AxisMundi Jerusalem

Gridlock in the Mideast

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.

The Iran question, again

It seems last week’s focus, settlement expansion, has given way to this week’s prime focus: Might Israel attack Iran?

Last week the Arab media found Israel’s refusal to cease settlement expansion unsurprising and affirmative of what they said was Israel’s unwillingness to pursue a peace settlement with the Palestinians. An op-ed in Al Ahram Weekly, an English-language newspaper in Egypt, questioned the Arabs’ ability to challenge Israel: “Will they have the courage to shift the focus back from the Israeli-instigated ‘Iranian threat’ to the clear and present Israeli danger to the region?”

Lebanon’s Daily Star echoed the argument that Israel was using a perceived Iranian threat as a diversion to its greater “Machiavellian design”.

“The strategy that they employ is simple: Draw attention away from the issue of Israeli occupation and toward Iran, which they portray as a far greater threat to regional security,” the paper wrote in an editorial. “Campaigns that rely on this method tend to downplay the destabilizing impact that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory has on the region, and argue that the Islamic Republic is the main – or indeed the only – source of regional violence.”

Former Israeli deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh said Israel might be compelled to attack Iran’s nuclear sites if international powers had not agreed to impose sanctions by the end of this year, while the current Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said a nuclear Iran would not constitute a threat to Israel’s existence – since Israel would act first to pre-empt such a threat.

Settlement Freeze Still the Hot Topic

Months on, and the buck still stops with the settlements.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is now in Europe to meet in London with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown today and US peace envoy George Mitchell on Wednesday. He will meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Thursday.

According to our latest article , the settlement freeze controversy  will dominate discussions, though Netanyahu is also keen to coordinate with Britain and Germany on opposition to Iran’s nuclear program.   (For more information on Netanyahu’s Europe trip, check out our factbox.)

In the midst of the debate, some organizations say that settlements continue to grow.

“On the eve of the visit,” says Reuters Allyn Fisher-Ilan, “Peace Now, an Israeli group opposed to Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory, said on Sunday that despite a government moratorium announced last week on approving new housing in the West Bank enclaves, more than 40,000 more homes could be built under plans already ratified.” Settler groups complain that families living there are being constrained by hindrances to building.

Even touchier than the settlement issue in the West Bank has been settlement building in East Jerusalem. An article in Ha’aretz says that Israel’s Jerusalem municipality is reviewing plans to construct 104 apartments there.

The report comes in the wake of rising tensions in East Jerusalem after the eviction of some Palestinian families from their houses. (See our report on that here, and a blog with video clips of protests against the evictions here.) Israel captured East Jerusalem along with the West Bank in the 1967 war. Palestinians want the capital of a future Palestinian state to be in Jerusalem.

The Mysterious Mr. Mitchell’s MacGuffin

It’s a bit like a Hitchock thriller. Nobody knows where he is — not even the U.S. State Department — and nobody knows when he will show up in Israel. All we know is, suspense is building and it’s time to watch out for surprises.

President Barack Obama’s Middle East peace envoy Senator George Mitchell is somewhere in transit — probably – and expected in Israel and the Palestinian Territories next week –  sometime.

A State Dept. spokesman at Wednesday’s regular briefing could not say much at all about Mitchell’s movements beyond he has left Washington.  Could he be in London meeting the Syrian foreign minister? Don’t know.  Is he going to Turkey as well? We will try to find that out. When is he going to be in Israel? Can’t say exactly.

Mitchell is famous for playing his cards very close to his vest and his vest very close to his skin. He gives out very little information when he is engaged in high-stakes mediation.

There is an unmistakable aura of mystery about what is going on at this delicate stage of talks with Israel and the Palestinians to get stalled peace negotiations started again, by resolving what looks like a standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and Washington’s demand that it cease.

Should an Israeli Settlement Freeze Have a Price?

Yesterday Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak met with US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell, in the hopes of easing the stalemate between the two countries over a settlement freeze. (See our latest story on those talks here.)

