Alastair Macdonald

Want to know how it feels to be George Mitchell, President Obama's special envoy to the Middle East? Try getting from Jerusalem to Ramallah on a typical weekday at the rush hour. And experience stalemate, frustration, competitive selfishness, blind fury and an absence of movement that even the most stubborn and blinkered of West Bank bus drivers might see as a metaphor for the peace process that is going nowhere fast right now.

It took me 2 full hours to drive the 100 metres (yards) or so from the Israeli military checkpoint in the West Bank barrier around Jerusalem to reach the relatively open main street through Qalandiya refugee camp, the gateway to Ramallah. The reason? Well, at its simplest it's traffic chaos caused by anarchy, a vacuum of law and order. Look further, as with much else in the Middle East, and you get a conflicting and contrasting range of explanations.

Traffic coming through the Israeli checkpoint must merge with that arriving on a main road that follows the West Bank barrier on the Palestinian side. Just beyond the checkpoint, where these two flows merge, they must also cross with traffic going in the opposite direction, from Ramallah, either into the checkpoint or along the barrier. The snag? No traffic lights, no traffic police, no nothing (barely smooth tarmac and certainly no painted junction lines) at the crossroads. The result? Check out the picture above.

Why does it happen? For many Palestinians, the cause as in so many other respects is Israel. Take away the checkpoint and the Jewish settlements protected by further military posts and traffic would circulate much more easily. For Israelis, the checkpoints, barrier and so on are the result of Palestinian violence during the Intifada of the first part of this decade. Bad traffic is the price ordinary Palestinians are paying. Dig further, and each side will come up with a long line of causes and counter-causes going back many decades, if not millennia. Stuck in a jam at Qalandiya checkpoint, you have time to muse on all of them, believe me.

There are a few nuances. Palestinians point out that the violence of the Intifada has died away. But Israelis note that a security guard was wounded in a stabbing at Qalandiya only on Sunday.  As I sat imprisoned in a car on Monday, boys aged 14 or less took advantage of the inability of Israeli jeeps to drive out and grab them to lob stones into the checkpoint.  Palestinians complain that Israeli troops have authority over the roads around the checkpoint under the Olso accords of the 1990s, but in fact show little or no interest in managing traffic beyond the confines of the checkpoints search bays. Palestinians argue that they manage traffic pretty well in Ramallah itself. A minor economic upswing in the past few months in the West Bank, grudgingly attributed at least in part to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policy of easing security roadblocks, seems to have contributed to bringing more cars onto the roads. Traffic lights and traffic cops keep reasonable order in the Palestinian cities. But out in the no man's land close to the Israeli barrier, they are not allowed to operate.

What else can you learn sitting tight for a couple of hours breathing other people's exhaust fumes? 1. Yasser Arafat is still popular, as attested to by some nifty graffiti art on the wall itself. 2. It's an ill wind that blows no good in the Middle East - enterprising young men were hawking gum, cigarettes and sunglasses with rather more success than usual to the stranded motorists. 3. Brutally selfish pig-headedness seems to pay, after a fashion, in these parts. The guys with the baddest attitude and least regard for their fellow man or woman, seem to get to the front of the queue, and no one seems able to stop them.

That's a pretty sad lesson to take away, but one that Mr Mitchell may be becoming familiar with as he struggles to coax anything looking like compromise from any of his interlocutors. However, if one can find any positives, perhaps it is this. I did eventually get across the crossroads, even if it did take a big chunk of my afternoon. And I did so quicker than I might have done if total anarchy had prevailed. For, in time, at least, in this small, ugly, scarred spot of the Middle East, ordinary people did come to the rescue. Groups of men from the refugee camp, with no obvious authority but the odd chequered headscarf, leather jacket or a don't-mess-with-me moustache, started directing the traffic, blocking everything from cheeky Suzukis to belching 16-wheelers with their bodies and forcing apart the gridlocked mess to start the process of clearing the backlog. A few thousand years after Moses and the Red Sea, another miracle in the Middle East. Mr Mitchell may have to hope for one. But at least the good folk of Qalandiya camp showed that, just maybe, such things really can happen around here.

