harriet Sherwood
The Guardian
January 18, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/view-from-jerusalem-with-harriet-sherwood/2011/j...
In a small village between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I joined a remarkable group of women and children for lunch last weekend, a noisy and cheerful crowd enjoying plates of chicken, fish, rice and salad. All of them were breaking the law.
The party consisted of around 20 mostly middle-aged Israeli women, slightly fewer and younger Palestinian women and a handful of the latter's children.
The Palestinians were from villages in the West Bank and therefore forbidden entry into Israel without proper permits. The Israeli women had illegally brought them across checkpoints for a day out – a journey that is both just a few miles and an impossible distance.
This wasn't the first occasion; there have been previous trips to Tel Aviv and Jaffa and to the zoo in Jerusalem. For many of the Palestinians, it is their first trip across the Green Line into Israel. Earlier trips have been described by Ilana Hammerman, one of the organisers, in the Israeli paper Haaretz, and by Rachel Shabi in the Guardian last September.
But in recent weeks, the Israelis – who describe themselves as "women who disobey" – have begun to be questioned individually by the police about their actions. Some see this as part of a bigger picture of intolerance and harassment of groups and individuals supporting co-existence, civil and human rights, and opposing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.
Many civil and human rights groups and politicians across the spectrum here detect a growing campaign against those challenging the "norm" of occupation. That, on a small and individual scale, is what these disobedient women are doing.
Two weeks ago, Nitza Aminov was questioned for an hour by police who took her fingerprints and photograph for their records. She refused to answer their questions. She told me that more women have been told to expect visits from the police this week.
Another, Meira, said police intimidation would not deter her from taking part in illegal days out. "If we have to sit in jail as a result, we'll sit in jail."
Hammerman has been questioned a few times, the first three months ago. "I've been public about challenging the law, acting in an illegal way," she told me.
The risks are greater for the Palestinian women, who are likely to face a harsh punishment if discovered illegally in Israel.
One of them, Fida – who by lunchtime had replaced the headscarf she had removed to get through the checkpoint – was not afraid of getting caught. "The Jewish people don't scare me – this is normal," she said.
As the group prepared to drive back to the West Bank in a sudden downpour, thoughts turned towards navigating their way back through the checkpoints. "We see that this is the way of life for Palestinians," said Meira.
Apparently, this is the goal of the present Jewish democracy. How can the US continue to "support it"? JRK
Israel's 'disobedient women' questioned over illegal trips for Palestinians
Harriet Sherwood
The Guardian
January 18, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/view-from-jerusalem-with-harriet-sherwood/2011/j...
In a small village between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I joined a remarkable group of women and children for lunch last weekend, a noisy and cheerful crowd enjoying plates of chicken, fish, rice and salad. All of them were breaking the law.
The party consisted of around 20 mostly middle-aged Israeli women, slightly fewer and younger Palestinian women and a handful of the latter's children.
The Palestinians were from villages in the West Bank and therefore forbidden entry into Israel without proper permits. The Israeli women had illegally brought them across checkpoints for a day out – a journey that is both just a few miles and an impossible distance.
This wasn't the first occasion; there have been previous trips to Tel Aviv and Jaffa and to the zoo in Jerusalem. For many of the Palestinians, it is their first trip across the Green Line into Israel. Earlier trips have been described by Ilana Hammerman, one of the organisers, in the Israeli paper Haaretz, and by Rachel Shabi in the Guardian last September.
But in recent weeks, the Israelis – who describe themselves as "women who disobey" – have begun to be questioned individually by the police about their actions. Some see this as part of a bigger picture of intolerance and harassment of groups and individuals supporting co-existence, civil and human rights, and opposing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.
Many civil and human rights groups and politicians across the spectrum here detect a growing campaign against those challenging the "norm" of occupation. That, on a small and individual scale, is what these disobedient women are doing.
Two weeks ago, Nitza Aminov was questioned for an hour by police who took her fingerprints and photograph for their records. She refused to answer their questions. She told me that more women have been told to expect visits from the police this week.
Another, Meira, said police intimidation would not deter her from taking part in illegal days out. "If we have to sit in jail as a result, we'll sit in jail."
Hammerman has been questioned a few times, the first three months ago. "I've been public about challenging the law, acting in an illegal way," she told me.
The risks are greater for the Palestinian women, who are likely to face a harsh punishment if discovered illegally in Israel.
One of them, Fida – who by lunchtime had replaced the headscarf she had removed to get through the checkpoint – was not afraid of getting caught. "The Jewish people don't scare me – this is normal," she said.
As the group prepared to drive back to the West Bank in a sudden downpour, thoughts turned towards navigating their way back through the checkpoints. "We see that this is the way of life for Palestinians," said Meira.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Will Christians stay in Isr/Pal?
Jerusalem’s Christians Get Help From Church in Buying a HomeDavid Miller
The Media Line
January 12, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=31085
Attempting to curb the flight of Palestinian Christians from Jerusalem, the city’s Latin Patriarchate is taking an unusual role in developing real estate projects that will provide affordable housing to its flock and others.
The church recently obtained building permits for 72 housing units to be built in the Beit Safafa neighborhood of southern Jerusalem on land purchased by individuals from the Al-Alami and Al-Husseini families. Last November, 68 Christian families entered their new homes in the Al-Shayah neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, in another project supported by the church.
Although the city is filled with churches, monasteries and other Christian institutions, its Christian population has been in a freefall. They numbered 31,000 in 1948, but today only 15,400, or just 2% of the city's population, identify themselves as Christians, according to statistics published by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (JIIS) on Christmas Eve.
"The Beit Safafa project is intended for church employees," Msgr. William Shomali, auxiliary bishop of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, told The Media Line. "We aren’t building a Christian ghetto there; even Muslims have encouraged this project because they realize that we are a small minority that needs to preserve itself."
While the Christian population in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East has been in decline for decades, Jerusalem presents a special problem. The city has limited room to expand, putting land at a premium and raising the cost of housing. The Israeli planning bureaucracy makes getting approvals for construction a slow and cumbersome process.
Shomali said he didn't believe that Christians received preferential treatment from Jerusalem's municipality, adding that zoning for the project began 15 years ago. He downplayed the distinctly Christian character of the project, saying the Latin Patriarchate was willing to facilitate purchasing groups from all segments of Palestinian society.
"Obtaining a permit is much easier for groups than for individuals," he said. "I encourage all Palestinians to form such groups, and we will help them."
Shomali insisted the church's involvement was limited to coordination between the buyers, providing lawyers and engineers for the project. Funding, he said, was provided entirely by the buyers who take out loans from the Arab Bank, a Jordan lender that operates in the West Bank, never from church funds.
Rula Shehedeh, a 22-year-old Christian resident of the A-Tur neighborhood of Jerusalem, said housing was unaffordable for both Christians and Muslim youth in Jerusalem. Muslims often refuse to rent their homes to Christians, she said.
"To buy a house you often need your parents' assistance," Shehedeh told The Media Line. "Christian monasteries, such as Al-Faji on the Mount of Olives, sometimes fund building projects for Christians within the monastery confines."
Hanna 'Issa, who oversees Christian affairs in the Palestinian Ministry of Endowments, bemoaned the flight of Christians from the Palestinian territories.
"The emigration of Christians from Palestinian land has become a disconcerting phenomenon in recent times," 'Issa told the London-based Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi. "Recent statistics indicate that 600 Christians emigrate annually from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza."
Bishop Shomali said it was initially his idea to help Christians purchase homes in Jerusalem and that the church gradually came to support it. He added that the main problem facing Jerusalem Christians wasn’t unemployment, but rather the high price of land in the city.
Hana Bendcowsky, director of the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations (JCJCR), said that previous building projects were undertaken on church land in Jerusalem, with new buildings rented out to young couples for cheaper than market prices.
"The Latin Patriarchate owns buildings in the Old City, which it rents out, and the Lutheran Church developed its property on the Mount of Olives," Bendcowsky told The Media Line. "It's hard to tell what will keep Christian families from leaving the city, but it's certainly helpful when you have somewhere to live."
As 2010 came to a close, Pope Benedict XVI took the opportunity to acknowledge the plight of Middle East Christians, pointing the finger at Israeli occupation as the main reason for the flight of Christians from the Holy Land.
"[Attacks against Christians] spread fear within the Christian community and [create] a desire on the part of many to emigrate in search of a better life," the pope said. "The Israeli occupation is making their life difficult and the Israeli occupation is responsible for the declining of number within the Christian community."
Bendcowsky said Israel’s security barrier, which cut off some Palestinian neighborhoods from Jerusalem, contributed to the price increase in neighborhoods, which were left within the city's municipal boundaries.
"Neighborhoods such as Beit Hanina and the Old City, with high Christian populations, have seen a huge price increase over the last 10 years," Bendcowsky said.
The Media Line
January 12, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=31085
Attempting to curb the flight of Palestinian Christians from Jerusalem, the city’s Latin Patriarchate is taking an unusual role in developing real estate projects that will provide affordable housing to its flock and others.
The church recently obtained building permits for 72 housing units to be built in the Beit Safafa neighborhood of southern Jerusalem on land purchased by individuals from the Al-Alami and Al-Husseini families. Last November, 68 Christian families entered their new homes in the Al-Shayah neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, in another project supported by the church.
Although the city is filled with churches, monasteries and other Christian institutions, its Christian population has been in a freefall. They numbered 31,000 in 1948, but today only 15,400, or just 2% of the city's population, identify themselves as Christians, according to statistics published by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (JIIS) on Christmas Eve.
"The Beit Safafa project is intended for church employees," Msgr. William Shomali, auxiliary bishop of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, told The Media Line. "We aren’t building a Christian ghetto there; even Muslims have encouraged this project because they realize that we are a small minority that needs to preserve itself."
