Palestinian State In The Making
President Obama will be hosting both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas this week. The subject, presumably, will be how to advance the prospects of a Palestinian state, and the agenda, almost certainly, will focus on such things as settlements and security arrangements. What has been getting less attention, but seems the biggest emerging fact on the ground, is the West Bank economy which is being driven by an exceptional, rising business class: the key to Palestine's civil society, around which a state must form. I have spent a good part of the summer talking to these leaders, and report on their achievements--and urgent requirements--in the current Harper's. The bottom line is this: Israel could not invent more appropriate partners to build a Palestinian state, economically federated with itself and Jordan; yet in spite of Netanyahu's exhortations, Israel seems to be doing everything to foil Palestine's economic development. Obama's chief objective must be to get Israel out of its way. (Alas, only Harper's subscribers will currently have access to the entire article. Below are excerpts from the article's opening.)
Benjamin Netanyahu ran for prime minister last winter rejecting a Palestinian state but promising to advance "economic peace." In his much anticipated speech at Bar Ilan University in June, he cautiously reversed himself on statehood but returned to his favorite theme: "Economic peace is not a substitute for peace, but it is a very important component in achieving it. . . . I call upon the talented entrepreneurs of the Arab world to come and invest here."
For Netanyahu's boosters, the phrase often means little more than increasing jobs for Palestinians on Israeli construction projects, including settlements that ring Ramallah, and in tax-exempt industrial zones; as well as more opportunity for West Bank farmers to sell to Israeli fruit wholesalers (who, in a grotesque twist, then pad their profits by controlling the distribution of their produce in Gaza). Economic peace slyly implies that Israelis can have no "partner" for a political settlement until Palestine looks more like Delaware. Meanwhile, presumably, fuller bellies and fatter wallets will make Palestinians more tranquil.
Nevertheless, economic peace prompts a reasonable question. If a Palestinian state rises, will it work? Does not the prospect of sovereignty presume a class of resilient entrepreneurs and professionals, people who will build competitive businesses that will, in turn, employ a burgeoning population?
The median age in Palestine is nineteen. It is likely that 2 million refugees will be returning in the event of a deal with Israel. Palestine will inevitably become an Arabic-speaking megalopolis spreading east toward Jordan from Jerusalem, yet interlocking with Israel, itself a mainly Hebrew-speaking megalopolis spreading north from Tel Aviv to Haifa. Together, Israel and Palestine will look something like greater Los Angeles. In that environment, fellahin harvesting their olive trees are going to seem beside the point.
For peace to take root, in other words, a Palestinian business class will have to engender a civil society--people networked to the region and the world, developing a secular state as a counterpart to their combined enterprises. If Israel really wanted peace, wouldn't it do everything in its power to facilitate this?
THE QUESTION IS intriguing, not only because of what the Israeli prime minister is saying (or how he is bluffing) but because of what the Palestinian prime minister is doing. Salam Fayyad, the head of the PA's government since the summer of 2007, is a former World Bank official who's often called a "technocrat." He's really a kind of chief executive of this new class of managers and investors: people unafraid of commercial competition, even with Israeli firms, and who expect to eclipse and eventually displace the PA's Fatah leaders--the old cadres whose patronage, monopolies, and little corruptions during the 1990s all but guaranteed Hamas's success in the 2006 election.
Fatah held its first general convention in almost twenty years in Bethlehem on August 4, and a young guard more determined to cooperate with Hamas is now challenging President Abbas's sorry diplomatic record. Behind the scenes, however, it is Ramallah's business elites who are positioning themselves. Fayyad is not the only seasoned manager now taking a role in the PA: the new economics minister is Dr. Bassem Khoury, the former CEO of generic drugmaker Pharmacare; Dr. Mohammad Mustafa, another former World Bank official, now runs the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF), Palestine's $850 million sovereign wealth fund, put together with painstaking transparency from monies Yasir Arafat once controlled with virtually no oversight. Even outside the PA, the influence of senior telecom executives such as Paltel's Sabih Al-Masri and Abdul Malik al-Jaber, or private-equity magnates such as Sayed Khoury, is gossiped about, counted on. One sees the makings of a quiet revolution.