I wouldn't bet on it. But thanks anyway, guys.

We'd be far too modest to claim to have made peace in the Middle East, but...

It's been a lively week down at the Dead Sea, a short drive downhill from the Reuters bureaux in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Our colleagues Douglas Hamilton and Ali Sawafta do appear to have played some small part in shifting some political roadblocks that threatened to thwart plans to get the lowest place on earth voted in as one of the seven wonders of the natural world.

Back in March, Douglas reported how political tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, which share the coastline of the famously salty lake, threatened to wreck its entry to the online poll to choose the Seven Wonders of nature. With a deadline looming, our team checked again this week and found that Palestinian objections to dealing with Jewish settlers on the West Bank stretch of the Dead Sea shoreline were indeed about to bin the bid.

The good news, though, is that our story was widely picked up in local media, which also voiced disappointment at the outcome - enough it seems to change some minds, as we finally were able to report yesterday.

If you want to go further and cast a ballot, you might want to visit the site here.

Of course, it's not all good news in this part of the world. Take a look at some other stories we've been covering at and around the Dead Sea in just the past couple of weeks:

The sewage pollution of the Jordan river, which flows into the lake from the Sea of Galilee.

Plans for a canal to bring water to the Dead Sea from the Red Sea, that have caused controversy. (The World Bank had to deny a report this week that it had agreed to finance part of a such project.)

Trouble between Israeli troops and Bedouin Arabs living in the Jordan valley.

Controversy over Israel declaring land by the Dead Sea available for settlement.

And finally, the easing of Israeli military checkpoint controls at Jericho, the Palestinian city just north of the Dead Sea, which claims to be "The World's Oldest".

For me, the hot, dry evenings of June in Jerusalem and the hills around it have become associated with nocturnal discovery in search of musical gems. It is the time of the Sounding Jerusalem Festival, weeks of nightly concerts featuring some of the best in European classical chamber music. The programme's highlights for me are eclectic improvisations between the visiting Europeans and Israeli and Palestinian players, creating both tension and novelty in exploring the similarities, common roots and differences between Western and oriental instruments and traditions.

The tensions are not just musical, but, in Jerusalem of course, can turn political, in a way the young Austrian cellist who founded the event four years ago seems to relish.

In the story I filed today, I quoted Erich Oskar Huetter as saying he wanted to "break down walls", by which he was talking metaphorically about the music and of the divides between the people of the city he has grown to love. It's far from easy. Israelis are banned by their government from travelling to some areas of the West Bank where concerts have been held. Even if they weren't, few would dare travel there in a climate of mutual fear and antagonism that last winter's Gaza war has only heightened. Likewise, Palestinians from the West Bank are mostly prevented from crossing boundaries into Jerusalem and Israel, boundaries marked out in part by the very real wall Israel has built around the city against the threat of suicide bombers and other attacks.  The result, audiences for the concerts are very rarely mixed.

One of the distinguished European soloists who have been drawn to Jerusalem by Huetter describes the 35-year-old, in French, as un fou utopique, a "crazy utopian" perhaps.  Whatever optimistic designs he may harbour about bringing Israelis and Palestinians together in the divided city, however, he strikes me as having a fairly realistic, modest goal. He's not expecting everyone to hold hands, listen to the music and forget about the troubles around them. But at least the audiences, he says, however different they may be from each other, understand that they are participating in a month-long phenomenon that stretches across the divide.  They form, he says, a single Sounding Jerusalem community in a place where the word community is most usually expressed in the plural.

And when cultures do clash, and voices are raised, Huetter seems just as happy.  He wants, he says, while setting the highest of musical standards, to generate reactions, shared human experiences, that also promote reflection on the environment in which the works are played.

