Palestine’s new US-trained policemen at a ceremony in Ramallah in 2008
It was in April this year that my old friend Kan’an called me. “Something is happening here. You must come and have a look. Rafidiya is coming alive again.” The Rafidiya quarter is part of Nablus, the largest city in the northern West Bank. The quarter is home to its upper classes, its budding bourgeoisie and one of the largest universities in the West Bank. Before the lights went out in spring 2002, Rafidiya’s boulevard was the best shopping and dining stretch in the whole of the Palestinian territories.
To get there I had to pass an Israeli checkpoint on foot and squeeze into a yellow collective taxi on the other side. I introduced myself to my fellow passengers: “Please tell me what has been happening here lately, with you and with the economy.” The first time I dared to make such a declaration, many years ago, I winced with embarrassment. In Sweden, where I live, a request like this from a stranger would be met with awkward silence. But in Palestine, within seconds I was in the midst of a heap of complaints, tragedies, rumours, and pleas for help, while the cab rolled and spun wildly along the teeming road. The detachment of the young driver was impressive. To him the children, fowl and donkeys in our way seemed no more real than the obstacles in a computer game.
Such reckless driving is a hot issue in Nablus. Frequent taxi accidents often lead to clan blood feuds, and it is a measure of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s fearlessness that he has begun to set up speed traps. Fayyad is a strange politician in this part of the world, seemingly not content with siphoning public assets into his relatives’ bank accounts. He believes in changing things, one student tells me with awe. In Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital further south, the government is routinely cursed, but its leader is usually exempt, and even called bayad, the term for a chicken that lays many eggs.
Fayyad’s competence is much resented by the old-school, pocket-stuffing, back-door dealers of the Fatah movement. But the effect he has had on Nablus is remarkable. The town’s revival, and in particular the overhaul of its police force by the US general Keith Dayton, has been little reported in the western media. But it is a giant step forward for the people of this region and the first move to reverse the devastating effects of the violence that derailed the peace process in 2000.
I met up with Kan’an Jamal at the Baqalewi tea house in Nablus’s old city. “We are like mice peeking out of their holes after a long, evil night,” he said. He is a trader of hyssop, a herb known as za’atar. Mixed with olive oil and accompanied by pitta bread, it is the staple diet in hard times. Kan’an’s village, Asira, a few miles north of Nablus, is the olive oil capital of Palestine. By the old yardstick, which measured wealth in acres and barrels of olive oil, his family was well off. But after Israeli clampdowns in 2002, they went hungry for the first time in living memory. First the Israelis forbade them to sell their oil outside the village. Then Palestinian bureaucrats helped them to get the oil out and sold it, but kept the money.
The last time I was in Nablus, in early 2008, Israeli commandos were firing missiles inside the kasbah, at what they believed to be a rocket factory. (Palestinian rockets are normally associated with the Gaza Strip. None have yet been fired against Israel from the West Bank, although there have been attempts to produce them.) Yet this time, in spring 2009, there was a sense of relief in the air. Merchants spoke at normal volume, standing beside their carts with huge tomato towers and pumpkin pyramids. Instead of looking over their shoulders, shoppers scrutinised each vegetable for blemishes, the way they have always done. I didn’t hear a single shot during our five-hour visit, nor on subsequent visits.
***
This was in contrast to my visit in early 2007. Returning to the middle east after many years in Latin America, I intended to spend the afternoon lounging in a coffee house in the old kasbah soaking up the atmosphere. It was not to be. At dusk the old town resounded with shots and cries, while from the mountains came the rumblings of Israeli helicopter cannons. Gangs clashed in the bazaar, and in the gutters of Butcher’s Lane the blood of humans mixed with that of sheep. Nablus is the market hub of the region. But where it once had been busy, good-natured and scenic, it was now an ongoing Tarantino movie. Mothers prayed while waiting for their children to return from school. No one served or ordered coffee outdoors and shop-owners scurried home before dark.
What had happened? In September 2000, the Oslo peace process broke down with the start of the second Palestinian uprising. Then, in spring 2002, Israel launched a military offensive to destroy the regular Palestinian forces. At that time Palestinian security had been carved up by Yasser Arafat into a dozen or more services, none powerful enough to defy him and all indebted to him via client-patron networks. As Arafat lost control, his armed power reverted to familiar patterns of clan, family, refugee camp and neighbourhood. The unofficial units—the al-Aqsa Brigades, Fatah Hawks and Tanzim militia—also regrouped and dug in where they could, often led by local strongmen of doubtful ideological purity.
Some of these groups continued to confront the Israelis. Many died or were jailed. But others tired of fighting a better-armed enemy and turned their weapons against easier prey. Local interests replaced the lofty aims of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, and there was soon a bewildering free-for-all. Gangs formed, dissolved and reassembled in amoeba-like fashion. At one point in 2004 there were four groups in Nablus claiming to be the real Fatah. Elsewhere, Islamist groups moonlighted as robbers, and robbers masqueraded as Islamists. The locals lost interest in such distinctions and gave them the collective name of zu’aran, bad guys.