Sam Bahour, an Ohio-born management consultant who was instrumental in setting up Palestine's first telecommunications company and who, subsequently, pushed through construction of Ramallah's first shopping center and supermarket during the darkest days of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, does not approve of Fayyad's American-trained police force's peremptory jailing of Hamas cadres and their curtailment of civil liberties. But he does appreciate the law-and-order government Fayyad has established in West Bank cities, which the Israeli army tends to avoid. This is a kind of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, Bahour admits, but the alternative is an Islamist command-state, like the one in Gaza, which offers no real hope and thrives on the uncertainties and brutalities of the occupation.
We are sitting in a café, nicely appointed in Art Deco style, which, Bahour tells me proudly, is the first of a chain, a kind of aspiring Palestinian Starbucks. But everywhere on the walls outside are pictures of young people, "martyrs." "Pictures of the Israeli army's innocent victims merge into pictures of suicide bombers and real armed fighters, looking sincere and ready for sacrifice," Bahour says. "This kind of thing works on our young people. When Israel attacked Gaza, my kids were on Facebook every night showing solidarity. We are surrounded by morbid memorials on every corner. We have got to create another reality fast."Bahour means a Palestinian state that Palestinian entrepreneurs themselves create in the womb of, and in spite of, the occupation, much as Zionism created a state within the British Mandate occupation. He is on the board of Birzeit University. He is also part of a business delegation that's been petitioning the Israeli Defense Forces to open the crossings to Gaza, so that West Bank enterprises can get in. ("Put a real Palestinian store next to a Hamas-controlled tunnel, and the store will win every time.") One green shoot of "another reality," Bahour notes, is the surprisingly robust Palestine Securities Exchange, whose companies' market capitalization exceeds $2.3 billion.
But the first order of business is housing. You see construction cranes everywhere in Ramallah. Mustafa says the PIF, in partnership with a Saudi real-estate company, is planning to invest $400 million on the Al-Ersal shopping and business office complex in the heart of the city, a project that will generate thousands of jobs and provide contracts for dozens of medium- and small-sized enterprises, from contracting and engineering to design and supplies. The PIF will also be spending $200 million on the 1,700-unit Al-Reehan project to the north--"our first settlement," Mustafa said, winking. Another hopeful new feature on the landscape--the one Netanyahu was himself grudgingly responding to--is the new president in Washington. Wherever you go in Ramallah you hear lively talk about Obama's leadership and confident declarations of how well positioned Palestinian business elites are to make the most of peace should he give them their chance. All of the business leaders I spoke with are eager for a peace treaty, and if Israeli leaders were seriously looking for partners they would look no further.
Yet what's missing is precisely the Israeli cooperation that Netanyahu's talk of economic peace would require. The problem is not Israeli companies, many of which are as hungry to chase business opportunities with Palestinian companies as the latter are to engage with Israelis. The problem is the occupation, whose military tactics and settlement institutions have long been directed to the realization of Likud's Greater Israel, not a Palestinian state; whose logic is to repress Palestinian autonomy rather than help prepare the ground for it or just get out of its way.
If you spend time in Ramallah and talk to its emerging leaders, it becomes depressingly clear that if the Israeli government were intentionally trying to crush Palestinian entrepreneurship, it could not pursue the endeavor more perfectly. Palestinian businesses have not only been cut off from Jerusalem, their natural commercial center; they cannot count on the things any company needs to survive: access to obvious markets in Jordan and Israel, the mobility of goods, the capacity to recruit talent, basic resources for specialized manufacturing and services, and a reliable financial infrastructure.
(Again, to read the whole article, go to the Harper's website here, free only to subscribers.)