It can just be fun, too. The locations of the festival surprise even long-time residents of the city and its environs. Who knew there was a mediaeval Arab castle in that village near Ramallah? I had also never seen the courtyard pictured above in the village of Ein Kerem, in Israel, which is part of a Christian-run care facility for disabled children. Nor did I know quite what lurked on the rooftops of the Old City until invited up for last year's spectacular festival finale (left). Featuring dozens of young Middle Eastern and European brass players scattered across Jerusalem, the spectacular will be reprised for the end of this year's festival on Sunday.

Listen out for more reactions.

PICTURES: Sounding Jerusalem/Christian Langwirth

A quiet weekend in the country is often not quite that in this part of the Middle East.  A couple of days in the northern Golan Heights left me with plenty to reflect on, about land and people, borders and sovereignty, war and peace.

The picture on the left shows, in the middle, the southern end of the Shebaa Farms, the few square miles at the centre of possibly the knottiest territorial dispute in a region with no shortage of same.  Is it Lebanese? Or Syrian? In any case it is occupied by Israel. All three countries converge here, while neither Lebanon nor Syria recognise Israel, seeing instead Palestine across their border. In the foreground of the picture, taken from near the 13th-century Crusader-era Nimrod Castle, lie the Golan Heights, Syrian territory seized by Israel in 1967 and held in another war six years later. In the distance, lie the Hezbollah strongholds that saw heavy fighting in the 2006 war with Israel.

At a time when there is renewed, if desultory, talk of talks between Israel and its northern neighbours, my colleague Alistair Lyon's reporting from Shebaa and the Golan last summer is worthwhile reading. For a technical reflection on what's at stake in the apparently insignificant Shebaa Farms, Asher Kaufman's essay from before the war in the Palestine Israel Journal is thought provoking. We might blame shoddy French colonial map-making back in the 1920s, when Paris and London were carving up the collapsed Ottoman empire after World War One. Though plenty has happened since then to complicate it further.

On a weekend trip to the southern slopes of Mount Hermon, I visited Druze villages where locals still consider themselves Syrian citizens and refuse to accept Israel's occupation and, later, annexation of the Golan. Among other visitors was a party of Palestinians from Jerusalem and the West Bank, curious about this other part of Israeli-occupied territory and about its inhabitants, members of the religious community that is an offshoot of Islam and is scattered across Israel, Lebanon and Syria.  Both Druze and Palestinians were keen to assert their common Arab culture, and rue the border-drawing governments that have divided and re-divided the land of the Middle East over the past century.

On the edge of the village of Majdal Shams, amid minefields lining the border, is the "Shouting Fence", where families divided by the sealed border once exchanged news, and marriage proposals, by loudhailer. Thank the Internet and advances in international telephony for making that less common now. For all their rejection of Israel, however, most of the signs over shops and restaurants lining Majdal Shams's main street are in Hebrew. Israeli tourists heading for the nearby ski slopes and mountain walking trails are by far the biggest drivers of a prosperous looking local economy.

Aside from exquisite fresh cherries, just in season, and rich cuisine with its own variations on Middle Eastern standards, the Golan offers a study in history. One stop on the tour is Mount Bental, where an Israeli trench and bunker system, complete with tank turrets buried in the earth, is now open to tourists. They can look down to the east on the UN peacekeeping forces camp and the site of the town of Quneitra, destroyed in the wars. A short drive away, lies Nimrod Castle, its impressive stone towers dominating the western side of the Golan plateau as it has done for 800 years. It was originally built by rulers in Damascus to defend against attackers from Jerusalem. 

So, the political faultlines that lie in and around the Golan are not new. Nonetheless, for many of the people living on the various sides of the various borders, with little chance of crossing them, there is a common irritation with their modern incarnation. Recalling Arab anger with the Sykes-Picot Agreement struck secretly by France and Britain during World War One which divided the region into spheres of influence, one Palestinian visitor declared, with not altogether intended irony: "This is a land without borders. Originally."

