A Balcony Over Jerusalem

by John Lyons

  Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar revealed one of the methods that Israel used to dramatically lower the number of Palestinians in the West Bank:

  Israel had used a covert procedure to cancel the residency status of 140,000 West Bank Palestinians between 1967 and 1994. The legal advisor for the Judea and Samaria Justice Ministry’s office admitted this in a document obtained by Haaretz.

  According to the document, Palestinians who wished to travel abroad via Jordan were ordered to leave their ID cards at the Allenby Bridge border crossing. They exchanged their ID cards for a card allowing them to cross.

  If a Palestinian did not return within six months of the card’s expiration … [they] were registered as NLRs – no longer residents. The document made no mention of any warning or information that the Palestinians received about the process.

  The Central Bureau of Statistics reported that the West Bank’s Palestinian population amounted to 1.05 million in 1994 – which meant the population would have been greater by about 14 percent if it weren’t for the procedure.

  Today, a similar procedure is still in place for residents of East Jerusalem who hold Israeli ID cards; they lose their right to return if they have been abroad for seven years.

  Ahmad Aweidah gave a different perspective: ‘There are people here now who are young and energetic and who believe in the future. Palestinians have one of the highest birth rates in the world. In Gaza alone in the first six months of this year [2009] there were 53,000 births.’ Time and demographics, he said, were on the side of the Palestinians: a mirror image of the view of Israel’s settlers.

  He went on to say that the Palestinian economy was in ‘tatters’. ‘It’s an economy completely disfigured, a servile economy for Israel. We import 80 per cent of our needs from Israel. Palestinian companies are not able to trade as they wish, its people are not able to move as they wish. Gaza is a complete catastrophe. The Palestinian economy is at 10 per cent of our potential. Palestinians have about $70 billion of their assets abroad (particularly in the US and Arab world).’1

  How did Aweidah interpret Netanyahu’s claim that Israel was trying to help the Palestinian economy?

  It’s bull. It’s just for media consumption. Netanyahu doesn’t want to pay the price for peace. He’s not interested in removing the settlements, he’s not interested in a two-State solution, but he has to say something. What he actually believes is that Palestinians should pack up and go to Jordan …

  In 1948 we were not supposed to be staying here. But we are still here. We have strong population growth, we are building things, we’re constructing things, we’re having kids, we’re getting married, we have a thriving culture, we have a thriving film industry now and we’re not going anywhere. We are a people who have a will to survive and who know how to survive. And Palestinians in the diaspora are successful – they are doctors, investment bankers, lawyers. The game is not lost. Far from it – we have survived against almost insurmountable odds. This is 62 years on. That plan did not go the way it was intended. The plan was that we would be completely emptied out of this land. [David] Ben-Gurion completely fucked up. He should have finished the job then.

  The Israelis have even alienated the Israeli Arabs. The Israelis could have so easily made Israeli Arabs part of their society and defenders of their society, but instead the way they have treated them has made them more extremist over the years.

  As I sat listening to Aweidah, one of the brightest young Palestinians, outlining his vision for the future of his people, I wondered whether Israel had failed to reach out to the next generation of moderate Palestinians. Aweidah, 40, should be a bridge to a future in which Israelis and Palestinians live alongside each other.

  As I drove from Nablus back home to Jerusalem, I kept thinking to myself: if this is how the moderate Palestinians are talking in public, how are the extremist Palestinians talking in private?

  Many people believe that if the Palestinian Authority disbanded itself it would precipitate the end of the occupation. That is, they believe that the PA helps Israel to maintain the occupation.

  ‘The role of the Palestinian Authority cannot be underestimated in how it’s easy and relatively cheap to run the occupation,’ Israeli Sarit Michaeli from human rights group B’Tselem told me.

  If the PA didn’t exist Israel would have to fix traffic lights in Ramallah, set the curriculum and print schoolbooks in Nablus, paint zebra crossings in Bethlehem, prosecute criminals on issues other than security – a Palestinian who’s a rapist or thief would have to be found and brought to trial by Israeli courts – and anything to do with running water, sewerage would have to be done by Israel … This money would have to be provided by Israel.

  Israel uses the existence of the PA as a retort to people who criticise the occupation. It’s a very common thing from Israeli spokespeople and media to say that Palestinians run their own lives … The existence of the PA … has allowed them [Israel] to posit the claim that there is really no direct occupation. This is important, because a lot of people buy this argument in Israel. If you have a situation where the control is indirect it’s easier to mask this control.