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/73851
Last week, the New York Times published an article about “signs of hope” in the West Bank (and in the city of Nablus in particular) that refreshingly breaks with the standard narrative of Palestinian desperation and misery. The Israeli military recently closed down its checkpoint into the city, along with other checkpoints elsewhere in the territories. The economy is growing instead of contracting. Downtown is full of shoppers. Islamist scolds have backed off. Police make sure passengers have fastened their seat belts.
It sounds like Nablus has more or less become a normal Middle East city.
Earlier this year in Jerusalem, Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh told me how much the West Bank surprises visitors now. “The other day,” he said, “someone came for the first time ever to this part of the world, and he called me and asked me to take him to Ramallah. So I drove him to downtown Ramallah, and we stopped there. The man was shocked. He said, ‘Where are the refugee camps? Where are the mud houses? Where’s the poverty?’ I said, ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’ He said, ‘I’m shocked. Look how nice it is.’ ”
I laughed out loud because I had a similar experience myself three years ago before the recent improvements. I didn’t expect to see “mud houses.” As far as I know, no one has ever reported the existence of “mud houses” in Ramallah. The usual Palestinian narrative, though, seems to encourage some people’s vivid imaginations.
But I was still startled by what Ramallah actually looked like. I expected to see, and to write about, squalid living conditions. I had already seen the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and the awfulness of those places is hard to describe.
I figured Ramallah wouldn’t be that bad, but I didn’t expect it to look so much better than lots of cities, and not just refugee camps, that I’ve seen in the region.
It was in early 2006, shortly after Hamas won the election, when I took a taxi from the Qalandia checkpoint outside Jerusalem to Ramallah with a Palestinian man named Sufian. Here, in part, is what I wrote at the time:
I stepped out into a surprisingly pleasant urban environment.
“No offense, Sufian, but this city is a lot nicer than I expected,” I said.
“Ramallah is beautiful,” he said with pride.
I didn’t think it was beautiful, exactly, but it did not look even remotely like the Third World war zone it’s reputed to be. I noticed no visible poverty once we left the squalor around the checkpoint. I was, however, warned by Israelis that Ramallah and Bethlehem are much nicer than the rest of the West Bank and need to be judged accordingly.
[…]
Ramallah is also in much better physical condition than the parts of Lebanon ruled by Hezbollah, even though Ramallah has experienced war a lot more recently. In fact, Ramallah is in better condition than any Shia region of Lebanon whether it’s ruled by Hezbollah or not. The only Sunni part of Lebanon that looks nicer than Ramallah is West Beirut.
Ramallah didn’t have the glitz of Beirut or the French-Arab Mediterranean charm of a city like Tunis. But it beat the pants off Cairo, one of the biggest tourist destinations in the whole Arab world. It looked a lot like Amman — an Arab city with a pretty good reputation. It was so much nicer than Baghdad, it’s pointless to even make the comparison.
I have not visited Gaza, even though I’ve tried twice, but I have looked inside from the Israeli side of the border. What I could see didn’t look pretty. I’m inclined to take more seriously the reports of misery and deprivation in there. Still, here is a photo of Gaza. Here is another. I’m not sure when they were taken. If Gaza is indeed a gruesome place now, it wasn’t always that way. (Hamas and its wars can’t have done the place too many favors.)
According to the New York Times, though, the West Bank in general is much nicer now than it was even when I saw it. Not only Bethlehem and Ramallah but also Nablus is now said to be doing okay.
Draw whatever political conclusions you want. I’m not sure what to make of it. My colleague Max Boot was with me in Jerusalem earlier this year when Toameh told us about the reporter who was stunned by the distinct lack of misery he expected to see. Boot asked Toameh if better economic conditions meant better political conditions. Toameh said, “No.” That was six months ago. He might have been wrong, and what he said might no longer be true. The New York Times does note that Fatah is trusted more now than Hamas — for whatever that’s worth.
Either way, reports of the West Bank’s lax security measures and economic improvement are more common these days than they were. It’s refreshing to see foreign correspondents describe the place as it is instead of as the desperately impoverished Israeli-ruled prison it’s reputed to be.