(PICTURE: Alastair Macdonald)

Not the best day at the office yesterday for Benjamin Netanyahu. For a man with one finger on the button of Israel's presumed nuclear deterrent and the other wagging warningly at Iran, there are better ways to inspire confidence than getting your buttons mixed up in public.

That's what happened to the prime minister, though, prompting this awkward explanation in the Knesset of why he had cast the only electronic vote against a parliamentary bill proposed by his own government.

On a day when his main ally, President Obama, was lecturing him again about West Bank settlements, local media said Netanyahu, just two months into the job, "may have been tired".

Buttons that could be used to launch rockets from Gaza, southern Lebanon and Iran are a central security concern to Israel's government and its allies.

The Israeli public lives with constant reminders of the buttons all around- not least with a full-scale nationwide civil emergency drill underway this week.

And inevitably the concern has seeped into Israeli culture. A few years back Israel's Eurovision Song Contest entry was this lively number 'Push the Button' from Sderot-based rockers Tipex. Sderot is the southern Israeli town that has borne the brunt of rocket attacks from Gaza. Take it away Tipex.

You can read more about Israel's presumed nuclear arsenal here. And here. Just make sure you press the right button...

There are a good many differences between Stalin's Moscow of 1945 and the green hills of the West Bank 64 years later. But that hasn't stopped an ambitious group of theatre people and enthusiastic Palestinian students from finding plenty of relevance in George Orwell's scathing allegory of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, Animal Farm.

I was impressed by their craft and also the big ideas that lie behind the production by the newly established Theatre School at the Freedom Theatre in the long troubled refugee camp at Jenin.

You can learn more about the theatre project here and read our story on the staging of Animal Farm by the young actors, at least one of whom says he is waging a "cultural Intifada" after spending years on the run from Israeli occupying forces for his role in the violent Intifada, or uprising, in the early years of this decade. Better still, why not go and see the play? Set amid the freshly watered green hills of the northern West Bank, Jenin can be an especially pleasant place at this time of year. Probably easier than Moscow in 1945...

The "Palestinian Rothschild", the "Messiah on the Hill", "The Man Who Built a Palace in the West Bank": Munib al-Masri has amassed epithets from journalists in the kind of abundance with which he has amassed his collection of rare artworks. One description he would treasure now, though, would be "unifier of the Palestinians", the "healer", perhaps. And some of his compatriots have, not for the first time, been suggesting a more formal title, too - "Prime Minister".

A bright spring morning spent today with the wealthy international oilman walking the grounds of the extraordinary Palladian villa he has built overlooking the tumbling lanes of his native Nablus left me in little doubt about the strength of his personal commitment to overcoming the rift between Fatah and Hamas that has crippled Palestinians' efforts to negotiate their statehood with Israel.

But despite talk that Masri, long a confidant of the late Yasser Arafat, might be an acceptable compromise prime minister by the parties, the man himself insisted he harboured no such personal ambition - his 75 years and a series of heart surgeries counted against him, he said. Those did not stop him striding boundingly around his newly terraced young olive groves atop Mount Gerazim, a Biblical site his palatial home shares with a heavily guarded Jewish settlement and the tiny remnants of the ancient Samaritan religious sect. Nor have they dimmed the passion with which he expounds his vision of a dynamic Palestinian state, accepting the borders left by the war with Israel of 1948 and enriched by education and the investments of a returning diaspora following his own example.

Two years ago he helped found a political movement, the Palestine Forum, that intends to push a unifying, independent "third way" between Arafat's long dominant Fatah, now headed by President Mahmoud Abbas and Islamist Hamas, now running the Gaza Strip. Masri has been involved in the reconciliation talks that are scheduled to resume in Cairo next week under Egyptian mediation. He expects to be back again, pressing for agreement on forming a unity government that could reunite Gaza and the West Bank for a year or less until elections can be held.

