By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 8, 2010; A08
Senior Obama administration officials have discussed whether President Obama should propose his own solution to the intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, including in a recent meeting between the president and seven former and current national security advisers, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
But officials, confirming a report Wednesday on the March 24 session by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, said there has been no decision to offer such a plan, either in the coming months or later this year. Officials said a presidential peace plan -- as opposed to "bridging proposals" that would be offered during peace talks between the two sides -- has long been considered an option for Obama. But they said the administration, now locked in tense talks with Israel about making confidence-building overtures to the Palestinians, is focused on arranging indirect talks between the two sides.
Some officials said the notion that Obama could offer his own plan might undercut those nascent efforts, because it could lead to a backlash among Israel's supporters and encourage the Palestinians not to make any concessions to Israel. Israeli officials have long opposed the introduction of an unilateral American plan, while Arab officials have pressed hard for one, saying it is the only way to break the impasse.
Jordan's King Abdullah II, who will visit Washington next week, recently told the Wall Street Journal that he will push Obama to offer his own plan because "tremendous tension" in the region over the failure to resolve the conflict has resulted in a "tinderbox that could go off at any time."
Still, it is notable that Obama would attend a discussion of such a concept with outside advisers. The president had popped into a meeting that national security adviser James L. Jones regularly holds with six of his predecessors at the White House when the subject turned to the Middle East. Brent Scowcroft, a national security adviser to Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush, made the case for an American-designed proposal and was supported by other participants in the room, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton.
Obama, however, did not tip his hand on whether he supported the idea, participants said.
The basic parameters of a peace deal are well known and would probably closely resemble the "Clinton parameters," offered by Clinton 10 years ago in the waning days of his presidency: land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for much of the land taken by Jewish settlements in the West Bank; billions of dollars in compensation to the Palestinians for giving up the right to return to their homes in Israel; an Israeli capital in West Jerusalem and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, with an agreement on oversight of religious sites in the Old City.
Advocates of an American plan say the two parties are incapable of making such concessions themselves; the current Israeli government, for instance, won't halt Jewish construction in East Jerusalem despite intense U.S. pressure. But detractors say such a plan is only a recipe for putting pressure on Israel, while even some supporters caution that the timing must be right -- such as in the midst of viable peace talks -- or else the impact of the gesture might be wasted.
A major stumbling block to any peace plan is that 1.5 million people -- almost 40 percent of the Palestinian population -- live in the Gaza Strip, now controlled by the Hamas militant group, which rejects any peace talks as well as the very existence of Israel. That was not the situation when Clinton offered his proposal, which envisioned a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, joined by highways.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Senior Palestinian leaders — men who once commanded militias — are joining unarmed protest marches against Israeli policies and are being arrested. Goods produced in Israeli settlements have been burned in public demonstrations. The Palestinian prime minister has entered West Bank areas officially off limits to his authority, to plant trees and declare the land part of a future state.
Something is stirring in the West Bank. With both diplomacy and armed struggle out of favor for having failed to end the Israeli occupation, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, joined by the business community, is trying to forge a third way: to rouse popular passions while avoiding violence. The idea, as Fatah struggles to revitalize its leadership, is to build a virtual state and body politic through acts of popular resistance.
“It is all about self-empowerment,” said Hasan Abu-Libdeh, the Palestinian economy minister, referring to a campaign to end the purchase of settlers’ goods and the employment of Palestinians by settlers and their industries. “We want ordinary people to feel like stockholders in the process of building a state.”
The new approach still remains small scale while American-led efforts to revive peace talks are stalled. But street interviews showed that people were aware and supportive of its potential to bring pressure on Israel but dubious about its ultimate effectiveness.
Billboards have sprung up as part of a campaign against buying settlers’ goods, featuring a pointed finger and the slogan “Your conscience, your choice.” The Palestinian Ministry of Communications has just banned the sale of Israeli cellphone cards because Israeli signals are relayed from towers inside settlements. Prime MinisterSalam Fayyad is spending more time out of his business suits and in neglected villages opening projects related to sewage, electricity and education and calling for “sumud,” or steadfastness.
“Steadfastness must be translated from a slogan to acts and facts on the ground,” he told a crowd late last month in a village called Izbet al-Tabib near the city of Qalqilya, an area where Israel’s separation barrier makes access to land extremely difficult for farmers. Before planting trees, Mr. Fayyad told about 1,000 people gathered to hear him, “This is our real project, to establish our presence on our land and keep our people on it.”
Nonviolence has never caught on here, and Israel’s military says the new approach is hardly nonviolent. But the current set of campaigns is trying to incorporate peaceful pressure in limited ways. Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, just visited Bilin, a Palestinian village with a weekly protest march. Next week, Martin Luther King III is scheduled to speak here at a conference on nonviolence.
On Palm Sunday, the Israeli police arrested 15 Palestinians in Bethlehem who were protesting the difficulty of getting to Jerusalem because of a security closing. Abbas Zaki, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization, was arrested, prompting demonstrations the next day. Some Palestinians are also rejecting V.I.P. cards handed out by Israelis allowing them to pass quickly through checkpoints.
Palestinian political analysts say it is too early to assess the prospects of the nonviolent approach. Generally, they say, given the division between Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority here, nothing is likely to change without a political shakeup and unified leadership. Still, they say, popular resistance, combined with institution-building and international appeals, is gaining notice among Palestinians.
“Fatah is living through a crisis of vision,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Jerusalem. “How can they combine being a liberation movement with being a governing party? This is one way. The idea is to awaken national pride and fulfill the people’s anxiety and passion. Of course, Hamas and armed resistance still remain a real option for many.”
Khalil Shikaki, who runs the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, said: “The society is split. The public believes that Israel responds to suffering, not to nonviolent resistance. But there is also not much interest in violence now. Our surveys show support for armed resistance at 47 percent in March. In essence, the public feels trapped between failed diplomacy and failed armed struggle.”