September 20, 2009 1:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem is the occupation, whose military tactics and settlement institutions have long been directed to the realization of Likud's Greater Israel, not a Palestinian state; whose logic is to repress Palestinian autonomy rather than help prepare the ground for it or just get out of its way.
this is the reality. have you ever tried to get a bone out of dog's mouth? the more you try, the more determined the dog becomes to hold on. that is the case with likud.
people are waiting for obama. stop dreaming. they will eventually be disappointed. only a solid BDS movement has any possibility of changing the situation for the benefit of all.
Stephen Walt: Settling for Failure in the Middle East
September 20, 2009 1:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course Israel and the US have been pouring money into the West Bank (or allowing it) at the expense of the miserable Gaza Ghetto even as they have solidified the little bantustans within. Does an influx of dollars make it a legitimate candidate for eventual independent statehood or just more controllable?
Fayad may be this or that, but he would not have been elected by the Palestinian people. And since President Abbas is only a pretend President anyway, and by and large, much of the government has been all but elected by the US and Israel, how does one "negotiate" with non-representatives of only half the Palestinian people? Sounds like more of the Road(map) to Nowhere.
September 20, 2009 3:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is a Roadmap to Nowhere but the elite cartographers can't see beyond their tight little bubbles.
They imagine that constructing a rigidly controlled artificial society from the top down will somehow benefit and make irrelevant the "fellahin harvesting their olive trees".
Oh, good luck with that premise.
I have yet to see any "serious" attention paid to the absolutely critical sector of crop production that has the benefits of local demand, established traditions and challenges shared by those who engage in farming, regardless of religious/nationalist identifications. But, that would divert energies to building a foundation for a state (or whatever) from the bottom up and I doubt the technocrat designers have much relevent hands-on expertise at that level.
September 20, 2009 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's the imperial blueprint. Destroy as much as possible, then find a few locals (Karzai, Fayyad, etc.), and let them make a lot of money as long as they provide "security" (security for everybody except their people).
This is what Avishai imagines as "peace," and it would have worked in other places but it won't work in Palestine. Why, because the settlers also need to make money and their needs will take priority over Palestinian businessmen. This is what screwed Oslo. It's round II of Oslo, and the best scenario would be that it leads to Intifada III. Worse scenarios are certainly imaginable.
BDS, and a special tribunal for war crimes. That is the only road of this hell.
September 20, 2009 8:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Shockingly simplistic and one-sided explanation for the failures of Oslo. You strike me as an educated person. Surely you can't be serious. Do you deny any Palestinian responsibility for the failure of Oslo? Was Intifada II inevitable?
How exactly does this road progress? Would Israel cave in the face of sanctions? Would the five million Jewish Israelis who have devoted their lives to building their state in the face of incredible odds and in opposition to unremitting hostility simply pack up and leave? Or would the Palestinians and surrounding Arab nations who have devoted themselves these past 60 years to reclaiming this land for themselves do an about face and become beneficent neighbors promising to live harmoniously in a multicultural democracy like the one in.... (where exactly?)?
Your prescription is not a road out of, but rather, one directly into, a hell the likes of which would dwarf the slow boil we have seen these past 60 years.
September 20, 2009 10:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nice to see you, Armchair G. I understand everyone comes at this from different perspectives. Your questions were not directed to me, but I hope you don't mind me butting in to give my view. I think, without a doubt, Israel was responsible for the Intifadas as well as the lobbing of, all things considered, relatively harmless rockets from Gaza as much as they were responsible for the 1000's dead in Lebanese refugee camps under Sharon's control or the assassinations or the driving out of Palestinian peace leaders or the imprisonment of political leaders and children or the humiliation and physical degradation of a people or the countless atrocities almost all to some degree or another disregarding innocent life at best or purposely applying collective punishment at worst.