Abbas's prime minister, Salam Fayyad, has tendered his resignation, although many expect him to carry on for now beyond the end-March deadline he effectively set for replacing him with a new, unity administration. Could Masri fill the gap? Perhaps not. It's not the man that matters, he says, but the programme. But watch this space.

Trouble always looked inevitable when courts gave the go-ahead to Jewish right-wingers to parade with flags through the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm in northern Israel. 

As the dramatic video captured by Reuters journalists in the town shows below, the doomsayers were not disappointed.

The parade came at a sensitive time for Israel's million or so Arab citizens, who identify themselves as Palestinians living inside the borders created in the war of 1948. After last month's Israeli election, Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu looks set to give a senior cabinet role to Avigdor Lieberman, a right-winger who has suggested redrawing those borders to put Umm al-Fahm and other Arab towns outside Israel and inside a Palestinian state. Lieberman also wants a loyalty test for citizenship. Local residents in Umm al-Fahm turned out in force to oppose the march in their town, with somewhat predictable results in terms of violent confronation. This American blogger was outspoken in his criticism of the marchers and Israel.

For the Israeli authorities, however, this was a case of ensuring basic political freedoms - for the marchers to fly their flags and demonstrate where they chose.  It brought to mind arguments that used to trouble Northern Ireland, where the parading of flags by members of one warring community through streets populated by the other was long a bitter bone of contention. In the face of arguments about civil liberties and free access, repeated violence between Protestant Orangemen, particularly fond of flag-waving parades, and Catholics eventually led to the establishment of full-blown special public body, the Parades Commission, in 1998. Its supporters credit it with contributing to the easing of sectarian tensions in the province.

Israelis and Palestinians seem a long way from the sort of progress that has calmed Northern Ireland over the past decade, as Mideast peace mediator Tony Blair, the British prime minister who oversaw the establishment of the Parades Commission, has found. But some might argue it is time to take another look at how flag-waving marches are approved. What do you think?

(PICTURES: Jewish ultranationalists wave Israel's national flag as they march in the northern town of Umm el-Fahm March 24, 2009. REUTERS/Darren Whiteside;  An unidentified member of the Protestant Orange Order marches in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland July 12, 2007. REUTERS/Andrew Paton)

It's not every day you hear a new thought in what is one of the modern world's oldest and most intractable conflicts. I'm not sure I heard one today. But I might have, in speaking to a Hamas official in Gaza. Let me share it with you.

Ayman Taha, the Hamas official recently returned from Cairo, was largely filling us in on negotiations he has been party to with Fatah, Hamas's arch-rival, with a view to mending the two-year-old schism that has crippled Palestinian politics and seen Hamas seize control of the Gaza Strip while Fatah retains the West Bank. Although we would, later in the day, hear of firmer plans to resume these reconciliation talks in Egypt, Taha limited his view of the good news largely to the fact that talks were happening at all. The bad news, he said, was that the two sides were still far apart on core issues. That's a pretty familiar refrain on many aspects of the Middle East conflict.

When I pressed Taha on some of the long-term elements of the Palestinian conflict with Israel, however, I did hear something a little different. Taha is not a key policymaker and it may well be that the thought he expressed in passing while describing the long-term possibilities has been voiced by others. But it seemed sufficiently different to me from the most typical summary of Hamas's ultimate aims to be worth noting here.

Put simply, many Hamas officials and independent analysts characterise the Islamists' goal as the total destruction of the state of Israel and the expulsion of most Jews from all the territory of what was, at the start of 1948, British-ruled Palestine.  The Hamas charter is a document that confuses many with its religious language and, for many, obscures rather than illuminates the movement's vision of the distant future. However, among its objectives, it condemns Fatah's recognition of Israel's existence and the interim peace accords its late leader Yasser Arafat struck with Israel in the name of the Palestinians.  This is one of the main bones of contention in Cairo. The closest Hamas leaders get to accepting Israel is talk of a long-term ceasefire, a hudna , that might last a decade or two, during which Palestinians would establish a state in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Jerusalem - ie beyond the borders Israel had before its territorial conquests of 1967. One can look at that as a temporary acceptance of what Fatah, Israel and Western powers see as the permanent solution. My question in conversations with Hamas officials has always been, however, 'what comes after the hudna?' Many Israelis see all Hamas's offers of ceasefires, long or short, as mere rest and re-arming breaks in its long march to push them into the sea. Typically, Hamas officials are vague on what might follow the hudna and do not waver from a stated determination never to let Israel remain.

