Reading Between, Over, Around the Lines...

Tricky business, following the news out here. For instance, there was a story today saying a deal between Hamas and the Israelis to release captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit--who has been held in Gaza since last June--in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners was very nearly completed. And there was a story yesterday saying that Hamas would agree to a long-term "hudna," or truce, if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, which means abandoning all settlements and turning over East Jerusalem.

These stories have appeared, with slight alterations, numerous times over the past few months, or let's say the past year. Each time, they become a conversation piece, "Hey, did you hear that...?" But they don't really mean anything, at least not in the transformative sense that one might hope for. The little steps, the propositions, the thru-the-media negotiations, they have aspects of posturing, aspects of theater, aspects of a still ongoing feeling out process. Though I suppose it's preferable to the negotiation-by-violent-act that is one manner in which the two sides--or rather the various and numerous sides--communicate.

In part, these statements don't mean much because the leadership couldn't deliver on them even if they wanted to. Khaled Mashal, Hamas's headman in Damascus, was in Tehran the other day reassuring the Iranians that Hamas would never recognize Israel. That's a message for the core constituency, a message delivered like a fund-raising pitch to a benefactor from the representative of an outfit that needs to keep money flowing in (and from an individual whose own influence within the group increases when he controls the purse strings).

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert doesn't have a whole lot of wiggle room either. I mentioned earlier that I don't much trust polls, but there was a pretty notable one here today, one that asked respondents to name the politician they found most trustworthy. Olmert got two percent of the vote. Two. (Which put him five percentage points behind the equally besieged Defense Minister, Amir Peretz, chairman of the Labor Party, who learned a few days earlier that he is very likely to lose his chairman's post to either one of two rivals the next time the Party has internal elections.) If peace is the goal, then bold steps are necessary. But bold steps in a political environment such as this can only be taken from a position of strength. When survival is the goal, bold steps are foolish. So they are not made. They are also not made, or even tried, if peace is not the goal. And, in some minds, that could well be the case.

The head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, gave a briefing the other day for a number of foreign correspondents. Quite interesting. We learned that the head of the Shin Bet wears jeans to work, but beyond that, in addition to sharing certain things that he wanted to share--that some Hamas members are going outside the Gaza Strip to get training from Iranian agents, that President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party is in total disarray, that he believes Hamas takes the long view of this struggle, putting greater emphasis on its existence as a movement than on its position in the government, making any talk of a truce purely tactical--he clearly demonstrated that he expected the current situation, the often-violent-but-not-as-violent-as-its-been-in-the-past atmosphere, to continue for some time. He did not sound like someone who thought serious negotiations would happen any time soon, in part, he said, because there's no one who can make the necessary steps to create the right conditions. He was talking about the Palestinian leadership. He might as well have been talking about the Israelis as well (more on this soon) and the Bush administration, too, for that matter.

There might well be a fair number of people who think that a state of conflict, marked often by violence and at times death, is the natural state of things here, that endless cycles of mutual antagonism, persecution, and victimization is how its supposed to be, a kind of prophecy foretold. At one point, Diskin said that the Shin Bet dealt with "capabilities," meaning responding to what the other side could actually do. Why they did it, the motivations, that's not their writ. That, he said, was up to the politicians to deal with. There's been little of late to indicate any of that is happening, on either side, or any side, despite any glimmer of hope that might pop up in the papers. These leaders aren't the people who can make the good stories--the ones about deals and truces and all that--come true, at least not now.
--Phil Zabriskie/Jerusalem