But these are sideshows in the big game. How many decades of oppression does it take to make an oppressor? Israel has occupied a people and their land. They now have a forty plus year history of war crimes because an occupier has internationally agreed upon required obligations to the occupied. The occupier controls what happens for better or worse against the comparatively powerless occupied people, and in effect, takes on the role of protector when occupying foreign territory (and a largely peasant/refugee population). That Israel is the protector of the Palestinians must, indeed, seem a twisted idea to Zionist hardliners.
One can argue about who "won" what in this battle or that war, but in this case (regardless of outside Arab states with their own agendas), the Palestinians never really fought a war with Israel. The Arab war of '48 was just that, and to be sure, there has been resistance, but throwing rocks or rockets (little more effective) is not a people able to defend itself or wage war against one of the greater military powers on earth. Israel (with endless assistance from its US enabler) is responsible for the plight of the Palestinians however they resist occupation, as is their right.
Unless and until the Palestinian people, not corrupt outside or self-appointed leaders, decide to give up their rightful claim to their land and statehood, attempts to force it on them, a la Gaza, the settlements, confiscation of areas in Jerusalem, second-class status for Israeli Arabs or the piecemeal divisions and controls in the WB, look very much to me as part of a slow, incremental but thinly disguised 60 year genocide.
PS If I offer no solutions, it's because I see none until the above is recognized and dealt with.
September 21, 2009 1:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Two accusations that I'd expect from you. About the one-sidedness first, leaving the "simplistic" to a separate post.
Are Palestinians responsible for the failure of Oslo? Let's put this rather in the general context of a vastly unequal struggle between a ruthless power and a disenfranchised and battered people. I'll use the most famous example, not because it is "the same," so don't bother going there, but because it presents a structural analogy for questions about the relation between responsibility and power.
Are Jews responsible for the holocaust?
There are those who says absolutely not, because, obviously they had no power. This is not very nuanced. Important contributors, such as for example Raul Hilberg, Hana Arendt, Lenni Brenner, and others, point to the complicity and failure of Jewish leaders to organize effective resistance as arguably important factors in the success or at least in the smooth implementation of the "Final solution." That is a charged and painful accusation, but I believe it is fair to say that nobody is completely powerless and that the weak always have options and their choices do matter. Crucially however, this kind of analysis of the shortcoming of Jewish action has absolutely no bearing on the criminal responsibility of the Nazis, which is total and absolute regardless of how inadequately Jews responded.
If this were the direction of your argument I would concur. Palestinian leadership, most notably Arafat and his entourage, committed egregious errors of judgment during the Oslo process, beginning with Arafat's stupid endorsement of Saddam during the first Gulf War, followed by the marginalization of the much more competent team that was negotiating in Madrid, culminating with showing up in Oslo without maps, without a legal team, and negotiating a document that he did not understand, and going downhill from there. These mistakes, however, do not lessen in the slightest Israeli responsibility as occupying power, whose grievous violations of human rights and international law led to another bloody revolt of the people under occupation.
There are those however who ask the question "are Jews responsible for the Holocaust" in a very different sense. They point out that Jews "assaulted" Germany by calling for a boycott after 1933. They recall Jewish terrorism like the murder of a diplomat that "led" to Kristallnacht. They explain that Hitler merely wanted to cleanse Europe of the "scourge" of communism, and Jews were to blame for mostly being communists. They repeat the term that was used then, Judeobolshevism (that is such a fine antecedent for our time's Islamofascism). They accuse Jews of facilitating the defeat of Germany in WW-I, thus "earning" Hitler's legitimate animus. Etc. Etc. That is, they abstract Jewish action from the context of resistance in order to produce a fantasy image of a besieged and patriotic German regime assaulted by evil Jews and responding in kind.
We call these people neo-nazis, antisemites and liers. Unfortunately, your desire for finding Palestinian "responsibility" for the failure of
Oslo sound a lot like theirs.