Israeli military authorities have not decided how to react. They allow Mr. Fayyad some activity in the areas officially off limits to him, but on occasion they have torn down what he has built. They reject the term nonviolent for the recent demonstrations because the marches usually include stone-throwing and attempts to damage the separation barrier. Troops have responded with stun grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests. And the military has declared that Bilin will be a closed area every Friday for six months to halt the weekly marches there.
“We respect Salam Fayyad,” one military official said, speaking under the army’s rules of anonymity. “But we don’t want him to engage in incitement. Burning goods is incitement. Destroying the fence is incitement and is not nonviolent. They are walking a thin line.”
One reason a violent uprising remains unlikely for now, Palestinian analysts say, is that in the two years that Mr. Fayyad’s security forces and ministries have been functioning, daily life inside West Bank cities and their surroundings has taken on much greater safety and normality.
The police and the courts are functioning again after the intifada of 2000 that led to many deaths on both sides. Traffic tickets are now routinely handed out. Personal checks, long shunned, are increasingly in use.
Of course, the presence of Israeli forces outside the cities and at checkpoints, the existence of the barrier and continued building inside Israeli settlements send most Palestinians into despair and make them doubt that a sovereign state can be built.
One effort to increase a sense of hope is a new push to ban goods made in the settlements, symbols of occupation. A $2 million project called the Karama National Empowerment Fund, jointly financed by Palestinian businesses and the government, aims to spread the message through ads and public events.
Mr. Abu-Libdeh, the economy minister, said a law was likely to go into effect soon barring the purchase of settlers’ goods, a trade worth at least $200 million a year. Efforts to end Palestinian employment in settlements will not carry penalties, he said, because the government does not offer unemployment insurance and it is unclear whether the 30,000 Palestinians who work in settlements could find new jobs.
Palestinian industrialists have financed the settlers’ goods ban partly because they hope to replace the goods with their own. They do not single out other Israeli goods, which are protected under trade agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.
Mr. Fayyad, the prime minister, a political independent, said his notion was to build the makings of a state by 2011.
“It’s about putting facts on the ground,” he said in an interview. “The occupation is not transitional so we need to make sure our people stick around. If we create services, it gives people a sense of possibility. I feel we are on a path that is very appealing both domestically and internationally. The whole world knows this occupation has to end.”
A young Israeli journalist is scheduled to go on trial in Israel in mid-April on accusations of serious security offenses, possibly including espionage, according to Israelis familiar with the case.
A court-imposed gag order has prevented any reporting of the case in Israel, but on Tuesday, a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge sharply criticized the forced news blackout, saying in a radio interview that it must be fought, and stirring a public furor.
The journalist, Anat Kamm, 23, is accused of having copied Israeli military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinian militants in the West Bank and of leaking them to a reporter. She apparently had access to the documents during her compulsory military service.
Observers have speculated that the recipient was Uri Blau from the liberal Haaretz newspaper, and that he used the documents as the basis for a 2008 exposé.
Ms. Kamm has been held secretly under house arrest for more than three months. After leaving the military, she had been working for Walla!, a Hebrew Web site partly owned by Haaretz.
Constrained by the gag order, the Israeli news media has so far made only cryptic references to the case. On March 9, for example, The Seventh Eye, an electronic journal of media affairs published by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research body in Jerusalem, ran an item saying simply that Ms. Kamm was about to go on unpaid leave from Walla!, without explaining why.
The popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot suggested in its April 1 edition that readers search the Internet with keywords “Israeli journalist gag” in order to learn about an affair of interest to Israelis that could only be reported on abroad. And on Tuesday the same newspaper ran a translation of an article by the American journalist Judith Miller on the case, with all the details that would have violated the gag order literally blacked out.
If Ms. Kamm is found guilty, informed observers said she could face up to 15 years in jail.
The case has already received extensive coverage abroad. Details began to emerge in mid March on a blog called Tikun Olam, or Repairing the World, by an American writer, Richard Silverstein. The New York-based Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the British newspapers Guardian and Independent newspapers and The Associated Press have also written about the affair.
According to The Independent, Mr. Blau, the Haaretz reporter suspected of having used the confidential military documents, is currently “hiding in Britain”.
The article by Mr. Blau at the center of the storm was published in November 2008. It focused on an episode in June 2007 in which two Palestinian militants belonging to the extremist Islamic Jihad group were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. The military said at the time that the two were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces.
However Mr. Blau noted that months before, one of the two militants, Ziad Subhi Muhammad Malaisha, had been marked as a target for assassination by the Israeli army’s Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank.
Mr. Blau’s article suggested that Mr. Malaisha’s killing contravened an Israeli Supreme Court ruling from December 2006 that strictly limited the circumstances in which the military is permitted to carry out preemptive strikes. Haaretz printed copies of Central Command documents stating that Mr. Malaisha and two other Islamic Jihad leaders were eligible targets alongside the report.
Israeli news media were not even allowed to mention that there was a gag order in place, according to Uzi Benziman, the chief editor of The Seventh Eye. But in a Tuesday morning interview with Army Radio, Dalia Dorner, the retired Supreme Court judge who is now the president of the Israeli Press Council said the gag order handed down by a magistrate’s court was “regrettable,” and should be fought all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Ms. Dorner’s comments opened the floodgates to Israeli debate about the imposition of such gag orders, though the court ruling still prevented any discussion of the actual case.
Mordechai Kremnitzer, a law professor at Hebrew University and a senior fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute, said that Israel’s treatment of suspected criminal offenses in the security realm was “draconian.” By isolating the suspect and preventing any public debate, he said, the authorities could more easily pressure the suspect to accept some measure of guilt, arrive at a plea bargain and settle the case “with no noise.”
Mr. Kremnitzer also criticized the ease with which courts in Israel hand out gag orders.
“Only the poor Hebrew readers do not know what is going on,” he said of Israelis unable to read foreign reports about the case in English. “It is an absurd situation,” he said.
The Haaretz newspaper and Israel’s Channel 10 are fighting to lift the gag order. Mibi Moser, the lawyer representing Haaretz, said there would be a court hearing on the matter on April 12, if the gag order was not lifted before.
Mr. Moser is also representing Mr. Blau of Haaretz, though he refused to give any details of that aspect of the case.
Sometimes the prosaic can be breathtaking. I am standing in the new showroom of a company that manufactures plumbing supplies in Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Mansour Izgayer, one of three brothers who own the factory, is giving me a tour of his business and his life. He and his brothers were living in the U.S. when peace seemed to break out in the Middle East after the 1993 Oslo accords. They decided to return home, as did many other members of the Palestinian diaspora. They built their company, Royal Industries & Trading, persistently, even after the prospects for peace shattered in the second intifadeh and it became near impossible to do business in the midst of a war zone, near impossible to move their products through Israeli checkpoints. It still isn't very easy, but the past few years have been much better. A new Palestinian government quietly began to restore order and emphasize economic growth. Israel removed many, but not all, checkpoints. Royal now has 360 employees, new product lines — fireplaces, welcome mats — and a new wing, complete with an assembly hall. It has an on-site mosque and a cafeteria. The Izgayer brothers' story is at the heart of the new optimism and old frustrations that mark the West Bank territory of Palestine. (See TIME's Middle East covers.)
A young woman enters the showroom, walking confidently toward us and smiling. "Very nice to meet you," she says. "I'm new here." She does not shake my hand; she is religious, dressed in a hijab and bulky overcoat. Her name is Samiya abu-Rayyan, and she is a bit of a miracle as well — a graduate of a new program, Education for Employment (EFE), that trains young Palestinians in how to get and keep jobs. She is a graduate of Hebron University, but she was entirely unprepared for the workplace. "I had many interviews, but I didn't know how to introduce myself," she says. EFE taught her everything from how to fill out a job application to how to deal with an angry boss — and how to look someone in the eye and smile, even though that ran counter to the tradition in which she was raised. She learned some business English and marketing as well. After several months of training, she interviewed with a bank and the plumbing company and received offers from both. She chose Royal because the Izgayer brothers offered a religiously conservative working environment and because of the company mosque. (See pictures of 60 years of Israel.)
And here is another odd, but inspiring, thing: Samiya would not have her new skills if it were not for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. On that day, a Jewish American real estate magnate named Ronald Bruder was desperately searching for his daughter, who worked in downtown New York City, near ground zero. His daughter turned up safe, but the shock and panic stirred him. "I started reading and thinking about the Middle East," Bruder told me recently. "And what I came to was this: if people were gainfully employed, maybe they wouldn't be so angry at us." Bruder began to travel the region, asking questions. "It was the Minister of Education in Jordan who told me, 'If you really want to help, what we need is soft skills.' I didn't know what soft skills were," Bruder said. "Now they're my life." In fact, they are the sort of skills that Samiya abu-Rayyan has acquired.
Bruder started EFE's first program in Jordan in 2006, but he quickly expanded to Morocco, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, plus Gaza and the West Bank. EFE's graduates number only in the dozens in the West Bank, but more classes are about to begin in Hebron and Ramallah. "We can expand pretty rapidly," he said, "if there are jobs for the people we graduate."
The West Bank GDP grew at around 8% in 2009, although that was an improvement on practically no economic activity at all. "We started from utter lawlessness, virtual disintegration in 2007," says Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister — an economist who graduated from the University of Texas and spent much of his career at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Palestinian Authority had been sundered by the Hamas coup in Gaza; Fayyad — a technocrat's technocrat — freely admits that governance in the West Bank had long been marked by corruption and ineptitude. "The only way to gain Palestinian statehood," Fayyad says, "was to start building the institutions of a credible state."
The first job was to regain control of the streets, which were in the hands of criminal gangs and radical militias. With the help of U.S. General Keith Dayton, the Palestinians trained five brigades (2,500 troops) of a new national-security force — with two more in the pipeline — and began training local police. "We started with Nablus, the most lawless city," says Fayyad. "Our policy was zero tolerance. Anyone who committed a crime was an outlaw, regardless of party affiliation." It seems to have worked. Nell Derick Debevoise, an American woman who works with an excellent pre- and after-school program in Nablus called Tomorrow's Youth, told me, "When I first got here, you couldn't walk the streets or go to the Old City. Now you can. In fact, there are some good restaurants opening there." (See the top 10 news stories of 2009.)
Security, Fayyad assumed, was one prerequisite of economic development. Another was transparent governance. "We're firing incompetents and thieves in the government. You can't be taken seriously unless you fire people," Fayyad says. As a result, "we're beginning to see some economic growth. Cement consumption is up 30%." Part of the growth has been funded by aid from the U.S., Europe and the Islamic world, which helps pay the salaries of government workers and funds new infrastructure projects. In 2008, Fayyad held a conference in Bethlehem, looking to begin the next phase — private development — and got some takers, including a Palestinian developer named Bashar Masri who is building an entire new city for 50,000 just outside Ramallah. "We could not have done this without Fayyad's reforms," Masri told me. "I mean, you deal with the police or with bureaucrats. They don't ask for a bribe. That never happened in Palestine before."
But the progress is taking place in the context of repression: the West Bank still has many aspects of a low-security prison. Israel controls the borders, the airspace, the water supply and the electricity. As you drive from Ramallah north to Nablus, illegal Israeli settlements and outposts command the tops of many hills — an infestation that most Palestinians, rightly, consider a continuing invasion of their land. Even the most optimistic Palestinians assume that the real Israeli plan is to wait them out, keep building settlements and force as many Palestinians into the diaspora as they can. Benjamin Netanyahu's recent decision to declare sites in the Arab cities of Hebron and Bethlehem Jewish historical landmarks seemed a provocation intended to cause the sort of mass violence that has destroyed the hopes of responsible Palestinians in the past. Fayyad's progress is as fragile as plate glass; the next rock thrown could shatter it. (See TIME's photo-essay "Life in the West Bank Settlements.")
"We are working hard. In fact, we have met every one of the obligations that we were assigned by the road map," says Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, referring to the peace process instituted by George W. Bush. Many Israelis, including members of the Netanyahu government, privately agree that the West Bank Palestinians, who had famously kicked away every good chance for peace they were offered, have finally gotten their act together. There has been no significant violence directed at Israel from the West Bank. Even the Hamas-controlled border with Gaza has been quiet. "On the other hand, what have the Israelis done to meet their road-map obligations?" Abbas continues. "What have they done with regard to stopping illegal settlement on our land?"
That is a very good question. Abbas and Fayyad plan to have all the components of a functioning Palestinian state in place in the West Bank by the summer of 2011. At that point, a different question arises — not just for Israel but for the U.S.: What obstacles are there to recognizing a legitimate state of Palestine? What excuses do we have left?
By Howard Schneider and Samuel Sockol Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, January 1, 2010; A08
JERUSALEM -- The first year in a decade without a suicide bombing, as well as an expanded Palestinian security force, resulted in a decline in the number of Israeli and Palestinian casualties in the occupied West Bank in 2009 -- a contrast to the hundreds of Palestinian lives claimed by last winter's war in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
Data from Israel's Shin Bet security agency and the United Nations showed a sharp drop in casualties in the West Bank, policed by a mix of Israeli security and intelligence agencies, as well as a Palestinian force that, under the control of the Palestinian Authority, has worked more closely with Israel.
According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 27 Palestinians in the West Bank or East Jerusalem died in "conflict-related" clashes with Israelis during the year -- less than half the number in 2008. The agency, which monitors conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, has collected data only since 2005. But OCHA officials said the number of Palestinian fatalities in 2009 is probably the lowest in at least a decade, which included a violent uprising beginning in 2000.
Overall, 15 Israelis died in conflict-related violence in 2009, compared with 36 in 2008, according to the Shin Bet's annual security report.
Five of the deaths involved attacks in or emanating from the West Bank, said the agency, which documented a sharp drop overall in attacks on Israelis. The Shin Bet said there were 636 attacks in the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the year -- a reduction of about 30 percent.
About 90 percent of those attacks involved makeshift firebombs or Molotov cocktails, which typically do not cause injuries. There was a far sharper drop, of about 75 percent, to 35, in the number of West Bank shooting and bomb attacks against Israelis over the year. Of particular note, "no suicide attacks were registered," the Shin Bet reported.
Of the other 10 Israelis killed in conflict-related violence during 2009, nine were felled by militant attacks or friendly fire during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces had left the strip by Jan. 21.
The death toll on the Palestinian side from the operation was far higher. OCHA data attributed 1,355 Palestinian deaths to the three-week operation, launched in response to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel. Israel estimates the figure at 1,166.
More than 566 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel in 2009, a sharp decline from the year before. Most of them were fired during Cast Lead.
About 90 Gazans have since been killed, according to OCHA data.
Gaza remains under an economic embargo and a strict blockade, a point emphasized in recent days when hundreds of international protesters arrived in Egypt hoping to cross into the Mediterranean enclave through the town of Rafah for a planned Gaza Freedom March on Thursday.
Egypt, which typically keeps the Rafah crossing closed, allowed only about 100 members of the group to enter. A gathering of protesters in downtown Cairo was broken up by Egyptian security forces, according to a group member.
Those allowed to enter Gaza joined a rally that was complemented by a gathering of several hundred at the Erez crossing on the Israeli side of the border. There, a crowd of Israeli Arabs and peace activists waved Palestinian flags and criticized the restrictions that prevent the movement of people and goods into and out of the strip.
Sockol, a special correspondent, reported from Erez.
Divide between Gaza and West Bank may affect thinking on an independent state
By Howard Schneider Tuesday, December 15, 2009
JABALYA, GAZA STRIP -- Sami and Tayseer Barakat grew up together in the concrete warrens of this refugee camp in Gaza, but the common thread ends there.
As young adults, Tayseer moved to the West Bank while Sami remained in Gaza. The choices have shaped the brothers' lives, values, prosperity and opportunities, and they have placed the two at very different points in what is now a three-way feud among Israelis and Palestinians.
More than ever before, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank represent opposite poles of a future state of Palestine, each increasingly distinct, adding fresh obstacles to the quest for a two-state solution that envisions Israel and Palestine existing side by side. Gaza has become imbued with a narrow Islamist culture that considers Israel's elimination the ultimate goal; the West Bank, in contrast, has become relatively open and secular, with its government trying to resolve disputes with Israel through politics and diplomacy.
In the process, the two Palestinian territories have grown increasingly antagonistic toward each other.
The notion of a single "Palestine" seems to be receding, for the Barakat brothers and all Palestinians, a process accelerated by Israeli policies that restrict travel into and out of the Gaza Strip and limit its economic growth in a bid to undercut support for the area's ruling Islamist Hamas movement. Gaza and the West Bank are not only run by competing governments but also differ in indicators such as birthrates, population growth, cultural and religious attitudes, and prosperity. What is a two-hour car trip seems like a world away, with travel and other restrictions making it difficult for friends to visit and family members to gather.
Where the West Bank is enjoying renewed economic growth and an emerging sense of possibility, Gaza -- dependent on foreign aid even in the best of times, because of its large refugee population -- has become a place of makeshift jobs, handouts and smuggled goods, still not able or allowed to rebuild after a punishing three-week war with Israel that began last December.