While the Christian population in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East has been in decline for decades, Jerusalem presents a special problem. The city has limited room to expand, putting land at a premium and raising the cost of housing. The Israeli planning bureaucracy makes getting approvals for construction a slow and cumbersome process.
Shomali said he didn't believe that Christians received preferential treatment from Jerusalem's municipality, adding that zoning for the project began 15 years ago. He downplayed the distinctly Christian character of the project, saying the Latin Patriarchate was willing to facilitate purchasing groups from all segments of Palestinian society.
"Obtaining a permit is much easier for groups than for individuals," he said. "I encourage all Palestinians to form such groups, and we will help them."
Shomali insisted the church's involvement was limited to coordination between the buyers, providing lawyers and engineers for the project. Funding, he said, was provided entirely by the buyers who take out loans from the Arab Bank, a Jordan lender that operates in the West Bank, never from church funds.
Rula Shehedeh, a 22-year-old Christian resident of the A-Tur neighborhood of Jerusalem, said housing was unaffordable for both Christians and Muslim youth in Jerusalem. Muslims often refuse to rent their homes to Christians, she said.
"To buy a house you often need your parents' assistance," Shehedeh told The Media Line. "Christian monasteries, such as Al-Faji on the Mount of Olives, sometimes fund building projects for Christians within the monastery confines."
Hanna 'Issa, who oversees Christian affairs in the Palestinian Ministry of Endowments, bemoaned the flight of Christians from the Palestinian territories.
"The emigration of Christians from Palestinian land has become a disconcerting phenomenon in recent times," 'Issa told the London-based Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi. "Recent statistics indicate that 600 Christians emigrate annually from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza."
Bishop Shomali said it was initially his idea to help Christians purchase homes in Jerusalem and that the church gradually came to support it. He added that the main problem facing Jerusalem Christians wasn’t unemployment, but rather the high price of land in the city.
Hana Bendcowsky, director of the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations (JCJCR), said that previous building projects were undertaken on church land in Jerusalem, with new buildings rented out to young couples for cheaper than market prices.
"The Latin Patriarchate owns buildings in the Old City, which it rents out, and the Lutheran Church developed its property on the Mount of Olives," Bendcowsky told The Media Line. "It's hard to tell what will keep Christian families from leaving the city, but it's certainly helpful when you have somewhere to live."
As 2010 came to a close, Pope Benedict XVI took the opportunity to acknowledge the plight of Middle East Christians, pointing the finger at Israeli occupation as the main reason for the flight of Christians from the Holy Land.
"[Attacks against Christians] spread fear within the Christian community and [create] a desire on the part of many to emigrate in search of a better life," the pope said. "The Israeli occupation is making their life difficult and the Israeli occupation is responsible for the declining of number within the Christian community."
Bendcowsky said Israel’s security barrier, which cut off some Palestinian neighborhoods from Jerusalem, contributed to the price increase in neighborhoods, which were left within the city's municipal boundaries.
"Neighborhoods such as Beit Hanina and the Old City, with high Christian populations, have seen a huge price increase over the last 10 years," Bendcowsky said.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Outrage and Civility Belong Together!
Relationships with Jewish Family and Friends
Thomas L. Are blog, 12.17.10
I have had several people recently to ask about keeping relationships with Jewish friends while at the same time being critical of Israel. This can be especially difficult when dealing with a Jewish member of ones own family. So, for what it’s worth.
I think sometimes we have to opt for relationship rather than issues I have in mind my relationship with one of the most anti-Muslim, pro-Israel men in Georgia. My last blog was in response to his email that said, “it was too bad that Israel did not sink the Mava Marmara. It would have freed the world of 600 terrorist.” Trying to get a sympathetic fact by him is like trying to give a flu shot to a tombstone. So, we do not talk about anything important except kids and doctors. Mark Braverman tells us to give up on the hard liners. Marc Ellis rejects what he calls “the ecumenical deal,” which requires Christian and Jews engaged in dialogue to never mention Israel’s occupation. I have a Jewish friend who is very vocal about “being free to criticize Israel.” Yet, she spends most of her time and energy criticizing those who criticize Israel. I understand the strain on relationships.
Now to the grandmother whose daughter is married to a “fine Jewish man.” I say, Jews are good people, and intelligent. Your grand children have every right to be proud of their heritage. When I was in Mississippi, the issue was civil rights for African Americans and the leaders of this cause came from the Jewish community. I think of those three civil rights worker who were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, two were Jews and the other was African American. Throughout history Jews have been sensitive to the needs of others. It is in their DNA to be caring and to stand up for the poor and oppressed. It’s also in their scriptures, especially the Psalms and the Prophets. Give it a little time and you will win your daughter’s heart and appreciation. Her struggle is not with you, it is with her own faith. My guess is that in years to come, her struggle will be with her children. Many, many young Jews are beginning to question the policies of Israel and some of them are angry. I would also bet that your daughter has never been there and has never seen what is going on in the West Bank and Gaza. The most passionate Jews who cry for Palestinian justice are those who have been there and are shocked by what they see.
Your daughter is absolutely right about anti-Semitism which has been a senseless stain on the Christian church for almost two thousand years. However, there are some in the Jewish community who cannot hear criticism of Israel as anything other than anti-Semitism. For those, I say we can only go on seeking justice without their approval.
Justice for Palestinians is the position of more and more Jewish authors, professors and peace advocates. I have in mind, Marc Ellis, Noam Chomsky, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Joel Kavol, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Peppe, Gideon Levy, Jeff Halper, Sara Roy, Mark Braverman , Tanya Reinhart, Richard Goldstein and many others These brave people are not seeking to destroy Israel, but believe Israel is on a path of self destruction. Just last week I heard Rachael Sussman who works for B’Tselem say that we must do “all that we can to stop Israel’s madness.”
Israel is deliberately starving people, depriving them of medicines, fuel and building supplies, stealing land, and water, creating Jewish only roads that separate families and restrict movement, constructing a wall which surrounds communities separating kids from their schools, farmers from their fields and the sick from medical care, bulldozing homes by the thousands, imposing closures, curfews, and checkpoints, all in the name of exceptionalism. These actions promote anti-Semitism and the reaction of the Arab nations. I cannot understand why the Jewish community is not standing on its heels shouting condemnation of Israel’s anti-Jewish policies rather than debating supersessionism. When have you heard a Rabbi even mention the word “occupation?”
Who is going to speak out for justice if we don’t at least try? Politicians are silenced by the lobby. The Christian right declares that the Jews must drive out the Palestinians for Jesus to come back, even if it means murder, torture, cruelty and theft. The media is seldom “fair or balanced.” Israel’s aggression is reported as a “reaction.” One Israeli soldier held in captivity and everybody knows of Gilad Shalit by name. Netanyahu called it "inhumane," which it is, while the 9000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons are seldom mentioned. Israel’s military is one of the most powerful and brutal on the globe and everybody in the world knows it but citizens of Israel and the US.
The argument that other governments do things that are bad or even worse, therefore we should not “pick on Israel,” does not hold up. If I am hauled before the judge, it’s a poor defense for me to say, “OK judge, I raped that girl, but Big John up the road raped two girls so it is unfair to judge me.” It makes no sense unless Israel is vying to be the most barbaric state on earth. It is our tax money that pays for Israel’s planes, bombs, and bullets. It’s our government that blocks international law from applying to Israel and vetoes UN resolutions. We, you and I, are involved in everything Israel does. We have a responsibility to speak out. So, keep up your good work, be who you are, and be guided by your moral convictions. Keep on loving your daughter but let someone else deal with her defense of Israel.
Thomas Are
December 18, 2010
Thomas L. Are blog, 12.17.10
I have had several people recently to ask about keeping relationships with Jewish friends while at the same time being critical of Israel. This can be especially difficult when dealing with a Jewish member of ones own family. So, for what it’s worth.
I think sometimes we have to opt for relationship rather than issues I have in mind my relationship with one of the most anti-Muslim, pro-Israel men in Georgia. My last blog was in response to his email that said, “it was too bad that Israel did not sink the Mava Marmara. It would have freed the world of 600 terrorist.” Trying to get a sympathetic fact by him is like trying to give a flu shot to a tombstone. So, we do not talk about anything important except kids and doctors. Mark Braverman tells us to give up on the hard liners. Marc Ellis rejects what he calls “the ecumenical deal,” which requires Christian and Jews engaged in dialogue to never mention Israel’s occupation. I have a Jewish friend who is very vocal about “being free to criticize Israel.” Yet, she spends most of her time and energy criticizing those who criticize Israel. I understand the strain on relationships.
Now to the grandmother whose daughter is married to a “fine Jewish man.” I say, Jews are good people, and intelligent. Your grand children have every right to be proud of their heritage. When I was in Mississippi, the issue was civil rights for African Americans and the leaders of this cause came from the Jewish community. I think of those three civil rights worker who were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, two were Jews and the other was African American. Throughout history Jews have been sensitive to the needs of others. It is in their DNA to be caring and to stand up for the poor and oppressed. It’s also in their scriptures, especially the Psalms and the Prophets. Give it a little time and you will win your daughter’s heart and appreciation. Her struggle is not with you, it is with her own faith. My guess is that in years to come, her struggle will be with her children. Many, many young Jews are beginning to question the policies of Israel and some of them are angry. I would also bet that your daughter has never been there and has never seen what is going on in the West Bank and Gaza. The most passionate Jews who cry for Palestinian justice are those who have been there and are shocked by what they see.
Your daughter is absolutely right about anti-Semitism which has been a senseless stain on the Christian church for almost two thousand years. However, there are some in the Jewish community who cannot hear criticism of Israel as anything other than anti-Semitism. For those, I say we can only go on seeking justice without their approval.