Reuters recently reported that there have been attempts among US  officials to encourage Arab states to take steps toward normalizing relations with Israel in return for a freeze–such as allowing Israeli registered cellphones on Arab networks, letting Israeli jetliners fly over Arab states’ airspace, or allowing tourists with Israeli stamps enter their countries.  Prospects on that front don’t look good.

Reuters cites a Western diplomat  saying that  Arab states “don’t want to pay for something twice”. The current Arab position is that “Israel had already committed under the 2003 “road map” peace plan to freezing all its settlement activity.” (Read the entire article here).

Writers in the Arab media have also responded to the US probe with a resounding “no way.” An editorial in the Jerusalem based Palestinian paper, “Al-Quds,” stated yesterday that: “The settlement freeze is not a donation, or a gift, from Israel to us as Palestinians and Arabs that we need to offer something in return for…the settlements were illegal in the first place… they conflict with any effort for peace or a two state solution.” (Note: this source is in Arabic)

In his Jerusalem Post blog, writer Ziad Khalil Abu Zayyad argues that “Israel continues to raid Palestinian territories, arrest anyone it wants, and continues to insult the Palestinian Authority by demonstrating how it has no control of its lands or people. So will the Arab world forget these Israeli policies and race to start normalization relations only because Israel says it will commit to a ‘settlement freeze?’ I don’t think so.”

On the other side, while some Israeli writers agree that the settlement freeze is only an Israeli gesture prior to any attempts at normalization, or argue that there is reason to be skeptical of Israeli settlement freeze promisies, others have argued that it the Palestinian side that needs to make concessions.

from Global News Journal:

Talking about talking to Hamas

Should Israel and/or its allies talk to men like these, the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas, who run the Gaza Strip?

That's a question that has been revived this week following the end of Israel's 22-day war in Gaza, which left Hamas rule apparently intact and 1.5 million people in desperate need, and the arrival in the White House of President Barack Obama, who has indicated he might be willing to talk to people his predecessor George W. Bush had shunned.

For now, it looks like talking about talking may be as far as it goes, as we examined in a story earlier in the week. Israel is conducting discussions through Egyptian mediators on prolonging its ceasefire, but is not interested in talking to a movement which rejects the agreements made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his PLO to accept Israel's right to exist. Nor are Hamas leaders willing to give Israel the implicit recognition that opening formal negotiations would give - though they do not rule out some contact.

Obama, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and new Middle East envoy George Mitchell, who notably negotiated an end to IRA violence in Northern Ireland, have given no sign they are about to break radically with the Bush administration's policies in the region for now, as my colleague Jonathan Wright examined today. Obama notably made his first call to regional leaders on Wednesday to Abbas, a sign many saw of a continued determination to support the secular leader in the West Bank against the movement which defeated his Fatah party in a 2006 parliamentary election and seized full control in Gaza the following year. Obama on Thursday repeated three long-standing conditions, agreed upon by the Quartet of mediating powers, for the boycott of Hamas to end.

And yet, and yet. There is talk about talks. This is notably in Europe, where governments who rallied behind Israel after it ceased fire in Gaza on Jan. 18 also face disquiet among their electorates about the fate of Gazans blockaded into their tiny enclave and denied access to basic reconstruction supplies, like cement and steel piping, after a war that killed some 1,300 and left tens of thousands homeless.  Israel fears such material will be used by Hamas to rearm, including building the rockets with which it has peppered southern Israel for years. But the embargo is taking a toll on ordinary people too. As regional political analyst Mouin Rabbani put it to me: ""The Europeans and other donors, now have a problem. Are you going to say 'Let them eat cake?'"

It is perhaps significant that, in a speech declaring "victory" in Gaza, Hamas's exile leader Khaled Meshaal appeared specifically to address Europeans in urging talks: "I tell European nations," he said in Damascus, "It is time for you to deal with Hamas." Hamas officials made clear to Reuters that the offer of talks was one specifically to international powers, not to Israel.