  Michaeli argued that the PA had very little authority. ‘The Palestinian economy is completely subjugated to the Israeli economy.’ The World Bank found that restrictions imposed by Israel cost the Palestinian economy $US3.4 billion per year: 35 per cent of Palestine’s GDP.2

  For the first two years we were in Jerusalem, the Israelis said it was impossible to have peace with the Palestinians – how could Israel make peace with the Palestinian Authority when it was divided from Hamas? Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that ‘First they [the PA] should make internal peace with Hamas and then they can try talking to us.’ But when PA leader Mahmoud Abbas did try to ‘make internal peace’ with Hamas, Netanyahu said that this was the reason why Israel could not make peace. After the PA and Hamas announced a ‘unity government’ in April 2014, Israel suspended peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and Netanyahu would later tell his security cabinet: ‘Today, Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] said yes to terrorism and no to peace.’3

  This was despite the fact that Abbas insisted not a single person who had been a member of Hamas could become part of the new Palestinian Government. Apart from Abbas’s own distrust of Hamas, he had another reason to ensure that no Hamas figure was part of any new government: money. The US lists Hamas as a terrorist organisation, so the US Congress would cease funding the Palestinian Authority should it have any involvement with Hamas.

  When Hamas made it clear it was prepared to agree to a Palestinian State along 1967 lines and recognise Israel, Netanyahu came up with another condition: that the Palestinians must recognise Israel as a Jewish State – a condition no previous Israeli prime minister had introduced.

  It almost seemed as if Israel was coming up with an excuse for every development. The more I talked to Israeli officials, the more it became clear: I was watching in slow-motion as a government sabotaged perhaps its last chance for peace.

  I asked New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren whether Netanyahu’s new condition of recognising Israel as a Jewish State was a negotiating ploy or a legitimate claim. Her answer was surprising. ‘My feeling is that it might be both things,’ she replied.

  It’s certainly possible that Netanyahu made it a priority to scuttle the talks, because we don’t see real evidence that he really wanted them to succeed. But I buy his argument that ‘Until they officially acknowledge this is the nation State of the Jewish people I cannot be convinced based on incitement or whatever that this agreement won’t be a precursor for them to try to destroy this State’ … If I were the Palestinians I would have said, ‘We already recognised you, basically, and we won’t take away the Arab rights and we won’t let this affect the right of return but sure, if you want to be the nation State of the Jewish people go for it. From now on you’re the nation State of the Jewish people, and by the way, since you want that so badly we’d like the land s
waps to be this way or we want this on the refugees.’

  Crispian Balmer of Reuters was also critical of the Palestinians, and believes they should be placed under greater scrutiny. ‘I also do get frustrated because I think sometimes the Palestinians are given a free ride. We’re all very critical of the occupation and they [the Palestinians] are the underdog, but at the same time, last year we did a story on honour killings in the Palestinian Territories … They do some pretty foul stuff themselves.’

  And Balmer has pointed out, it is not just the Israelis who are hostile to the foreign media. ‘It should also be said the Palestinians are pains in the arse too when it comes to some of this stuff. I’ve had significant problems with the Palestinians, be it Hamas gunmen smashing into our newsroom in Gaza and threatening to throw one of our people from the 12th storey or in the West Bank.’

  It was 23 September 2011. President Mahmoud Abbas had just submitted an application for Palestine to become the 194th member of the United Nations. The PLO had been given UN Observer status way back in 1974, long before it declared the independent State of Palestine in 1988. The Oslo Accords – which created the Palestinian Authority – had offered a brief ray of hope, but since then the peace process had stalled as Israel continued to aggressively expand its settlements in the West Bank.

  Frustrated by the lack of progress, and emboldened by the events of the Arab Spring, Abbas and his team had been courting the international community for many months before arriving for the 66th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York. Their hope was that full membership of the UN would take them to the brink of statehood. The next step after official recognition by the UN would be for Palestine to become a sovereign country, consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

  I was there to cover the proceedings at the UN, along with a huge contingent of international media.

  Benjamin Netanyahu rose first to address the assembly, delivering a speech fit for prime-time American television: perfect English with an American accent. (Netanyahu lived in the US for many years.) The speech ticked all the boxes, painting Israel as the David against the Goliath of Iran. His message amounted to: ‘We won’t have a State imposed on us. The only solution is one that the Israelis and Palestinians work out for themselves through direct negotiations.’

  Compared with this, Abbas’s address later in the day was one of the worst crafted speeches I had heard. He raced through his words, barely stopping to allow the generally friendly audience of diplomats from 190 countries to offer him the applause they clearly wanted to give. He spoke entirely in Arabic and made no attempt to pitch his message directly to key players by using occasional phrases in English, French or Hebrew. He could easily have rehearsed some targeted phrases for the international media along the lines of ‘Why should we be one of the last people on earth to live under occupation?’ A simple message which could have been run on news bulletins around the world – not just in the Arab world.

  Worse still, he made no effort to appeal to the very people who would be crucial in deciding whether Palestinians ever got a State: the Israeli public. Apparently playing to his own constituency, he mentioned Muslims and Christians but made no reference to any Jewish connection with Jerusalem. It was an appalling misjudgement by Abbas, displaying a real lack of courage. There can’t have been too many times when a speaker with the attention of the world on him has lost an opportunity so comprehensively.

  The next day I was walking along Fifth Avenue and ran into two Israeli journalists with whom I’d flown from Israel, Shimon Shiffer and Nahum Barnea. They are two of the elder statesmen of Israeli media, both from Yedioth Ahronoth – the largest selling newspaper in Israel and generally a centrist paper. They were sitting in the sun outside a café in a plaza, reading the papers, so I joined them. We started talking about the UN speeches.