September 21, 2009 5:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Every historical thesis is simple relative to the reality it seeks to capture and make legible. Narrative abstracts from reality in order to render it intelligible. That doesn't make it not serious. What makes a narrative simplistic is when, like yours, it avoids the most important facts.
A significant human project only survives by the benefit it produces to some of the agents. That is why, one of most important question in history is "cui bono?" who benefits? The occupation and colonization of the West Bank is 42 year old. Cui bono?
In the first 20 years, the benefit of the occupation was chiefly cheap Palestinian labor. That labor helped Israel recover from 1966 recession and produced a fast and strong rise in the general standard of living of Jews in Israel. The First Intifada made this economic arrangement impractical.
About the same time, Israel went through a profound economic revolution, involving privatization, scaling down of the state and massive shrinkage of the defense budget imposed by fiscal necessity. One aspect of that restructuring was a staggering growth in inequality and rising social tensions inside Israel. That deepened the rift between Labor, the party of the establishment, which benefited from privatization, and Likud, which fashioned itself as the party of the excluded who paid the price of the economic crisis.
That was the economic background for the growing split between the "peace camp" and the "nationalist camp." The peace camp wanted a post-colonial system, with a Palestinian elite groomed and fattened by Israel ruling over Palestine under Israeli and US tutelage. Such a system would maintain Israeli dominance by benefiting two groups, first, the Palestinian business elite, and second, Israel's global business elite, who would enjoy access to the Arab world as well as participate as investor in various labor intensive industries that could be set under the new regime. The plan had three losers, first, the majority of Palestinians, whose interests were not taken in consideration. Second, the Israeli army, who would lose budgets as one of its major functions were to be "outsourced" to a Palestinian militia, not to mention the devastating impact of regional peace on its institutional fortunes. And third, the majority of Israelis whose fortunes were left to the "trickle down" theory of economics: they will benefit from the scraps as rich Israelis become richer.
The second plan was offered by Likud, which involves maintaining direct military rule and intensifying colonization by transforming the occupation into an unofficial welfare system, with high municipal budgets, government and contractor jobs, free land, subsidized mortgage, transportation etc, for Israeli Jews from the periphery. The biggest winner of this plan was the army, the second winner were the less affluent Israelis who suffered from privatization. The big losers were of course Palestinians. The affluent classes of Israel, whose dreams of a "new Middle East" had to be scaled down, was not happy, but its losses were sweetened by the fact that this scheme allowed the privatization and globalization of the Israeli economy to proceed for a relatively small price, (for them, since the price was paid by the Palestinians)
Likud won. Not only it won the elections, but its pressure forced Labor government to accept the compromise. Globalization and privatization for Tel-Aviv, welfare through settlements for the rest. Thus the occupation, instead of being farmed out to a Palestinian business class as the Oslo plan was, was kept in military hands and used to the benefit of a growing settlement population, business class and administrative class of Jews.
The reason Likud won is fairly simple. The "nationalist plan" offered something to everybody with a vote, while also satisfying the interests of the dominant class, and concentrated the losses among those who have no say in the system--Palestinians. The "peace camp" was good for the dominant classes, and also for a potential new Palestinian elite, but it ignored the interests of most Israelis who do vote.
That story has to be told together with the impact of rhetoric, the forces of nationalist identification, religious revival, etc. but those are fairly known, so I restrict myself here to tell the story of the economic background, which is mostly unknown.
September 21, 2009 6:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
if there is a two-state solution agreement, who will implement it in on the ground in israel?
if obama pushes hard for a two-state (he won't) and netanyahu agrees (he won't), there will be a civil war in israel between the settlers, many of whom are in the army with a messianic fever, and the secular army and the secular jews.
see this BBC report The Rise of Israel's Military Rabbis and you will see that a two-state solution will never happen.
the israeli army is transforming itself into a jihad army. the israeli jihadists in the army are obeying 'god'. if the command is given by the secular command structure to dismantle the settlements, who do you think the jihadists will obey? 'god' or the secular general?
BDS
September 21, 2009 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink