From Ramallah: Who wants peace?

Yesterday Tony Blair was named the Quartet’s envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The Israelis say they are happy with this appointment, and so does the PA, but many Palestinians – and everyone whose opinion I trust on the Middle East – are dubious, to say the least. The war in Iraq and Blair’s behavior during the wars in Lebanon and Gaza last summer are two strikes against him, not to mention the perception here and everywhere that, as my Arabic teacher said yesterday, “Blair is Bush’s tail.” Robert Fisk’s reaction to the news is definitely worth reading.

Some people are talking about the events of the last few weeks as presenting a new opportunity for peace. I wish I could agree. What kind of peace would this renewed effort bring?

Last weekend I went to Bethlehem and stayed at Ibdaa’ Cultural Center in the Dheisheh refugee camp nearby. We met with a group of teenagers from the camp who are participating in a blogging program that tries to link Palestinian refugees in different camps to one another and provide teenagers with a means of self-expression. (The same organization also runs a really great English language site about refugees.) Five other PAS students and I sat in on a planning meeting and then had a discussion with the eight teenagers and three young women about my age, who were leading the meeting.

We talked about whether the blogging project could change anything, about the occupation and about peace. These 14 and 15-year-olds are not hopeful about the future of Palestine and have no illusions that their blogs can do anything to help their situation. They don’t believe there will be peace between Israel and Palestine anytime soon, and they cite two reasons: Israel doesn’t want peace, and the rest of the world – particularly the Unites States – doesn’t want peace.

A 15-year-old girl qualified that analysis for us. There are many Israelis who want peace, she said, but the Israeli government doesn’t. Likewise, a boy told us he understood the difference between the American people and the American government. It’s the American government that is to blame for what is happening to his people, he said.

But that argument only goes so far. As convenient as this dichotomy is for promoting goodwill between Palestinians and Americans and Palestinians and Israelis, the sad truth is that to a great extent the American and Israeli governments are representing the wishes of their people.

One of the group’s leaders – an Arab Israeli – argued this point to the students. Israelis want security, she said, and that hardly resembles peace for people in the West Bank and Gaza. Just look at the wall, she said. More occupation means security – the facade of peace – for Israelis, but more violence and suffering for the Palestinians.

I went to a panel yesterday in Jerusalem about the role of the international community in the peace process, and Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Israeli foreign minister, made a similar statement. Israel and Palestine cannot produce an agreement themselves, he said, because the political realities in each of their countries will not allow it. “The Israel that I know – not the Israel of my dreams, but the Israel that I know – has much more in common with Hamas than with the PLO,” he said. Israelis in general, he believes, are not ready to make the concessions that are necessary for peace.

So what would peace here look like, and whose is it to give? For a long time, the peace process here was based on the idea of “land for peace.” Israel would return land to the Palestinians in exchange for “peace” – as though peace was something in the Palestinians’ power to give.

“Peace,” of course, meant that the Palestinian resistance would stop. The resistance to the occupation, then, was expected to end before the occupation itself. Hope as we might, that couldn’t and didn’t happen. But even if it had, would there have been peace? Is peace just an end to Palestinian bombings and Palestinian demonstrations (which, judging by the IDF’s response, Israel also sees as a threat)? Stop complaining about your situation, we seem to say to the Palestinians, and then we can talk about where and how you might live. Stop trying to resist us, and then we will stop oppressing you. That strategy seems neither just nor pragmatic.

There is inherent violence in the occupation, and whenever we talk about peace we have to understand that. The wall and the checkpoints are violent, not only because they are strangling the Palestinian economy and preventing travel to school, work and to visit family, but because they are a constant reminder of humiliation and powerlessness. (One of the leaders of the blogging group told us that she was hospitalized once for depression, which she attributed to the stress of going through three checkpoints a day for four years in order to go to school. Writing, she said, has finally helped her cope.) Real peace requires an end to occupation. What exactly that will look like for the Palestinians and Israelis and what kind of state or states will exist here remains to be seen. But if we say we want peace, we have to want freedom, rights and land for Palestinians.

I’m not sure how sincere America or Israel is in its desire for that kind of peace. For Palestinians, because they are the occupied, peace is ultimately the only means through which they will get their rights. Israelis need peace, too, but it’s harder for the occupier to see this. Israel has other tools at its disposal to get what it wants. The wall and the settlements take land and resources without peace. The checkpoints bring a sense of security without peace. Israel and the United States have the ultimate power over the situation, and that makes it both more necessary and less likely for them to make the concessions that are necessary for peace.

In the meantime, the occupation and the resistance continue. The IDF this week conducted major operations in Gaza and Nablus, against both Fatah and Hamas, in which at least two civilians were killed. (Al Jazeera notes that the Nablus incursion also prevented students from taking their final exams.) These incursions occurred despite strong condemnation from the Palestinian Authority, to which Israel and the U.S. have so eagerly pledged their support.

As Saeb Erekat, the head negotiator for the Palestinians, said at the panel yesterday, “The Middle East is going down the toilet faster than people think.”