Doubts have deepened about how and whether two places so different can be knit back together. As the different lives being lived by the Barakat brothers suggest, the divergence has a momentum of its own.
In one, an aspiring lot
On a Thursday in the West Bank, men and women gather at Ramallah's Ziryab restaurant for the start of the weekend. They sip beer and smoke in a room decorated with original art and sculpture, much of it made by Tayseer Barakat, the owner and the younger of the Barakat brothers.
There's a new burst of activity in Ramallah, the center of cultural and political life for the West Bank's 2.4 million Palestinians. Construction cranes slice the sky, and bulldozers clear large lots for the next project. There are film festivals and investment companies, new shopping centers and planned communities.
Though the West Bank remains occupied by Israel and suffered years of violence during an intifada, or uprising, this decade, Barakat has seen his horizons gradually open. He arrived here in the mid-1980s after attending art school in Egypt, looking for a livelihood that would leave time to paint and sculpt. After teaching for a few years, he pursued a more independent path, opening a restaurant and redecorating it by hand with a modern and elegant collection of artwork.
Ramallah was the ideal spot. It had a professional class that could afford a night out, returning expatriates who might splurge on a painting and the cultural temperament to let him do what he wanted.
"The situation here -- it is like giving someone an aspirin," said Barakat, 50. "It could change at any time. But compared to Gaza, it is good."
The politics of struggle has been replaced by a more aspirational sensibility. On a recent fall afternoon, Barakat prepared to say goodbye to his son, Odai, 18, who is soon leaving to study at Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus.
It's a routine family passage, but it is profound in the Palestinian context. Tayseer Barakat is among the few Gazans allowed by Israel to shift his legal address to the West Bank -- a change in status that, among other things, means predictable access to the world beyond.
Odai hopes to study film and then return to make his contribution to Palestinian society. It has nothing to do with reconquering land, he said, but reflects an idea taking root in the West Bank -- to help put a bandage on old wounds so they can heal and give rise to something new and durable.
"The first film I'll make will be about the Palestinian cause. I'll tell the story," he said, likening his vision to the movie "Braveheart" and its tale of Scotland's rise alongside England. The Scottish leader William Wallace was not trying to destroy the English, Odai pointed out, but was attempting to carve out a place for his people on land of their own.
In the other, a grim lot
In Gaza, Sami Barakat gave his children strict instructions as an uprising against Israel raged through the first years of the decade: Stay away from protest sites such as the Erez crossing into Israel. On an October day in 2000, that advice came undone. Yousef Barakat, then 13, boarded a bus headed to a rally at Erez. Later that day, a rubber bullet hit him in the head.
He survived but lost sight in his right eye. A plaque displayed in the family's living room, sent to Yousef by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, honors "the blessed intifada, that you enflamed, and gave it your blood, which scents the Palestinian sand."
Yousef, now 22, is studying history at al-Quds University and has no clear sense of what will follow his upcoming graduation. Under the strategy that Israel has employed in Gaza, that lack of opportunity should lead the young man to certain conclusions: reject Hamas, reconcile with the rival government in the West Bank and then with Israel, and see Gaza reopened to the world.
But the incident nine years ago left its mark. If the West Bank branch of the Barakat family views coexistence with Israel as important, the Barakat branch in Gaza is not so sanguine. Although hardly radical and not supportive of violence -- the family members here say they are disenchanted with aspects of Hamas's governance -- the children, in particular, do not envision peace.
"There is no chance to coexist," Yousef said. "Israel does not want peace."
Israel's rules have choked off the economy in Gaza, increasing poverty and despair among its 1.5 million people. In addition, since winning elections two years ago, Hamas has shut down much of the cultural and political life.
The seaside nightspots that began to develop here in the 1980s and 1990s, a more open era, are now limited to ragged tea huts and a handful of hotels and clubs that host international visitors and the well-to-do.
There are no cinemas and little nightlife. Even seemingly nationalist events -- the anniversary of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's death or an annual Palestinian independence day -- are shaped to reflect Hamas's aim of building a "resistance society" hunkered down for a long-haul struggle. That means tough going for anyone trying to build a business.
Sami Barakat, 55, ran a small grocery store near Jabalya before learning the money-changing trade and opening an office. It let him pay the bills and buy a house. But of late, being a money-changer is a losing proposition in an economy with little cash and little commerce with the rest of the world. He now depends on whatever Tayseer Barakat and a brother in the United States can contribute each month.
Nor are things much easier for the one member of the family who sees his future in religion -- what might be considered Gaza's growth industry.
Mohammed Barakat, 23, just graduated from Gaza's Islamic University with a degree in Islamic law and hoped for appointment as an imam at a mosque. He sees himself as a sort of bridge, strict in his observance of Islam's social aspects but against the use of violence against Israel.
But he is not a member of Hamas. As a result, his ideas won't be heard from the pulpit at Friday prayers.
"The problem is that people who rely on their emotions are the majority," he said. "I try to convince them that you should react out of logic. They call me a coward."
Beermaker Draws Crowds to Town of Taybeh But Sees Roadblocks to Progress, Prosperity
By Howard Schneider Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, October 5, 2009
TAYBEH, West Bank, Oct. 4 -- There's more than a bit of Sam Adams in David Khoury, the mayor of this tiny Christian village in the occupied West Bank. Along with being a politician and patriot, he is a brewer, and he sees the craft as a symbol of the Palestinian state he hopes will emerge here one day.
To the usual images of conflict, checkpoints -- and in the case of areas influenced by Islamist groups such as Hamas, an intolerance of alcohol -- Khoury and his family-owned Taybeh brewery have added an Oktoberfest, a weekend of music, dancing, local crafts and free-flowing suds, just to the east of Ramallah and across the valley from nearby Israeli settlements. To the usual lineup of traditional products like olive oil and honey, he has added a lager that has caught on in Japan and been franchised for production in Germany.
