Fractured

Thursday, 29th January 2009

Bernard Avishai - an analyst I wish I'd discovered years ago - has an article in Prospect on the faultlines at the heart of the Middle East conflict:

Most people know, roughly, that Palestine is two entities: a West Bank majority, nominally led by the Palestinian Authority—but really by a secular business and professional class in Ramallah—and an Islamist minority, centred in Gaza, run by an arguably pragmatic but unarguably totalitarian Hamas. What we have yet to learn, however, is that Israel is two entities also. There is a slim secular majority, a Hebrew-speaking republic centred in Tel Aviv that profits increasingly from links with the outside world. This Israel is hawkish about security, but opposed to annexing occupied territory. It is comparatively highly educated and cosmopolitan, vaguely committed to democratic norms and therefore to a peace process. It can imagine a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one.
But then, set against this, you have Israel's second state. This is not the one-fifth Arab minority who might never accept a Jewish state. Instead, since 1967 Israel's Zionist settlement policies and laws privileging orthodoxy have engendered a huge Judean state-within-a-state: anchored in Jerusalem, largely theocratic, and deeply implicated in the ongoing West Bank settlements. Judea is less educated than its Hebrew cousin and instinctively more tribalist. Judeans are largely wards of the state. Most see peace—that is, a return of two million Palestinian refugees to Greater Jerusalem—as the end of their way of life.
Only through understanding the fundamental divides on both sides can President Obama break the deadlock. In Palestine, the West Bank elites want to undermine Hamas, but refuse to fight Hamas supporters for fear of benefiting Israel. Secular Israelis, meanwhile, will not fight the Judeans for fear of benefiting the Palestinians. Both groups of moderates fear the loss of social solidarity with their own side, and so moderate leaders are stuck. Years of vendettas make cynicism about peace sound smart and brave. And given that a quarter of children who entered Israeli schools in 2008 are Arabs, and another quarter are ultra-orthodox of various kinds, it is easier to anticipate a future of ethnic cleansing than of quiet.

The magazine also has a must-read by Adam LeBor on the ambivalent outlook of the country's Arab minority:

Perhaps fiction can best deal with the paradoxes of life as an Arab citizen of Israel. Sayed Kashua is an Israeli Arab columnist for the leftist daily Ha'aretz and a prize-winning novelist, writing in Hebrew. His novel Let it be Morning is set in an Arab Israeli village which is suddenly surrounded by Israeli tanks. Phones are cut off, the roads blocked. Nobody knows why. The village turns on its Palestinian guest workers. They are stripped to their underwear and forced towards the Israeli lines. Several are shot. Food and water supplies start to run out. Then the reason for the blockade is revealed: Israel and the Palestinians have signed a peace deal, and the village is to be ceded to Palestine in a territory swap. Yet the news brings not joy but horror; the villagers accuse the Jews of betraying them. And this is no exaggeration—as a poll conducted in 2008 showed, 77 per cent of Arab Israelis would rather live in the Jewish state than anywhere else.