  With no warning, Shiffer snapped: ‘I now talk to you as an Israeli, rather than a journalist. As an Israeli, I was outraged at Abbas’s speech! I’m a supporter of Abbas and the Palestinians, but for him to wipe the Jews out of the history of Jerusalem … this outrages me!’

  If he’d outraged an influential supporter, I thought, what impact had he made on the less sympathetic Israeli public? I realised how the Israelis were wiping the floor with the Palestinians in terms of how to play public relations. There really was no contest.

  After 50 years of occupation, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has become a media war. The Israelis are winning this war, without question – not because they have the better argument, but because they have a better resourced and more intimidating media and lobbying machine. Living in Israel, I experienced Israel’s hasbara machine on a daily basis. When a missile was fired into southern Israel from Gaza and landed in towns such as Sderot or Ashkelon, the Israeli PR people would send out texts along the lines of ‘Rocket lands in Ashkelon – Russian-speaking media can contact [name and phone number included], Japanese media can contact [name and number], German media can contact …’ It would then go on to say that if you wanted to speak to a woman who had a child at the school you could call her on the number provided or if you wanted to speak to a paramedic on the spot you could call his number. It amounted to a rapid-response media special forces team.

  The machine worked even harder during the time of the Gaza wars. During the 2012 Gaza War, three Israelis were killed when a missile from Gaza hit their home. I needed to get to the front line and our car was not working. An email arrived saying that the think tank Israel Project had a bus leaving Jerusalem, which I joined. With about 30 journalists on board, staff from the Israel Project handed out ‘Fact Sheets’. Their staff also walked up and down the bus with baskets of sandwiches: ‘Pastrami on rye or vegetarian?’ they asked. Many journalists live off organisations like the Israel Project. In Israel, you can be driven to war while being fed facts, figures and pastrami on rye.

  The Palestinian side, in contrast, were appalling – highly disorganised and suffering from the fatigue of a 50-year occupation. Which made me wonder: given that Israel’s image around the world was probably the worst it had ever been, due largely to the wars with Gaza and the occupation, and the Palestinians’ image was probably as good as it had ever been, what would be the situation if the Palestinians ever learnt to do public relations the way the Israelis do it?

  By November 2012, facing the prospect of a US veto after its application was referred to the UN Security Council, Palestine had decided to reduce its ambitions and pursue an upgrade to ‘Non-member State’. The resolution was approved by a majority of UN members – with Australia, on the initiative of Bob Carr, taking the historic decision to abstain. Palestine had partially achieved its objective – no thanks to Abbas’s appalling speech in front of the UN.

  One day in 2010, a year into my posting, I ran into the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. While I had spoken to him on the phone, I had never met him so I introduced myself. ‘I’m having real problems getting any information out of your side,’ I said. Then I added, ‘Compared with the Israelis.’

  Erekat looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, the Israelis are good, aren’t they?’

  My only thought was, well, you’re getting a billion dollars a year in funding from the European Union, Australia and other countries and you still can’t put together a functioning public relations department?’

  Fifty years on, the Israelis have set up a largely remote-controlled machine and have got every inch of Gaza and the West Bank mapped out. Yet the Palestinian are just playing with the same old blunt instruments. But while the Israelis are able to maintain military control over the Palestinians, they will not win the real contest. As Israel continues to rule over an increasingly large population – a minority Jewish population (based on demographics) is now on the brink of controlling the lives and movements of a majority Palestinian population in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza – Israel’s occupation is, inevitably, doomed.

  The
only question is whether what comes next will be an orderly, political process or a violent, chaotic one in which many people will die. I am by nature an eternal optimist. But after six years of living amid this conflict I fear that the latter is now almost inevitable.

  CHAPTER 20

  Netanyahu’s Israel

  January 2015

  OUR TIME IN THE MIDDLE EAST WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE. As a family, we’d arrived with such enthusiasm.

  We’d spent some of our best years in Israel. But during these six years, Sylvie, Jack and I had realised something was very wrong. We’d come to this realisation in different ways and at different times – after all, Jack had spent this time in primary and secondary school, so his experience here had been very different from mine and Sylvie’s. But from our varied lives, we’d each come to the same conclusion: the State of Israel is in deep trouble.

  We each felt a disappointment with what we’d found here – a sadness that there was so much suffering and that it showed no sign of stopping. But as a journalist I had a very different perspective: astonishment that the reality of modern Israel goes largely unreported.

  What is going on in Israel today is a dramatic story. What is occurring is the extinguishment not just of any chance of a Palestinian State but also of the vision by the international community, as agreed by the United Nations in 1947, to find a sustainable peace through a two-State solution. However, unless you read between the lines or have sources of information outside the mainstream media, you would barely know this.

  The other conclusion I’d come to was that the end of a Palestinian State also meant the arrival of a horrible new reality. As Israel approaches the 70th anniversary of its founding, there is a formidable threat confronting it. If not addressed, Israel will not survive in its current form.