"This is the other side of the coin," Khoury said of the two-day festival held this weekend outside his office. "It shows political freedom and democracy. It is resisting occupation by showing that we can grow the economy and build it."
It is a theme that is being heard more often among Palestinian officials and businesspeople these days. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has issued a two-year plan to build the institutions needed for a Palestinian state and has argued that Palestinians should work toward that goal as if Israel were no longer present in the West Bank, rather than wait for an uncertain peace process to change the facts on the ground.
The few thousand people that migrated to Taybeh this weekend might seem a small contribution to that end. But it shows some of the larger dynamics at work in the West Bank, as the small and somewhat off-the-beaten-path village has put its stamp on Palestinian society.
Taybeh is by reputation the only village in the West Bank without a mosque, and its thousand or so year-round residents are dominated by two families, the Khourys and the Khouriehs.
The brewery was started in 1995 by David Khoury and his brother Nadim, who had returned from the United States with his head full of ideas about hops and German beer-purity laws as well as his own recipes. They almost went broke during the intifada that erupted in 2000, and while never directly challenged by Islamist groups, they feared that the enterprise would be pushed to the fringes of Palestinian society.
That has changed. The brewery now turns a profit, the beer is widely available at restaurants in the West Bank and Israel, and the Oktoberfest, now in its fifth year, is helping brand the town as a once-a-year destination.
Along with a handicraft bazaar, falafel stands and plenty of beer taps, the stage acts brought a sense of the West Bank's diversity -- traditional dubka dance groups alongside Palestine rock-rappers CultureShoc and the hip-hop band Ramallah Underground.
"It has been great," said Manar Naber, a handicrafts salesman who said that, beyond the occasional busload of Christian tourists coming to look at the local churches, there was rarely a crowd in Taybeh before the Oktoberfest.
The growing sense of normalcy in the West Bank has been important, Khoury said, though he added it should not be misunderstood.
As a businessman, he notes that his trucks of draft beer still have to travel to a special industrial checkpoint far to the south before crossing into Israel for delivery to restaurants in Jerusalem, turning a half-hour trip into a four-hour excursion.
As a politician, he sees the limits of what Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has done so far in pursuit of what he calls economic peace. Checkpoints and barriers have been removed, people are moving more freely into and around the West Bank, and the economy is picking up as a result. But industrial development, capital projects and private-sector risk-taking remain at a minimum, he said, something also noted by World Bank and other studies which have concluded that the West Bank economy remains heavily dependent on public spending and money from donor nations.
But as a brewer, he has to say that life is good. The Taybeh Brewing Co. sold more than 150,000 gallons last year and has been marketing a nonalcoholic "halal" beer to extend its reach to Muslims.
And just like Sam Adams, he has his eye on Boston. He has children in graduate school in New England, and the hope is to use a family-owned liquor store in the Brookline area as a takeoff point for U.S. distribution.
"It is life, liberty and the pursuit of good beer," Khoury said.
Tense relations between the United States and Israel are having a negative effect on Israeli public opinion.
President Obama (file photo)
A new Jerusalem Post poll shows that only 4 percent of Israeli Jews see U.S. President Barack Obama's policies as pro-Israel. That is a drop of 2 percent from the previous poll in June. The survey found that 51 percent of Israelis see the Obama administration as pro-Palestinian, while 35 percent consider it neutral.
"There's quite a bit of concern and disappointment in President Obama, in the sense that Israel [is] sort of under attack on all of these settlement issues, on Jerusalem," said Israeli analyst Dan Diker. "And I think that many Israelis are saying, 'Well wait a second, where is the friendly U.S. administration that Democratic and Republican administrations have been known to be?'"
President Obama's supporters say he is trying to take a more "even-handed" approach to the Middle East conflict than his predecessors. But his outreach to the Muslim world, and especially his landmark speech in Cairo in June, are seen by many Israelis as an attempt to appease the Arabs at the expense of the Jewish state.
"President Obama has been all over the Middle East, he's been in Turkey, he's been in Saudi Arabia, he's been in Cairo, and giving major speeches, and he has not spoken to or with the Israeli people or really sort of extended his hand as a partner in this entire process," he said.
Israelis had a much more positive view of President George W. Bush. According to a Jerusalem Post poll in May, 88 percent of Israelis considered Mr. Bush's policies to be pro-Israel.
By Howard Schneider Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, August 19, 2009
JERUSALEM, Aug. 18 -- For five months, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been fending off U.S. pressure to halt the expansion of West Bank settlements. Now he is reaping dividends for his defiance.
Although Israeli leaders have historically been reluctant to publicly break with the United States for fear of paying a price in domestic support, polls show that Netanyahu's strategy is working. And that means that after months of diplomacy, the quick breakthrough that President Obama had hoped would restart peace talks has instead turned into a familiar stalemate.
Arab states largely have rebuffed Obama's request for an overture to Israel until the settlement issue is resolved -- a stand that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak emphasized in a meeting with Obama on Tuesday -- and the Palestinians have said a settlement freeze is a precondition for resuming negotiations. Meanwhile, the Israeli public seems to have rallied around Netanyahu's refusal to halt all settlement construction, a backlash that intensified when the Obama administration made clear that it wanted Israel to stop building Jewish homes in some parts of Jerusalem as well as in the occupied West Bank.
In Israel, the dynamic seems to have shifted further from any dramatic concessions. Netanyahu "scored points" for standing up to Obama, said Yoel Hasson, a member of parliament from the opposition Kadima party. In contrast to the United States' public demands for a settlement freeze, signaled early in the relationship between the two new governments, "I think the U.S. understands that it is better for them to do everything with Netanyahu more quietly," Hasson said.
Noting that the Palestinians had negotiated with Israel until late last year despite ongoing construction in the West Bank, Dan Meridor, Israel's intelligence minister, said he found it "strange" that the issue became a precondition for talks after the White House made public demands on Israel.
"I don't think it was intentional, but the result is that this became an obstacle for restarting negotiations," Meridor said in an interview.
The most recent War and Peace Index poll, conducted monthly by Tel Aviv University, showed overwhelming support for Netanyahu's decision to oppose the White House on settlement construction and particularly on building in East Jerusalem. In recent weeks, organizations that favor building houses for Jews in all parts of Jerusalem and the West Bank have steadily become more vocal.
Four members of Netanyahu's cabinet visited unauthorized Jewish outposts in the West Bank on Monday as a show of support, with Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon, considered part of the prime minister's inner circle, saying that a reduction of Israel's presence in the West Bank would "bolster terror."
Ateret Cohanim, an organization active in promoting Jewish construction in Jerusalem's contested neighborhoods, this week hosted former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on a tour of projects -- including a cocktail party at the site of a proposed Jerusalem apartment complex that the Obama administration has singled out for criticism. Huckabee said the trip was arranged in recent weeks as part of a developing response to Obama's demands on Israel.
Members of Congress praised Netanyahu's first months in office on a recent tour of Israel, and even Obama allies such as House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) suggested that the onus was on the Palestinians to open talks with or without a settlement freeze.
"There have been some very positive things that have happened under Netanyahu, and I think that [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas ought to take the opportunity to engage," Hoyer said in an interview last week with the Jerusalem Post while on a trip sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group. Despite the administration's concern that construction of Jewish housing in East Jerusalem neighborhoods could prejudge the future boundaries of a city that both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital, Hoyer said Jerusalem "is a whole," adding: "My view is that it will remain whole."
"From the point of view of Israeli public opinion, so far Netanyahu has maneuvered quite successfully," said Tel Aviv University professor Ephraim Yaar. His surveys have showed support for Netanyahu in his clash with Obama and distrust of the U.S. president. In his July poll of 512 Israelis, 60 percent said they did not trust Obama "to safeguard Israel's interests," and 46 percent said he favors the Palestinians, compared with 7 percent who think he favors Israel. The poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
In a June speech, Netanyahu endorsed for the first time the idea of a limited Palestinian state, a position crafted as a response to Obama's call in Cairo for renewed peace efforts in the region.
But so far he has largely pursued the path spelled out when he took office in March -- gradual steps to ease the Israeli military presence in the West Bank, a lifting of some roadblocks and a focus on improving the West Bank economy. He has said he is prepared to resume peace talks with the Palestinians "without preconditions," but he has made clear that he is hesitant to make major concessions while the Gaza Strip remains in the hands of the Islamist Hamas group and while uncertainty persists over Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Israel agreed to a freeze on settlement construction as part of the "road map" agreement signed in 2003. Since then the Jewish population in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, has increased from about 224,000 to about 290,000. The Palestinians and Arab states in the region regard a settlement freeze as a critical step -- an acknowledgment that the Palestinian Authority has improved security in the West Bank, as required under the agreement, and a sign that Israel is serious about allowing the area to become part of a Palestinian state.
On Tuesday, Israeli government officials and anti-settlement activists confirmed that no new bids for government construction had been issued for the West Bank since November -- predating Netanyahu's election by several months. But anti-settlement group Peace Now said government-backed construction accounts for less than half the Jewish building in the West Bank. About 1,000 houses and apartments remain under construction, and there is a backlog of approved projects, the group said.
Opposing Obama's demand for a settlement freeze carried some risk. Israelis generally expect their leaders to maintain good relations with the United States and have punished prime ministers who do not do so -- including Netanyahu during his first term, in the late 1990s, when he clashed with President Bill Clinton.
The two sides are still expected to reach some kind of compromise on the issue, though short of the initial demands made by the White House. Netanyahu is meeting U.S. special envoy George J. Mitchell in London this month, and he expects to meet with Obama when he visits the United States for a U.N. General Assembly meeting in September. Discussion has centered on freezing settlement activity for six months to a year.
Israel's leader is coming under growing pressure from hardliners in his coalition to reject American demands for a halt to settlement expansion.
Jewish settlers and Ultra Orthodox Jewish men pray to support Israeli settlements in the West Bank (File)
A delegation of four hawkish Israeli Cabinet ministers toured controversial settlement outposts in the West Bank Monday in solidarity with Jewish residents there.
It was a direct challenge to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has vowed to dismantle about two dozen outposts in response to pressure from the United States. Washington has demanded a complete freeze on settlement expansion, saying Israel is creating facts on the ground on territory the Palestinians seek for a future state.
There are about 100 outposts in the West Bank, most of them consisting of makeshift structures and trailer homes. Residents are young, religious settlers, who seek to expand the Jewish presence in all the biblical Land of Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu has declared the outposts illegal, but the Cabinet delegation denied that, saying they are legitimate because previous Israeli governments had approved them.
Cabinet Minister Yuli Edelstein of Mr. Netanyahu's Likud party noted that Israel just marked the fourth anniversary of the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, where 21 Jewish settlements were dismantled and 8,000 settlers evacuated. He said there should be no further evacuations because, when Israel pulled out, the Islamic militant group Hamas took over.
"We removed all the settlements out of the Gaza Strip. We have a terrorist entity there, shooting rockets at the Israeli civilians. The whole area is insecure," Edelstein said.
While Mr. Netanyahu supports the settlements ideologically, he is prepared for concessions because he wants to heal a growing rift with Washington. Edelstein is hoping that Israel and the U.S. can find common ground.
"There are misunderstandings, there are disagreements on certain issues; and at the same time, we always have to keep in mind that it's still possible to bridge the gaps," said Edelstein.
But bridging the gaps won't be easy as long as Mr. Netanyahu's nationalist coalition partners try to tie his hands and prevent any significant action against the settlements.
By Howard Schneider Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, July 31, 2009
BURQA, West Bank -- It has been nearly a decade since the Jewish settlement of Migron appeared on the hilltop opposite this Palestinian village, beginning with a communications tower and followed by a cluster of homes and a fence around approximately 90 acres of land.
Data tucked onto the hard drive of anti-settlement activist Dror Etkes's computer indicates that the land belongs to the residents of Burqa and nearby Deir Dibwan, and Etkes said he expects that information will one day force the settlers to leave.
The compulsion won't come from Israel's politicians, world public opinion or the Obama administration, Etkes contends, but from Israel's Supreme Court, where local advocacy groups are having increased success challenging settlements with simple property claims.
Etkes, the 42-year-old coordinator of settlement issues for the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, has helped instigate a number of lawsuits through the pioneering use of mapping software to establish where settlements have encroached on private Palestinian land. "You have to create a tsunami that will expose the dimensions" of the problem, he said.
The debate over the status of West Bank settlements has been underway for more than three decades -- with the United States and many other countries regarding them as the improper actions of an occupying power, Israel claiming they are legitimate uses of land it is responsible for administering, and the Palestinians regarding them as an effort to undermine creation of a state of their own. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and about 290,000 Israelis now live in roughly 120 government-sanctioned settlements, as well as several dozen unauthorized ones. Those figures exclude Jewish areas in East Jerusalem.
The enclaves run from small clusters of homes, such as Migron, where some residents feel they are fulfilling a religious call to reclaim the land of Israel, to city-size developments with tens of thousands of residents drawn by cheaper prices and room for growing families.
But even as the international debate has proceeded with no clear resolution -- the dispute between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is the latest in a long series of disagreements between their countries over the issue -- a quiet revolution has taken place among Israeli groups opposed to the settlements.
Limited in the past to political advocacy and efforts to court international opinion, they now have access to a deeply layered database on West Bank land that Etkes assembled over three years. Multiple sets of information can be compared -- official Israeli maps; Palestinian, Jordanian and British records rendered in digital form; hundreds of Global Positioning System images; and aerial photos supplemented by field observations.
The Israeli courts honor the property rights of Palestinians and are beginning to pressure the government to block construction or make plans to remove houses built on private property. Proving landownership in the West Bank is not always easy, though, with a hodgepodge of records and rules that include formal land registrations, conventions that extend property rights to those who traditionally cultivate an area and Israeli government property seizures.
Still, Etkes's data are having an effect. Prodded by litigation, the Israeli government is laying plans now to move the Migron settlers to another part of the West Bank. And building at the settlement of Ofra has been restricted because it is on private land, according to Michael Sfard, the lawyer who has filed most of the lawsuits.
"It's a different universe," Sfard said. "If we had had these tools 40 years ago, I think the landscape would be different." Yesh Din has about 20 cases pending in the courts, and Etkes said "dozens" more are yet to be filed. The change has been noted by the Netanyahu government and others, who say the groups are funded by foreign governments and other outside sources and who have promised more aggressive rebuttals.
But Yesh Din's strategy of relying on the Israeli courts raises some deeper issues, akin to the debates in the United States about the role of the judiciary in molding policy, said Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University, who tracks the funding and relationships among nongovernmental groups.
"There is already a debate that the court is run by a small group of like-minded people that are outside the political process," Steinberg said. "As a result of this, it will increase." Judges are chosen by a nine-member committee that includes three justices, members of the Israeli bar, cabinet members and members of the parliament.
That debate, Etkes said, is the type of issue he hopes his work will raise. There is little chance, he added, that litigation alone will stop the expansion of settlements. But he said he hopes it will make Israelis confront the degree to which the settlements have encroached on private property and make the government enforce the law.
"We're asking questions about what Israel wants to be when it grows up," said Etkes, a former tour guide who said that he was raised in a religious family that supported the settlements and that he spent summers picking fruit in some of the same communities he is now opposing in court. "You talk about the rule of law and say that is your ethos. The main point is: Who controls the West Bank -- the state or the settlers?"
Enforcement of the rules can be slow, with Israeli authorities saying they prefer even years-long negotiations to risking the kind of violence that flared this month when settlers set fire to Palestinian fields and pelted cars with rocks after the removal of a small outpost.
Across the valley in Migron, training-wheel bikes scattered in driveways speak to a community that is nestled and comfortable, despite the large metal security gate and the guard at the entrance.
Itai Harel was one of the first to move to Migron. He said there was no sense of taking land that belonged to anyone else, only of improving barren hills "where our prophets walked and where the Bible was written." In responding to the litigation, Migron residents contended that their homes were built on land that had been abandoned and was under Israeli state control, and that they were abiding by government policy that supported Jewish settlement in the area.
If the larger area that was fenced in around Migron included private fields -- Harel acknowledged that some wheat and barley fields had been maintained in the area -- then compensation should be discussed, he said.
According to Etkes, all of Migron is in a part of the West Bank where private land registration was completed before the 1967 war and ownership was well established. He has become a familiar figure to the settlers, trolling the West Bank in a dusty four-wheel-drive vehicle looking for signs of new roads or outposts.
"They found a genius strategy: go to the Supreme Court, where everybody thinks like them," Harel said of Etkes and groups such as Yesh Din and Peace Now.
"Why should we leave here? If we leave, it is acknowledging it is occupied land," rather than Israel, said Harel, 35, who is raising four children here.
Across the valley, Mohammed Barakat, the Palestinian village treasurer of Burqa, said the wheat and barley fields mentioned by Harel may well have been his: Those were the crops grown on his 10 acres before the fence went up around the place in 2001. The loss has meant a few thousand dollars a year out of his pocket ever since.
"It's paralyzing," Barakat said of the settlements and the road, built for their use, that encircle Burqa. "It's like living in a refugee camp."
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