Justice for Palestinians is the position of more and more Jewish authors, professors and peace advocates. I have in mind, Marc Ellis, Noam Chomsky, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Joel Kavol, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Peppe, Gideon Levy, Jeff Halper, Sara Roy, Mark Braverman , Tanya Reinhart, Richard Goldstein and many others These brave people are not seeking to destroy Israel, but believe Israel is on a path of self destruction. Just last week I heard Rachael Sussman who works for B’Tselem say that we must do “all that we can to stop Israel’s madness.”
Israel is deliberately starving people, depriving them of medicines, fuel and building supplies, stealing land, and water, creating Jewish only roads that separate families and restrict movement, constructing a wall which surrounds communities separating kids from their schools, farmers from their fields and the sick from medical care, bulldozing homes by the thousands, imposing closures, curfews, and checkpoints, all in the name of exceptionalism. These actions promote anti-Semitism and the reaction of the Arab nations. I cannot understand why the Jewish community is not standing on its heels shouting condemnation of Israel’s anti-Jewish policies rather than debating supersessionism. When have you heard a Rabbi even mention the word “occupation?”
Who is going to speak out for justice if we don’t at least try? Politicians are silenced by the lobby. The Christian right declares that the Jews must drive out the Palestinians for Jesus to come back, even if it means murder, torture, cruelty and theft. The media is seldom “fair or balanced.” Israel’s aggression is reported as a “reaction.” One Israeli soldier held in captivity and everybody knows of Gilad Shalit by name. Netanyahu called it "inhumane," which it is, while the 9000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons are seldom mentioned. Israel’s military is one of the most powerful and brutal on the globe and everybody in the world knows it but citizens of Israel and the US.
The argument that other governments do things that are bad or even worse, therefore we should not “pick on Israel,” does not hold up. If I am hauled before the judge, it’s a poor defense for me to say, “OK judge, I raped that girl, but Big John up the road raped two girls so it is unfair to judge me.” It makes no sense unless Israel is vying to be the most barbaric state on earth. It is our tax money that pays for Israel’s planes, bombs, and bullets. It’s our government that blocks international law from applying to Israel and vetoes UN resolutions. We, you and I, are involved in everything Israel does. We have a responsibility to speak out. So, keep up your good work, be who you are, and be guided by your moral convictions. Keep on loving your daughter but let someone else deal with her defense of Israel.
Thomas Are
December 18, 2010
Thursday, January 6, 2011
A Third Way to Palestine
Dear Friend,
There is another way to empower "Palestine" as an independent nation: Economic empowerment via Fayyad. Read on: JRK
A Third Way to Palestine
Robert Danin
Foreign Affairs (Opinion)
January 1, 2011 - 12:00am
This past September, as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down in Washington to dine with U.S. President Barack Obama, a barely noticed event took place in Ramallah. With little fanfare, the 13th Palestinian Authority (PA) government, headed by Salam Fayyad, issued its one-year countdown to independence. This brief and understated document is likely to prove far more significant for the future of Palestine than the White House dinner and reflects nothing short of a revolutionary new approach to Palestinian statehood.
For nearly a century, "armed struggle" was the dominant leitmotif of the Palestinian nationalist movement. This strategy was supplemented and ostensibly replaced by peace negotiations after the Oslo accords of 1993. The newest approach, adopted by Prime Minister Fayyad, a U.S.-educated former International Monetary Fund (IMF) economist, signifies the rise of a third and highly pragmatic form of Palestinian nationalism. Fayyad's strategy is one of self-reliance and self-empowerment; his focus is on providing good government, economic opportunity, and law and order for the Palestinians -- and security for Israel by extension -- and so removing whatever pretexts may exist for Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian territories. Fayyad's aim is to make the process of institution building transformative for Palestinians, thereby instilling a sense that statehood is inevitable. Elegant in its simplicity and seemingly unassailable in its reasonableness, this third way -- dubbed "Fayyadism" by some Western observers -- has nevertheless precipitated serious opposition. Some Palestinians fear Fayyad is only making life better under Israel's occupation, Israelis accuse him of becoming increasingly confrontational, and a growing number of international democracy advocates blame him for Palestinian political paralysis.
Although Fayyadism is not a replacement for a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has become an indispensible component of any future talks. Improving conditions on the ground and giving people a greater stake in running their own lives demonstrate to Palestinians that the peaceful path pays dividends. Fayyadism empowers Palestinian leaders to convince their constituents that it is worthwhile to make the painful compromises that will be necessary for a genuine settlement to be reached. At the same time, more widespread recognition of Palestinian performance on the ground in the realms of security, economic growth, and administration will instill confidence among Israelis that they can hand over control of the occupied territories to a reliable Palestinian partner. Skeptical Israelis tend to wonder: Is Fayyad a partner or an opponent? The reality is that as a Palestinian nationalist, he is both -- although not an enemy.
Should peace negotiations break down, as they have so often in the past, then the Fayyadist enterprise can provide an important safety net for the Palestinians and the Israelis: it can help prevent a complete breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian relations and a possible cascade into violence, as occurred in 2000, when peace talks broke down and there was nothing else in place to revive them. Such a safety net can help keep hope -- and people -- alive.
THE STRUGGLE WITHOUT
Since 1948, the Palestinian nationalist movement has largely been dominated by the "outsiders" -- Palestinians exiled in the Arab world and beyond. The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo by the Arab states in 1964 as an umbrella organization for the various Palestinian nationalist groups. Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement soon came to dominate the PLO; its primary objective was to reverse the creation of the Jewish state and return Palestinian refugees to the homes they lost in 1948 by means of armed struggle and terrorism. Some of those Palestinians who had taken refuge from Israel in the West Bank and Gaza used those Palestinian territories, then administered by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, to launch guerrilla raids into Israel.
With Israel's lightning victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, the West Bank and Gaza came under Israel's control. Still, the center of Palestinian political gravity remained with the PLO leaders in exile. These "outsiders" tended to be more absolutist in their objectives, given that they had already paid the price of defeat by Israel, whereas the "insiders" -- those Palestinians residing in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem -- struggled to protect their homes and patrimony under Israeli occupation.
Insiders launched the first intifada, or uprising, in late 1987, thereby taking the lead in intra-Palestinian politics. The uprising was initiated by a loose coalition associated with Fatah and other nationalist groups, alongside a new Palestinian organization: Hamas. Founded in Gaza, Hamas emerged as an Islamist alternative to Fatah and the PLO and challenged the PLO's exclusive leadership claims inside the occupied territories. Although the PLO leadership based in Tunisia eventually caught up and secured its political primacy, the center of gravity within Palestinian politics had fundamentally shifted to the insiders.
Their first success was in forcing Jordanian King Hussein to relinquish Jordanian claims to the West Bank. The outsiders and their absolutist approach were further weakened when the PLO backed Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. After the 1993 Oslo accords, the PLO moved toward conciliation and recognized Israel and its right to exist. Israel, in turn, recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. Arafat returned from exile, and the PLO outsiders and insiders were suddenly and uneasily reunited in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas remained largely outside Palestinian politics as an Islamist social movement with a small, and violent, terrorist wing.
The Oslo accords and the self-rule they initiated by creating the PA were meant to end the era of armed struggle and terrorism. Negotiations with Israel and the establishment of Palestinian institutions, so the logic went, would lead to a final peace accord between Israel and the PLO. For a time, it seemed to be working. Israel granted the Palestinians limited control over portions of the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas was weak, and the two sides attempted to negotiate a final settlement to end the conflict. But that hope was short-lived. Rather than serving to build confidence, the post-Oslo period only increased bitterness and mistrust. Palestinians either engaged in or turned a blind eye to terrorism, and incitement to violence continued. Meanwhile, Israel continued to expand the West Bank settlements and failed to carry out previously negotiated troop redeployments from the West Bank.
By the autumn of 2000, the road to peace no longer seemed so clear. The first intifada, in 1987, had been waged largely with stones and Molotov cocktails; the second one, which began in September 2000, relied on higher-tech weapons and, increasingly, suicide terrorist attacks. Palestinian security officers who until then had worked closely with their Israeli counterparts turned their weapons on the Israelis. Israel, in turn, attacked PA institutions and reoccupied some parts of the West Bank from which it had earlier withdrawn. Oslo seemed to be unraveling. Armed struggle, it turned out, had not been abandoned after all; Arafat had simply chosen to harness violence to supplement negotiations.
During the second intifada, the nationalist Fatah camp was outflanked by Hamas' more militant approach and its absolute rejection of Israel. Ultimately, Israel succeeded militarily in bringing the second intifada to a halt, largely by reoccupying the West Bank and then building a separation barrier to keep Palestinians out of Israel. Yet this did not kill the resistance impulse. Its mantle had been largely taken up by Hamas; other religious militant groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad; and radical elements in Fatah, such as the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, all of whom continued to reject the principle of nonviolence, even though by 2003 Israel had severely limited those Palestinians' ability to conduct terrorist attacks.
Arafat died in November 2004; two months later, Abbas was elected as the second PA president. Abbas' victory ushered in a new era, with a clear Palestinian commitment to peaceful negotiations. Israelis welcomed his unambiguous renunciation of all violence, but Abbas' approach was not universally embraced by all Palestinians. Some had lost faith in the Oslo-era paradigm of negotiations as the path to statehood. Abbas' party, Fatah, lost the January 2006 parliamentary elections to Hamas by a slim margin in what was largely a protest vote against Fatah corruption and sclerosis. Hamas formed a new PA government and took power for the first time. Subsequent outside efforts to moderate the organization, such as the February 2007 Mecca accord, which produced a Hamas-Fatah unity government, failed to convince Hamas to renounce violence and terrorism.
THE LONELY REFORMER
Under the Hamas-Fatah unity government, intra-Palestinian tensions mounted over who retained control of the security forces, eventually leading Hamas to go on the offensive in Gaza. After its fighters violently took over the Gaza Strip in June 2007 and ejected the Fatah-dominated PA security forces, Abbas dissolved the national unity government and appointed the PA's long-standing finance minister, Fayyad, an independent and an insider from the West Bank, to form a new PA government. The PA retained control of the West Bank, and Hamas became the de facto authority in Gaza, even though the PA still continues to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of employees there. The PA, severely wounded by Israel during the second intifada and then by Hamas in the 2006 legislative elections, was now placed in the hands of a little-known political independent.
As Arafat's finance minister, Fayyad had won domestic and international acclaim for introducing transparency and accountability to the PA. With Fayyad at the helm, the PA initially set forth an extremely modest reform and development agenda. The goal was to provide basic services and pay the salaries of civil servants in the West Bank and Gaza while encouraging fiscal discipline. The PA's systematic two-year development plan, presented at an international donors' conference for the Palestinian territories held in December 2007 in Paris, called on Israel, the Palestinians, and the international community to work together to create an environment conducive to Palestinian reform. It was, in short, a plan for good governance and improving the investment climate. The international community pledged more than $7.7 billion, although some Arab states have yet to make good on their promises.
In early 2008, Israel and Fayyad's PA government agreed to work to improve living conditions in the West Bank. A new Palestinian effort, encouraged by the United States and Tony Blair, the official envoy of the Quartet (the European Union, the UN, the United States, and Russia), aimed to bring about rapid change and to increase PA control on the ground. Slowly, over the next year, Israel allowed PA forces to deploy and retake control of limited areas, and then increasingly more West Bank towns, using newly trained officers. This approach was also meant to help generate support for the PA and the peace negotiations then under way between President Abbas and then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
The PA also intensified its economic efforts with hundreds of development projects supported by the international community. At the Quartet's prodding, some Israeli physical barriers to movement -- both within the West Bank and between it and Israel -- were eased or removed beginning in the second half of 2008 and then more seriously in 2009, precipitating a much-hoped-for economic boost by allowing trade to flourish. Palestinian forces deployed professionally and effectively, retaking areas that had descended into chaos and militia control. This joint approach was quietly expanded to other parts of the West Bank, with similarly encouraging results. The city of Nablus and its environs, which had been a hotbed of some of the worst intifada violence and terrorism, became increasingly prosperous and safe. Yet Fayyad was and still remains frustrated by Israel's frequent military incursions into Palestinian population centers, which undermine PA credibility and the growing sense that Palestinians are regaining control of their own lives. The Palestinians were indeed beginning to prosper. But without there being a real sense of retaking control, the economic benefit could not translate into political recognition of that change.
A THIRD PATH
In August 2009, strengthened by a cabinet reshuffle, Fayyad adopted a more radical and audacious program. It aimed at nothing short of ending the occupation and achieving statehood within two years. Fayyad enumerated, ministry by ministry, the steps the government would take to prepare the Palestinian territories for that goal.
By announcing an ambitious two-year deadline for statehood, Fayyad reintroduced the timeline that had fallen by the wayside. The Oslo accords had aimed to reach a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 1999; once that deadline lapsed, the Palestinians lost confidence in the idea of independence. The Quartet's 2003 "road map" had set 2005 as the date for Palestinian statehood, although by then, the Palestinians believed it would never happen. By setting his own goal, Fayyad sought to motivate his constituents and signal to Israel that the Palestinians were unhappy with the sense of drift. The year of decision would be 2011.
Fayyad replaced reform and minor technocratic goals with bold, revolutionary aspirations. As he put it in the PA government's August 2009 program, he sought "to complete the process of building institutions of the independent State of Palestine in order to establish a de facto state apparatus within the next two years." The PA pledged to finalize the creation of central and local institutions, upgrade the delivery of government services, and launch infrastructure projects. Fayyad also issued a bold call for self-reliance: "Hard work, coupled with faith in our ability to create new realities on the ground, will clear our path to freedom. Through our strength of will and building on the foundations of our achievements we can end the occupation and establish the independent and sovereign state of Palestine." This marked a dramatic departure both from the old model of armed struggle and from the modest goals Fayyad had articulated just 18 months earlier, which focused on working with Israel to create conditions conducive to reform.
Fayyadism represents, above all, a fundamental attitudinal shift. Its emphasis on self-reliance is a conscious effort to change the role of the Palestinians in their narrative from that of victims to that of agents of their own fate. It is a vision for the future and an implicit critique of the Palestinian national movement's long-standing fixation on the past. It strives to replace cynicism and hopelessness, rampant among Palestinians, who have repeatedly seen their dreams squelched, with reasons for hope. The process itself is transformational: as the situation on the ground improves and the PA delivers increasing economic prosperity and security for the Palestinians and, ultimately, for Israel, the PA will provide a sense of possibility where one has been sorely lacking. Finally, Fayyadism repudiates the use of violence -- a tactic that was long central to Palestinian nationalism and still has widespread resonance in Palestinian society.
This approach has the power to change the way that Israelis regard their Palestinian neighbors. In the past two years, the Israeli security establishment has dramatically shifted its view of Palestinian institutions and capabilities. When Fayyad first embarked on his reforms, most Israeli experts deemed his plans unrealistic. Yet slowly, grudgingly, and with increased respect, key Israelis from the military and intelligence services have recognized that the Palestinians are functioning effectively in the realms of governance, economic development, and, most important to Israel, security.
Since 2007, the West Bank economy has taken off. Official IMF figures place growth in the West Bank at 8.5 percent for 2009, with the first part of 2010 registering over 11 percent growth. Government spending has remained within budgetary targets, and improved tax collection rates have resulted in higher than projected domestic tax revenues. Indeed, in the first half of 2010, tax revenues were 15 percent above budgetary projections. Unemployment, close to 20 percent in 2008, has been reduced by nearly a third. More than 120 schools were built over the past two years, 1,100 miles of road laid, and 900 miles of new water networks established. In the past year alone, 11 new health clinics were built and 30 more were expanded in the West Bank.
To even the casual observer, it is clear that the PA's efforts over the past two years have had a dramatic effect in the West Bank. Ramallah is booming. Hebron, Jenin, Nablus, and other cities that were once no-go areas are now safe and bustling at all hours. Renegade militiamen no longer walk the streets with impunity; they have either been imprisoned, been driven underground, or been granted amnesty as a result of a 2007 deal with Israel. Now, uniformed Palestinian police officers keep the peace, with six battalions recently trained by U.S. forces deployed throughout the West Bank. Such actions were prescribed by the road map, which outlined the path to a two-state solution.
The Palestinian security services under Arafat had become so unwieldy, with more than a dozen competing armed organizations, that a dramatic reform effort was necessary to make them efficient and accountable. Thus, the road map explicitly called on the PA to rebuild and consolidate the Palestinian forces, with U.S. assistance, into three main bodies reporting to a newly empowered interior minister. Providing law and order, dismantling terrorist organizations, and cooperating with Israel were all identified and endorsed by the international community as steps required for real progress toward Palestinian statehood.
Fayyad's goal was to create the necessary conditions so that the Palestinians would be prepared for de facto statehood by 2011. From an economic and institutional standpoint, that goal has already been achieved, at least according to the World Bank. Its most recent monitoring report of Palestinian institutions concluded in September 2010 that "if the PA maintains its current performance in institution-building and delivery of public services, it is well positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future."
Not surprisingly, Fayyad's efforts have generated public support and boosted his job-approval ratings. This is due partly to his tireless approach of taking his campaign to the streets and to areas of the West Bank that other politicians avoid -- a strategy that has generated support among the politically unaffiliated majority, who see the dominant Fatah Party as hopelessly corrupt and Hamas' vision as frighteningly reactionary. Yet Fayyad has not translated this support into any meaningful political organization. He remains genuinely politically independent, with no formal political base or organizational structure. Hence, one of Fayyadism's greatest challenges lies in translating this one-man phenomenon into something more systematic than just the vision Fayyad espouses.
IF YOU BUILD IT, WILL INDEPENDENCE COME?
With such a bold departure from past traditions, it is no surprise that Fayyadism has generated a significant backlash from within the Palestinian polity and even from some supporters of the Palestinian cause abroad. By attempting to build institutions of a state while under occupation, cooperating with the Israelis, and behaving as if Palestine were a state, Fayyad is seen by many as having abandoned the traditional liberation theology of the Palestinian national movement. Moreover, by establishing an alternative basis for legitimacy -- competence and results -- in a society in which legitimacy has traditionally derived from leadership in the armed struggle, Fayyad is asking the public to take a leap of faith. Many fear that in doing so, he is ceding sacred ground to Hamas. It is not yet obvious to many Palestinians that competent institutions will help them achieve statehood.
Fayyad's critics fear that although he has embarked on a noble venture, his approach is naive and potentially politically suicidal. They argue that by focusing on changes on the ground, Fayyad is ignoring the fundamental nature of the occupation, which they say must be addressed at a political level. They fear that however good his intentions, the reformist project will fail because they believe the overwhelming weight of Israel's occupation will never allow the Palestinians to succeed. Improving conditions in the West Bank, they argue, is a palliative remedy that serves Israeli interests by lightening the burden of Israel's military occupation. Yet Fayyad seeks to move away from the zero-sum thinking that suggests that anything that could possibly benefit the Palestinians should be bad for Israel, and vice versa. Instead, he argues that improving the lives and security of Palestinians also serves to build trust and cooperation with the country he seeks as a future Palestine's peaceful neighbor.
A second criticism leveled at Fayyad is that rather than supporting President Abbas in political negotiations, Fayyad is undermining the PA's effort to secure the entirety of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They fear that Fayyad is setting up the PA to accept Phase 2 of the road map, which calls for a Palestinian state with provisional borders, the final disposition of which would be negotiated between the embryonic Palestinian state and Israel. Many Palestinians worry that Israel might then simply recognize Palestine in the 40 percent of the West Bank that currently falls outside of exclusive Israeli jurisdiction. The existential dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians could then be rendered a territorial dispute, leaving Israel with the upper hand. At that point, critics argue, the international community would lose interest and declare the dispute largely resolved, with some territorial claims outstanding. This concern is largely unfounded, however, given that Fayyad has repeatedly and unequivocally argued that Palestine must include the entirety of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, with the 1967 armistice line as its border.
Fayyad's approach also challenges some of the deeply entrenched corruption that remains in Palestinian society. For a small yet influential group of Palestinians, Fayyad's reforms pose a direct threat. By instituting a transparent and accountable salary-payment mechanism in the Finance Ministry during Arafat's rule, Fayyad opened the taps for significantly greater foreign financial support to the Palestinians, but in doing so, he also robbed some of the traditional business elites of the money that allowed them to maintain their patronage networks. As prime minister, Fayyad has resisted relinquishing control over the Finance Ministry, lest it become a source of funding for unauthorized party activity. This has pitted him against some of the Fatah stalwarts, already resentful of Fayyad for his popularity and independence, who are keen to gain access to the PA coffers. So strong are the vested interests of some within Fatah that they would rather see Fayyad fail, and the Palestinian enterprise suffer, than see him succeed and endanger their long-standing economic interests.
Hamas leaders are also opposed to Fayyad, and not only because the PA refuses to grant them a seat in the government so long as Hamas occupies Gaza and refuses to surrender to the PA's monopoly of force. For years, Hamas actually respected Fayyad's willingness to challenge Fatah corruption and quietly backed his clean-government approach. This dovetailed well with Hamas' early efforts to challenge corruption -- at least when they were in the opposition. But now, Fayyad is working to ensure that there is only one security force deployed on the West Bank's streets -- the PA's -- and to prevent all forms of violence. Consequently, Hamas has become an opponent.
The PA security services have been accused of heavy-handedness in their treatment of Hamas in the West Bank. After the death of an incarcerated suspected Hamas member in June 2009, the PA took steps to avoid future similar incidents, such as issuing orders forbidding physical and psychological punishment and disciplining the officers involved in the affair. In September 2009, Fayyad ordered security commanders to halt the mistreatment of prisoners; 43 officers were demoted, jailed, or fired for abusing prisoners. Hamas legislators and human rights researchers confirmed that the PA forces ceased torturing prisoners. Al-Haq, one of the leading Palestinian human rights organizations, wrote to Fayyad in February of last year and noted his "honest approach toward establishing legitimacy and the rule of law." Fayyad's most recent government guidelines contain extensive plans for strengthening the justice system, including building a penal system that "unfailingly respects human rights," upgrading law enforcement capacity, and encouraging civil society to publicly report on the performance of public institutions in relation to human rights.
Fayyad has also been criticized for the lack of effective checks and balances in Palestinian governing institutions. This critique is valid but misplaced. The blame rests not with the Fayyad administration but with the dysfunctional status quo, brought about largely by Hamas' violent takeover of Gaza, in which the PA was violently driven out. Indeed, today a quorum cannot convene for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Nor does there seem to be a great impetus for this to happen, either from Hamas, which enjoys the monopoly it exercises over Gaza, or within Fatah, which only has minority status within the PLC. The Fatah-Hamas stalemate can only be resolved in one of three ways: through true reconciliation, such as by means of the effort sponsored by Egypt over the past few years; through new elections that produce a decisive victory that the other cannot ignore; or by one side's ousting the other and taking control of the territory it currently does not govern.
THE ROAD TO STATEHOOD
Fayyadism aspires to bring the PA to the gates of statehood, but it does not clearly articulate how the Palestinians will then cross that threshold. Ideally, negotiations with Israel will hasten that outcome. Fayyad's focus is on preparing the groundwork so that all obstacles to independence are removed.
However much progress has been made, the Fayyadist experiment could still unravel. The bolt from the blue remains one of the defining hallmarks of the Holy Land, and any number of sudden or undesirable developments could end the Fayyadist experiment. Unanticipated violence, precipitated by dashed political expectations, could reverse many of the gains, just as the eruption of the second intifada did in 2000. Conversely, Fayyadism's success could precipitate violence by renegade Palestinians or Israelis who seek to foil Fayyad's aspirations. His efforts could also be undermined by political developments, such as a radical shakeup that ends the uneasy political marriage between Abbas and his prime minister, a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement that renders Fayyadism a casualty, or Israeli reluctance to cede greater control to the PA. Fayyadism is a bicycle that must either pedal on or fall over from a lack of forward momentum.
The political divide between the physically disconnected West Bank and Gaza also must be bridged if Palestinian statehood is to be realized. Unless Hamas lays down its weapons or relinquishes absolute control of Gaza, a unified Palestinian state is not likely. Israel's attempts to isolate Gaza and squeeze it materially have not produced a popular uprising against Hamas rule, nor will it. Hamas' military lock on Gaza is too strong, despite its lack of real popular support there (polls consistently show Hamas' popularity ratings in Gaza to be between 20 percent and 25 percent). And as the 2009 Operation Cast Lead demonstrated, although Israel is willing to use devastating firepower to weaken Hamas, it is not willing -- nor is Egypt -- to use military force to completely extricate Hamas from Gaza. Instead, a general consensus exists that Palestinian political reconciliation is the only option. Yet Hamas is comfortably entrenched in Gaza, as is the PA in the West Bank, and neither is willing to make the fundamental concessions required for real unity.
The stronger the Fayyad government becomes, and the more it delivers results to the people, the better placed the PA will be to extract concessions from Hamas, especially if the only thing holding up an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is Hamas' political opposition. PA leaders calculate that progress in the negotiations and ultimately a credible peace deal with Israel could be put to a popular referendum, thereby placing Hamas in the unenviable position of becoming the spoiler of Palestinian statehood; Hamas wants to ensure that a deal is not reached so that it will not be placed in that position.
The only other alternative would be a three-state solution -- a Hamas-controlled state in Gaza, a Fatah-controlled state in the West Bank, and Israel sandwiched in between. Indeed, there are some Israelis and even some Palestinians who see merit to such an outcome. Fayyad, however, has categorically rejected three states as an unacceptable solution, arguing that if the political split between the West Bank and Gaza is not resolved, then there cannot be a Palestinian state.
FROM CONFLICT TO COOPERATION
In the meantime, much more can be done -- by the Palestinians, by Israel, and by the international community -- to strengthen the Fayyadist endeavor. For its part, Israel should suspend its ambivalence about Fayyad and recognize that this is a historic opportunity -- he and Abbas are the best Palestinian partners Israel is ever likely to find. This partnership does not require affection, just a businesslike calculation of self-interest.
For a long time, Israelis in the national security establishment dismissed Fayyad as affable but not strong and were therefore reluctant to do anything to help him. Now, they recognize the seriousness and strength of his efforts but are not quite sure how to react. Fayyad has taken steps in the past few years that have made him increasingly suspect in the eyes of Israelis. He has appealed to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to block Israel's membership in the body, waged a campaign to boycott goods produced in Israeli settlements, written letters to members of the European Union urging them not to upgrade the EU's relationship with Israel under the European Neighborhood Policy, and participated in the weekly peaceful demonstrations against the barrier Israel has erected to separate it from the Palestinians.
Israel's concern is understandable, given that Fayyad is asking the Israelis to entrust him with more power. Some of the steps that Fayyad has taken to confront Israel internationally may actually be politically counterproductive, in that they push away some of the very Israelis he seeks to engage. Although he has tried to rectify this by explaining his approach directly to Israeli audiences, his message has not resonated widely in Israel. Those who understand his need to balance domestic political concerns with cooperation with Israel have not been very vocal. But the Israelis should recognize that Fayyad's commitment to nonviolence is unequivocal and that he has taken political and personal risks at home to pursue peaceful reconciliation.
Israel can help Fayyad with security, especially in the West Bank areas in which Palestinians are still prevented from exercising control. Ultimately, for Fayyad to convince the Israelis that a Palestinian state is an asset and not a threat, he will need to demonstrate that the Palestinians can deliver effective security throughout the West Bank and are able to prevent Hamas from taking over. At the moment, the PA is still prevented from operating in vast areas of the West Bank, and the Israel Defense Forces still conduct visible operations in areas that previous agreements gave over to Palestinian control. These incursions, more than any other Israeli action, discredit Fayyad and the PA in the eyes of Palestinians and undermine the motivation of the Palestinian security services. Greater coordination between Israel and the PA could help minimize or eliminate these incursions and allow the Palestinians to expand their operations effectively into West Bank territory today controlled by Israel. This would be consistent with the IDF's recurrent pledge that the more the Palestinians do in terms of security in the West Bank, the less Israel will do.
Second, Israel needs the PA to play a role within "Area C" -- the 60 percent of contiguous West Bank territory still under exclusive Israeli control. PA efforts there are critical for sustainable economic development and for private-sector investment. To date, Palestinian construction and development is forbidden by Israel in 70 percent of Area C, and in the remaining 30 percent, it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain the required permission to build or repair infrastructure.
Israel should allow the PA to implement development projects and access its land and resources. In addition, Israel should reinstate the moratorium on demolishing Palestinian structures that it adopted for five months in 2008 and halt further expropriations of land in these areas. Including Palestinians in planning and zoning in Area C, especially in Palestinian-populated areas, and facilitating access to the Jordan Valley would send a powerful signal that Israel is serious about its commitment to a two-state solution. It is also one of the most important steps Israel can take to allow the Palestinians to create a sense of a state in the making.
All of this will require greater Palestinian operational coordination with Israel to supplement the political negotiations. To date, that coordination has been insufficient. Israel and the PA meet on an ad hoc basis or through third parties. Left to their own devices, Israel and the PA will not likely establish the necessary coordination mechanisms. Thus, the international community needs to make the issues pertaining to Area C and security cooperation part of ongoing high-level negotiations or establish a systematic and ongoing trilateral mechanism to bring together the Palestinian prime minister and the Israeli defense minister, given that the Israeli military still exercises jurisdiction over the occupied territories.
Although the international community has played an important role in providing financial support to the PA, it has not always put its mouth where its money is. The United States, as the overseer of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, has tended to focus its high-level attention on negotiations, while leaving subordinates to do the important work on the ground to support Palestinian state building. Focusing more political attention on the ground-up approach would help strengthen Fayyad's position among Palestinians, encourage Israel to invest more political capital in the state-building effort, and ultimately increase the chances that final-status negotiations will succeed.
Fayyadism alone will not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only an agreement accepted by the Israelis and the Palestinians can do that. But Fayyadism is helping support that effort and preparing the groundwork for peace and Palestinian statehood in a way that negotiations alone or armed struggle never could.
ROBERT M. DANIN is Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He headed the Jerusalem mission of Quartet Representative Tony Blair from April 2008 to June 2010 and served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs from 2005 to 2008 and Director for the Levant and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs at the U.S. National Security Council from 2003 to 2005.
There is another way to empower "Palestine" as an independent nation: Economic empowerment via Fayyad. Read on: JRK
A Third Way to Palestine
Robert Danin
Foreign Affairs (Opinion)
January 1, 2011 - 12:00am
This past September, as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down in Washington to dine with U.S. President Barack Obama, a barely noticed event took place in Ramallah. With little fanfare, the 13th Palestinian Authority (PA) government, headed by Salam Fayyad, issued its one-year countdown to independence. This brief and understated document is likely to prove far more significant for the future of Palestine than the White House dinner and reflects nothing short of a revolutionary new approach to Palestinian statehood.
For nearly a century, "armed struggle" was the dominant leitmotif of the Palestinian nationalist movement. This strategy was supplemented and ostensibly replaced by peace negotiations after the Oslo accords of 1993. The newest approach, adopted by Prime Minister Fayyad, a U.S.-educated former International Monetary Fund (IMF) economist, signifies the rise of a third and highly pragmatic form of Palestinian nationalism. Fayyad's strategy is one of self-reliance and self-empowerment; his focus is on providing good government, economic opportunity, and law and order for the Palestinians -- and security for Israel by extension -- and so removing whatever pretexts may exist for Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian territories. Fayyad's aim is to make the process of institution building transformative for Palestinians, thereby instilling a sense that statehood is inevitable. Elegant in its simplicity and seemingly unassailable in its reasonableness, this third way -- dubbed "Fayyadism" by some Western observers -- has nevertheless precipitated serious opposition. Some Palestinians fear Fayyad is only making life better under Israel's occupation, Israelis accuse him of becoming increasingly confrontational, and a growing number of international democracy advocates blame him for Palestinian political paralysis.
Although Fayyadism is not a replacement for a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has become an indispensible component of any future talks. Improving conditions on the ground and giving people a greater stake in running their own lives demonstrate to Palestinians that the peaceful path pays dividends. Fayyadism empowers Palestinian leaders to convince their constituents that it is worthwhile to make the painful compromises that will be necessary for a genuine settlement to be reached. At the same time, more widespread recognition of Palestinian performance on the ground in the realms of security, economic growth, and administration will instill confidence among Israelis that they can hand over control of the occupied territories to a reliable Palestinian partner. Skeptical Israelis tend to wonder: Is Fayyad a partner or an opponent? The reality is that as a Palestinian nationalist, he is both -- although not an enemy.
Should peace negotiations break down, as they have so often in the past, then the Fayyadist enterprise can provide an important safety net for the Palestinians and the Israelis: it can help prevent a complete breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian relations and a possible cascade into violence, as occurred in 2000, when peace talks broke down and there was nothing else in place to revive them. Such a safety net can help keep hope -- and people -- alive.
THE STRUGGLE WITHOUT
Since 1948, the Palestinian nationalist movement has largely been dominated by the "outsiders" -- Palestinians exiled in the Arab world and beyond. The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo by the Arab states in 1964 as an umbrella organization for the various Palestinian nationalist groups. Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement soon came to dominate the PLO; its primary objective was to reverse the creation of the Jewish state and return Palestinian refugees to the homes they lost in 1948 by means of armed struggle and terrorism. Some of those Palestinians who had taken refuge from Israel in the West Bank and Gaza used those Palestinian territories, then administered by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, to launch guerrilla raids into Israel.
With Israel's lightning victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, the West Bank and Gaza came under Israel's control. Still, the center of Palestinian political gravity remained with the PLO leaders in exile. These "outsiders" tended to be more absolutist in their objectives, given that they had already paid the price of defeat by Israel, whereas the "insiders" -- those Palestinians residing in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem -- struggled to protect their homes and patrimony under Israeli occupation.
Insiders launched the first intifada, or uprising, in late 1987, thereby taking the lead in intra-Palestinian politics. The uprising was initiated by a loose coalition associated with Fatah and other nationalist groups, alongside a new Palestinian organization: Hamas. Founded in Gaza, Hamas emerged as an Islamist alternative to Fatah and the PLO and challenged the PLO's exclusive leadership claims inside the occupied territories. Although the PLO leadership based in Tunisia eventually caught up and secured its political primacy, the center of gravity within Palestinian politics had fundamentally shifted to the insiders.
Their first success was in forcing Jordanian King Hussein to relinquish Jordanian claims to the West Bank. The outsiders and their absolutist approach were further weakened when the PLO backed Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. After the 1993 Oslo accords, the PLO moved toward conciliation and recognized Israel and its right to exist. Israel, in turn, recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. Arafat returned from exile, and the PLO outsiders and insiders were suddenly and uneasily reunited in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas remained largely outside Palestinian politics as an Islamist social movement with a small, and violent, terrorist wing.
The Oslo accords and the self-rule they initiated by creating the PA were meant to end the era of armed struggle and terrorism. Negotiations with Israel and the establishment of Palestinian institutions, so the logic went, would lead to a final peace accord between Israel and the PLO. For a time, it seemed to be working. Israel granted the Palestinians limited control over portions of the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas was weak, and the two sides attempted to negotiate a final settlement to end the conflict. But that hope was short-lived. Rather than serving to build confidence, the post-Oslo period only increased bitterness and mistrust. Palestinians either engaged in or turned a blind eye to terrorism, and incitement to violence continued. Meanwhile, Israel continued to expand the West Bank settlements and failed to carry out previously negotiated troop redeployments from the West Bank.
By the autumn of 2000, the road to peace no longer seemed so clear. The first intifada, in 1987, had been waged largely with stones and Molotov cocktails; the second one, which began in September 2000, relied on higher-tech weapons and, increasingly, suicide terrorist attacks. Palestinian security officers who until then had worked closely with their Israeli counterparts turned their weapons on the Israelis. Israel, in turn, attacked PA institutions and reoccupied some parts of the West Bank from which it had earlier withdrawn. Oslo seemed to be unraveling. Armed struggle, it turned out, had not been abandoned after all; Arafat had simply chosen to harness violence to supplement negotiations.
During the second intifada, the nationalist Fatah camp was outflanked by Hamas' more militant approach and its absolute rejection of Israel. Ultimately, Israel succeeded militarily in bringing the second intifada to a halt, largely by reoccupying the West Bank and then building a separation barrier to keep Palestinians out of Israel. Yet this did not kill the resistance impulse. Its mantle had been largely taken up by Hamas; other religious militant groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad; and radical elements in Fatah, such as the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, all of whom continued to reject the principle of nonviolence, even though by 2003 Israel had severely limited those Palestinians' ability to conduct terrorist attacks.
Arafat died in November 2004; two months later, Abbas was elected as the second PA president. Abbas' victory ushered in a new era, with a clear Palestinian commitment to peaceful negotiations. Israelis welcomed his unambiguous renunciation of all violence, but Abbas' approach was not universally embraced by all Palestinians. Some had lost faith in the Oslo-era paradigm of negotiations as the path to statehood. Abbas' party, Fatah, lost the January 2006 parliamentary elections to Hamas by a slim margin in what was largely a protest vote against Fatah corruption and sclerosis. Hamas formed a new PA government and took power for the first time. Subsequent outside efforts to moderate the organization, such as the February 2007 Mecca accord, which produced a Hamas-Fatah unity government, failed to convince Hamas to renounce violence and terrorism.
THE LONELY REFORMER
Under the Hamas-Fatah unity government, intra-Palestinian tensions mounted over who retained control of the security forces, eventually leading Hamas to go on the offensive in Gaza. After its fighters violently took over the Gaza Strip in June 2007 and ejected the Fatah-dominated PA security forces, Abbas dissolved the national unity government and appointed the PA's long-standing finance minister, Fayyad, an independent and an insider from the West Bank, to form a new PA government. The PA retained control of the West Bank, and Hamas became the de facto authority in Gaza, even though the PA still continues to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of employees there. The PA, severely wounded by Israel during the second intifada and then by Hamas in the 2006 legislative elections, was now placed in the hands of a little-known political independent.
As Arafat's finance minister, Fayyad had won domestic and international acclaim for introducing transparency and accountability to the PA. With Fayyad at the helm, the PA initially set forth an extremely modest reform and development agenda. The goal was to provide basic services and pay the salaries of civil servants in the West Bank and Gaza while encouraging fiscal discipline. The PA's systematic two-year development plan, presented at an international donors' conference for the Palestinian territories held in December 2007 in Paris, called on Israel, the Palestinians, and the international community to work together to create an environment conducive to Palestinian reform. It was, in short, a plan for good governance and improving the investment climate. The international community pledged more than $7.7 billion, although some Arab states have yet to make good on their promises.
In early 2008, Israel and Fayyad's PA government agreed to work to improve living conditions in the West Bank. A new Palestinian effort, encouraged by the United States and Tony Blair, the official envoy of the Quartet (the European Union, the UN, the United States, and Russia), aimed to bring about rapid change and to increase PA control on the ground. Slowly, over the next year, Israel allowed PA forces to deploy and retake control of limited areas, and then increasingly more West Bank towns, using newly trained officers. This approach was also meant to help generate support for the PA and the peace negotiations then under way between President Abbas and then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
The PA also intensified its economic efforts with hundreds of development projects supported by the international community. At the Quartet's prodding, some Israeli physical barriers to movement -- both within the West Bank and between it and Israel -- were eased or removed beginning in the second half of 2008 and then more seriously in 2009, precipitating a much-hoped-for economic boost by allowing trade to flourish. Palestinian forces deployed professionally and effectively, retaking areas that had descended into chaos and militia control. This joint approach was quietly expanded to other parts of the West Bank, with similarly encouraging results. The city of Nablus and its environs, which had been a hotbed of some of the worst intifada violence and terrorism, became increasingly prosperous and safe. Yet Fayyad was and still remains frustrated by Israel's frequent military incursions into Palestinian population centers, which undermine PA credibility and the growing sense that Palestinians are regaining control of their own lives. The Palestinians were indeed beginning to prosper. But without there being a real sense of retaking control, the economic benefit could not translate into political recognition of that change.
A THIRD PATH
In August 2009, strengthened by a cabinet reshuffle, Fayyad adopted a more radical and audacious program. It aimed at nothing short of ending the occupation and achieving statehood within two years. Fayyad enumerated, ministry by ministry, the steps the government would take to prepare the Palestinian territories for that goal.
By announcing an ambitious two-year deadline for statehood, Fayyad reintroduced the timeline that had fallen by the wayside. The Oslo accords had aimed to reach a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 1999; once that deadline lapsed, the Palestinians lost confidence in the idea of independence. The Quartet's 2003 "road map" had set 2005 as the date for Palestinian statehood, although by then, the Palestinians believed it would never happen. By setting his own goal, Fayyad sought to motivate his constituents and signal to Israel that the Palestinians were unhappy with the sense of drift. The year of decision would be 2011.
Fayyad replaced reform and minor technocratic goals with bold, revolutionary aspirations. As he put it in the PA government's August 2009 program, he sought "to complete the process of building institutions of the independent State of Palestine in order to establish a de facto state apparatus within the next two years." The PA pledged to finalize the creation of central and local institutions, upgrade the delivery of government services, and launch infrastructure projects. Fayyad also issued a bold call for self-reliance: "Hard work, coupled with faith in our ability to create new realities on the ground, will clear our path to freedom. Through our strength of will and building on the foundations of our achievements we can end the occupation and establish the independent and sovereign state of Palestine." This marked a dramatic departure both from the old model of armed struggle and from the modest goals Fayyad had articulated just 18 months earlier, which focused on working with Israel to create conditions conducive to reform.
Fayyadism represents, above all, a fundamental attitudinal shift. Its emphasis on self-reliance is a conscious effort to change the role of the Palestinians in their narrative from that of victims to that of agents of their own fate. It is a vision for the future and an implicit critique of the Palestinian national movement's long-standing fixation on the past. It strives to replace cynicism and hopelessness, rampant among Palestinians, who have repeatedly seen their dreams squelched, with reasons for hope. The process itself is transformational: as the situation on the ground improves and the PA delivers increasing economic prosperity and security for the Palestinians and, ultimately, for Israel, the PA will provide a sense of possibility where one has been sorely lacking. Finally, Fayyadism repudiates the use of violence -- a tactic that was long central to Palestinian nationalism and still has widespread resonance in Palestinian society.
This approach has the power to change the way that Israelis regard their Palestinian neighbors. In the past two years, the Israeli security establishment has dramatically shifted its view of Palestinian institutions and capabilities. When Fayyad first embarked on his reforms, most Israeli experts deemed his plans unrealistic. Yet slowly, grudgingly, and with increased respect, key Israelis from the military and intelligence services have recognized that the Palestinians are functioning effectively in the realms of governance, economic development, and, most important to Israel, security.
Since 2007, the West Bank economy has taken off. Official IMF figures place growth in the West Bank at 8.5 percent for 2009, with the first part of 2010 registering over 11 percent growth. Government spending has remained within budgetary targets, and improved tax collection rates have resulted in higher than projected domestic tax revenues. Indeed, in the first half of 2010, tax revenues were 15 percent above budgetary projections. Unemployment, close to 20 percent in 2008, has been reduced by nearly a third. More than 120 schools were built over the past two years, 1,100 miles of road laid, and 900 miles of new water networks established. In the past year alone, 11 new health clinics were built and 30 more were expanded in the West Bank.
To even the casual observer, it is clear that the PA's efforts over the past two years have had a dramatic effect in the West Bank. Ramallah is booming. Hebron, Jenin, Nablus, and other cities that were once no-go areas are now safe and bustling at all hours. Renegade militiamen no longer walk the streets with impunity; they have either been imprisoned, been driven underground, or been granted amnesty as a result of a 2007 deal with Israel. Now, uniformed Palestinian police officers keep the peace, with six battalions recently trained by U.S. forces deployed throughout the West Bank. Such actions were prescribed by the road map, which outlined the path to a two-state solution.
The Palestinian security services under Arafat had become so unwieldy, with more than a dozen competing armed organizations, that a dramatic reform effort was necessary to make them efficient and accountable. Thus, the road map explicitly called on the PA to rebuild and consolidate the Palestinian forces, with U.S. assistance, into three main bodies reporting to a newly empowered interior minister. Providing law and order, dismantling terrorist organizations, and cooperating with Israel were all identified and endorsed by the international community as steps required for real progress toward Palestinian statehood.
Fayyad's goal was to create the necessary conditions so that the Palestinians would be prepared for de facto statehood by 2011. From an economic and institutional standpoint, that goal has already been achieved, at least according to the World Bank. Its most recent monitoring report of Palestinian institutions concluded in September 2010 that "if the PA maintains its current performance in institution-building and delivery of public services, it is well positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future."
Not surprisingly, Fayyad's efforts have generated public support and boosted his job-approval ratings. This is due partly to his tireless approach of taking his campaign to the streets and to areas of the West Bank that other politicians avoid -- a strategy that has generated support among the politically unaffiliated majority, who see the dominant Fatah Party as hopelessly corrupt and Hamas' vision as frighteningly reactionary. Yet Fayyad has not translated this support into any meaningful political organization. He remains genuinely politically independent, with no formal political base or organizational structure. Hence, one of Fayyadism's greatest challenges lies in translating this one-man phenomenon into something more systematic than just the vision Fayyad espouses.
IF YOU BUILD IT, WILL INDEPENDENCE COME?
With such a bold departure from past traditions, it is no surprise that Fayyadism has generated a significant backlash from within the Palestinian polity and even from some supporters of the Palestinian cause abroad. By attempting to build institutions of a state while under occupation, cooperating with the Israelis, and behaving as if Palestine were a state, Fayyad is seen by many as having abandoned the traditional liberation theology of the Palestinian national movement. Moreover, by establishing an alternative basis for legitimacy -- competence and results -- in a society in which legitimacy has traditionally derived from leadership in the armed struggle, Fayyad is asking the public to take a leap of faith. Many fear that in doing so, he is ceding sacred ground to Hamas. It is not yet obvious to many Palestinians that competent institutions will help them achieve statehood.
Fayyad's critics fear that although he has embarked on a noble venture, his approach is naive and potentially politically suicidal. They argue that by focusing on changes on the ground, Fayyad is ignoring the fundamental nature of the occupation, which they say must be addressed at a political level. They fear that however good his intentions, the reformist project will fail because they believe the overwhelming weight of Israel's occupation will never allow the Palestinians to succeed. Improving conditions in the West Bank, they argue, is a palliative remedy that serves Israeli interests by lightening the burden of Israel's military occupation. Yet Fayyad seeks to move away from the zero-sum thinking that suggests that anything that could possibly benefit the Palestinians should be bad for Israel, and vice versa. Instead, he argues that improving the lives and security of Palestinians also serves to build trust and cooperation with the country he seeks as a future Palestine's peaceful neighbor.
A second criticism leveled at Fayyad is that rather than supporting President Abbas in political negotiations, Fayyad is undermining the PA's effort to secure the entirety of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They fear that Fayyad is setting up the PA to accept Phase 2 of the road map, which calls for a Palestinian state with provisional borders, the final disposition of which would be negotiated between the embryonic Palestinian state and Israel. Many Palestinians worry that Israel might then simply recognize Palestine in the 40 percent of the West Bank that currently falls outside of exclusive Israeli jurisdiction. The existential dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians could then be rendered a territorial dispute, leaving Israel with the upper hand. At that point, critics argue, the international community would lose interest and declare the dispute largely resolved, with some territorial claims outstanding. This concern is largely unfounded, however, given that Fayyad has repeatedly and unequivocally argued that Palestine must include the entirety of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, with the 1967 armistice line as its border.
Fayyad's approach also challenges some of the deeply entrenched corruption that remains in Palestinian society. For a small yet influential group of Palestinians, Fayyad's reforms pose a direct threat. By instituting a transparent and accountable salary-payment mechanism in the Finance Ministry during Arafat's rule, Fayyad opened the taps for significantly greater foreign financial support to the Palestinians, but in doing so, he also robbed some of the traditional business elites of the money that allowed them to maintain their patronage networks. As prime minister, Fayyad has resisted relinquishing control over the Finance Ministry, lest it become a source of funding for unauthorized party activity. This has pitted him against some of the Fatah stalwarts, already resentful of Fayyad for his popularity and independence, who are keen to gain access to the PA coffers. So strong are the vested interests of some within Fatah that they would rather see Fayyad fail, and the Palestinian enterprise suffer, than see him succeed and endanger their long-standing economic interests.
Hamas leaders are also opposed to Fayyad, and not only because the PA refuses to grant them a seat in the government so long as Hamas occupies Gaza and refuses to surrender to the PA's monopoly of force. For years, Hamas actually respected Fayyad's willingness to challenge Fatah corruption and quietly backed his clean-government approach. This dovetailed well with Hamas' early efforts to challenge corruption -- at least when they were in the opposition. But now, Fayyad is working to ensure that there is only one security force deployed on the West Bank's streets -- the PA's -- and to prevent all forms of violence. Consequently, Hamas has become an opponent.
The PA security services have been accused of heavy-handedness in their treatment of Hamas in the West Bank. After the death of an incarcerated suspected Hamas member in June 2009, the PA took steps to avoid future similar incidents, such as issuing orders forbidding physical and psychological punishment and disciplining the officers involved in the affair. In September 2009, Fayyad ordered security commanders to halt the mistreatment of prisoners; 43 officers were demoted, jailed, or fired for abusing prisoners. Hamas legislators and human rights researchers confirmed that the PA forces ceased torturing prisoners. Al-Haq, one of the leading Palestinian human rights organizations, wrote to Fayyad in February of last year and noted his "honest approach toward establishing legitimacy and the rule of law." Fayyad's most recent government guidelines contain extensive plans for strengthening the justice system, including building a penal system that "unfailingly respects human rights," upgrading law enforcement capacity, and encouraging civil society to publicly report on the performance of public institutions in relation to human rights.
Fayyad has also been criticized for the lack of effective checks and balances in Palestinian governing institutions. This critique is valid but misplaced. The blame rests not with the Fayyad administration but with the dysfunctional status quo, brought about largely by Hamas' violent takeover of Gaza, in which the PA was violently driven out. Indeed, today a quorum cannot convene for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Nor does there seem to be a great impetus for this to happen, either from Hamas, which enjoys the monopoly it exercises over Gaza, or within Fatah, which only has minority status within the PLC. The Fatah-Hamas stalemate can only be resolved in one of three ways: through true reconciliation, such as by means of the effort sponsored by Egypt over the past few years; through new elections that produce a decisive victory that the other cannot ignore; or by one side's ousting the other and taking control of the territory it currently does not govern.
THE ROAD TO STATEHOOD
Fayyadism aspires to bring the PA to the gates of statehood, but it does not clearly articulate how the Palestinians will then cross that threshold. Ideally, negotiations with Israel will hasten that outcome. Fayyad's focus is on preparing the groundwork so that all obstacles to independence are removed.
However much progress has been made, the Fayyadist experiment could still unravel. The bolt from the blue remains one of the defining hallmarks of the Holy Land, and any number of sudden or undesirable developments could end the Fayyadist experiment. Unanticipated violence, precipitated by dashed political expectations, could reverse many of the gains, just as the eruption of the second intifada did in 2000. Conversely, Fayyadism's success could precipitate violence by renegade Palestinians or Israelis who seek to foil Fayyad's aspirations. His efforts could also be undermined by political developments, such as a radical shakeup that ends the uneasy political marriage between Abbas and his prime minister, a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement that renders Fayyadism a casualty, or Israeli reluctance to cede greater control to the PA. Fayyadism is a bicycle that must either pedal on or fall over from a lack of forward momentum.
The political divide between the physically disconnected West Bank and Gaza also must be bridged if Palestinian statehood is to be realized. Unless Hamas lays down its weapons or relinquishes absolute control of Gaza, a unified Palestinian state is not likely. Israel's attempts to isolate Gaza and squeeze it materially have not produced a popular uprising against Hamas rule, nor will it. Hamas' military lock on Gaza is too strong, despite its lack of real popular support there (polls consistently show Hamas' popularity ratings in Gaza to be between 20 percent and 25 percent). And as the 2009 Operation Cast Lead demonstrated, although Israel is willing to use devastating firepower to weaken Hamas, it is not willing -- nor is Egypt -- to use military force to completely extricate Hamas from Gaza. Instead, a general consensus exists that Palestinian political reconciliation is the only option. Yet Hamas is comfortably entrenched in Gaza, as is the PA in the West Bank, and neither is willing to make the fundamental concessions required for real unity.
The stronger the Fayyad government becomes, and the more it delivers results to the people, the better placed the PA will be to extract concessions from Hamas, especially if the only thing holding up an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is Hamas' political opposition. PA leaders calculate that progress in the negotiations and ultimately a credible peace deal with Israel could be put to a popular referendum, thereby placing Hamas in the unenviable position of becoming the spoiler of Palestinian statehood; Hamas wants to ensure that a deal is not reached so that it will not be placed in that position.
The only other alternative would be a three-state solution -- a Hamas-controlled state in Gaza, a Fatah-controlled state in the West Bank, and Israel sandwiched in between. Indeed, there are some Israelis and even some Palestinians who see merit to such an outcome. Fayyad, however, has categorically rejected three states as an unacceptable solution, arguing that if the political split between the West Bank and Gaza is not resolved, then there cannot be a Palestinian state.
FROM CONFLICT TO COOPERATION
In the meantime, much more can be done -- by the Palestinians, by Israel, and by the international community -- to strengthen the Fayyadist endeavor. For its part, Israel should suspend its ambivalence about Fayyad and recognize that this is a historic opportunity -- he and Abbas are the best Palestinian partners Israel is ever likely to find. This partnership does not require affection, just a businesslike calculation of self-interest.
For a long time, Israelis in the national security establishment dismissed Fayyad as affable but not strong and were therefore reluctant to do anything to help him. Now, they recognize the seriousness and strength of his efforts but are not quite sure how to react. Fayyad has taken steps in the past few years that have made him increasingly suspect in the eyes of Israelis. He has appealed to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to block Israel's membership in the body, waged a campaign to boycott goods produced in Israeli settlements, written letters to members of the European Union urging them not to upgrade the EU's relationship with Israel under the European Neighborhood Policy, and participated in the weekly peaceful demonstrations against the barrier Israel has erected to separate it from the Palestinians.
Israel's concern is understandable, given that Fayyad is asking the Israelis to entrust him with more power. Some of the steps that Fayyad has taken to confront Israel internationally may actually be politically counterproductive, in that they push away some of the very Israelis he seeks to engage. Although he has tried to rectify this by explaining his approach directly to Israeli audiences, his message has not resonated widely in Israel. Those who understand his need to balance domestic political concerns with cooperation with Israel have not been very vocal. But the Israelis should recognize that Fayyad's commitment to nonviolence is unequivocal and that he has taken political and personal risks at home to pursue peaceful reconciliation.
Israel can help Fayyad with security, especially in the West Bank areas in which Palestinians are still prevented from exercising control. Ultimately, for Fayyad to convince the Israelis that a Palestinian state is an asset and not a threat, he will need to demonstrate that the Palestinians can deliver effective security throughout the West Bank and are able to prevent Hamas from taking over. At the moment, the PA is still prevented from operating in vast areas of the West Bank, and the Israel Defense Forces still conduct visible operations in areas that previous agreements gave over to Palestinian control. These incursions, more than any other Israeli action, discredit Fayyad and the PA in the eyes of Palestinians and undermine the motivation of the Palestinian security services. Greater coordination between Israel and the PA could help minimize or eliminate these incursions and allow the Palestinians to expand their operations effectively into West Bank territory today controlled by Israel. This would be consistent with the IDF's recurrent pledge that the more the Palestinians do in terms of security in the West Bank, the less Israel will do.
Second, Israel needs the PA to play a role within "Area C" -- the 60 percent of contiguous West Bank territory still under exclusive Israeli control. PA efforts there are critical for sustainable economic development and for private-sector investment. To date, Palestinian construction and development is forbidden by Israel in 70 percent of Area C, and in the remaining 30 percent, it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain the required permission to build or repair infrastructure.
Israel should allow the PA to implement development projects and access its land and resources. In addition, Israel should reinstate the moratorium on demolishing Palestinian structures that it adopted for five months in 2008 and halt further expropriations of land in these areas. Including Palestinians in planning and zoning in Area C, especially in Palestinian-populated areas, and facilitating access to the Jordan Valley would send a powerful signal that Israel is serious about its commitment to a two-state solution. It is also one of the most important steps Israel can take to allow the Palestinians to create a sense of a state in the making.
All of this will require greater Palestinian operational coordination with Israel to supplement the political negotiations. To date, that coordination has been insufficient. Israel and the PA meet on an ad hoc basis or through third parties. Left to their own devices, Israel and the PA will not likely establish the necessary coordination mechanisms. Thus, the international community needs to make the issues pertaining to Area C and security cooperation part of ongoing high-level negotiations or establish a systematic and ongoing trilateral mechanism to bring together the Palestinian prime minister and the Israeli defense minister, given that the Israeli military still exercises jurisdiction over the occupied territories.
Although the international community has played an important role in providing financial support to the PA, it has not always put its mouth where its money is. The United States, as the overseer of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, has tended to focus its high-level attention on negotiations, while leaving subordinates to do the important work on the ground to support Palestinian state building. Focusing more political attention on the ground-up approach would help strengthen Fayyad's position among Palestinians, encourage Israel to invest more political capital in the state-building effort, and ultimately increase the chances that final-status negotiations will succeed.
Fayyadism alone will not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only an agreement accepted by the Israelis and the Palestinians can do that. But Fayyadism is helping support that effort and preparing the groundwork for peace and Palestinian statehood in a way that negotiations alone or armed struggle never could.
ROBERT M. DANIN is Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He headed the Jerusalem mission of Quartet Representative Tony Blair from April 2008 to June 2010 and served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs from 2005 to 2008 and Director for the Levant and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs at the U.S. National Security Council from 2003 to 2005.
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