In this regard, Ayman Taha, one of a younger guard of Hamas political figures in Gaza, did not disappoint. "We will never recognise Israel's right to exist in our land," he said. But he also said something else intriguing.

It went as follows:

Q: Can you ever make peace with Israel?

A: "We have a strategic vision and that is Palestine, all of Palestine ... is ours. And we have a transitional vision that we can accept a state in the 1967 borders in return for a long term truce ... The truce would then be for 10 to 15 years in which we and them can live a normal life."

Q: And what comes after that truce? War?

A: "We are talking about something that does not exist ... It should be left for the coming generations to decide. We cannot deprive the coming generations of their right. Maybe the coming generation would say we were wrong to do it and would cancel what we agreed upon. And maybe a coming generation would develop it ... It may not be war to follow. It (the truce) might be renewed."

That thought that it will be a future generation that may decide war or peace, and that that generation may take a different path from the present one, may be one to ponder. There is little else that we have not heard before in this conflict.

(PICTURE: Palestinians pray in a makeshift mosque in Jabalya refugee camp, Gaza Strip,  March 14, 2009. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis)

Hillary Clinton visited Jerusalem today for the first time as Secretary of State. Note that last word. It's become central to diplomacy and Israeli domestic politics. State. The Palestinians want one. Hillary Clinton, echoing her predecessor Condoleezza Rice, said they should have one. She told Israelis that a Palestinian state was in their best interests. But many Israelis are not so sure, including allies of incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanayahu. And many Palestinians are losing hope of getting one. We looked at some of the issues in an analysis today, speaking to experts and policymakers.

But what of the ordinary people on the ground? We spoke to them too. Here's what some of them had to say:

Hani Mohammed, 42, an engineer from Tulkarm in the Israeli-occupied West Bank: "Only wishful thinkers believe in the so-called 'two-state solution'. I cannot think of any Israeli leader, loyal to his country, who would agree to give up the West Bank."

Haitham Yousef, 38, a bank clerk at Qalqilya, West Bank: "I am with the two-state solution because it's the only way out. But the coming of a right-wing government (in Israel) would kill this vision by increasing the number of (Jewish) settlements on our land."

Mohammed Rezik, 35, a teacher in Gaza: "With or without Netanyahu in office, a Palestinian state is a dream that will take a long time to materialise. So far it's all just talk. First we (Palestinians) need to unite, the Israelis need to believe in a peaceful settlement and the world must support the establishment of a Palestinian state just as it backed the creation of Israel."

Emad Abu Abdallah, 40, a Gaza taxi driver: "What do you mean by a two-state solution? Do you mean we recognise Israel? No, we cannot, Hamas does not want to."

Gila Fine, 27, an Israeli academic editor in Jerusalem: "The biggest impediment to any sort of agreement lies with the Palestinians. I don't see any possibility of achieving an agreement, no."

Menachem Eitan, 45, a businessman from Givatayim, Israel: "I don't see the idea of two nation states gaining any momentum. Any right-wing government would probably oppose it."

Moshe Sadeh, 62, an Israeli accountant in Jerusalem: "No two-state solution is possible. These people aren't willing to make peace with us, they just want a piece of us. Hillary Clinton is wasting her time here."

So what do you think?

(PICTURE by Asmaa Waguih, REUTERS/Sharm el-Sheikh, March 2)