In short, the area’s policing broke down. There was little business, no investment and no order. Roaming gangs would extort protection dues from merchants. If intimidating or bribing constables was not enough, the thugs would enter courtrooms and shoot judges in the legs. War-torn Ramallah was on track for recovery in 2006, but as Nablus tore itself apart it began to lose its significance in Palestinian politics.
Nightly incursions of Israeli troops looking for militants didn’t help. Today Nablus’s alleys are plastered with the resulting martyr posters. Many of the photos of young men in keffiyehs brandishing AK-47s have been photoshopped to appear in close embrace with Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and others. But some images are of robbers and racketeers styled as guerillas and patriots. As I toured the arched lanes of Nablus’s old city this year with a university lecturer, he spat at the ground and shook his head at the garish memorials. “The richer the crook, the more glorious the announcement.”
Abu Jabal was one small-time boss who rose after Arafat’s fall. One day in 2007, he entered an electronics shop near the kasbah and pointed out items he liked. “He said they were for a cousin who was getting married,” the owner told me. Jabal and his ilk won prestige and support by helping the needy and playing rich uncle to friends, relatives and clients. But as the shopkeeper wrote out a bill, Jabal’s brow darkened. “Deliver, or be sorry,” he said, and left. When the shop owner didn’t, a burst of automatic fire was sprayed at his storefront every day. After a month he gave in. “The business started to go. People knew they might get shot if they entered my shop.”
Abu Jabal’s gang also attacked charities and local radio stations. A few policemen wanted to confront them, but their superiors refused to let them return fire. Some policemen resigned in disgust. The merchants and dignitaries of Nablus sent delegations to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, imploring him to act. The shopkeepers, meanwhile, began to buy guns. “I got one,” says Farid, who runs a plant nursery. “Not that I hoped to fight them off, but so that they’d know I was armed and pick on the next guy.”
***
Barely two years later the scene at Za’adunat, an outdoor restaurant along the Rafidiya boulevard, was tranquil. Two matrons in traditional dress puffed contentedly at their hubbly-bubblies. Their children sipped tamarind juice and jostled on the terrace. Above the ravine, where Nablus lies wedged between the mountains Ebal and Gerizim, an orange moon rose like a paper lantern.
Keeping watch over us that evening were policemen in dapper, navy-blue uniforms. Palestinian security men traditionally look like their Egyptian, Jordanian or even Israeli peers, depending on which surplus warehouse has handed down their kit. But these new Palestinian police officers had American gear. They are sometimes known as Dayton soldiers, after General Dayton. His work began in May 2005, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accepted, without much enthusiam, President Bush’s plan to rebuild the Palestinian Authority. This being the Bush era, each rebuilt area of government was meant to be part of the plan to fight terrorism. But this justification was enough, and six months later Dayton set out to overhaul the fragmented and battered Palestinian forces.
His first goal was to find better people. All new police applicants were screened by the CIA, the Israel Security Agency, the Jordanians and the Palestinian services to weed out potential criminals, Islamists and troublemakers. The new cadets were then trained in Jordan, and later in Palestinian-run Jericho on the West Bank. In the summer of 2008, Israel finally allowed the first Dayton battalion into Jenin, the most chaotic and violent city on the West Bank, and the one hardest hit in the 2002 Israeli offensive. It was a success.
But Dayton’s achievement is limited and fragile. Many Palestinians resent being policed by a force chosen, trained, dressed and paid for by the US and co-ordinated with the Israelis. And the policing improvement is both a cause and consequence of an economic revival that could easily be snuffed out. (The standard of living in the West Bank is still lower than a decade ago, and even if Israel further lifts its restrictions on movement, real income per capita in 2012 will still be about 20 percent below its 2000 level.) Yet most people in Nablus shrug off objections to the Dayton cops. They do everything the police should do. They fight crime. They chase crooks. They treat people with civility. As of yet, I have found no instance of any of them angling for baksheesh (bribes) or protection money.
This is all the more surprising given the dismal history of Palestinian policing. During the first uprising against Israel, from 1987 to 1991, Palestinian policemen serving in the Israeli police force—which at that time policed the West Bank—were branded as collaborators. Most were forced to resign. Israeli border police, with their rougher ways, took over until the Oslo agreements were implemented in 1994-95. At that point tens of thousands of policemen came back from exile in Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere, returning to local adulation.
But the joy was brief. Many of Arafat’s policemen had come of age in the alleys of Beirut and Tunis. Few had any notion of the rule of law, and many sought to boost their earnings. The tangled mess of Arafat’s competing security services was clumsily grafted on top of clan rivalries, well-oiled customs and sheikh-run informal courts. They had no local knowledge and no awareness of local sensibilities. In the West Bank villages, where justice is upheld in traditional ways and crime rare, they brought more trouble than they prevented.
Political will is not enough to combat violence and corruption. Improved policing usually takes generations. But, even though General Dayton’s solution for West Bank security is a temporary fix, it is still a remarkable turnaround. To get out of a swamp you must hold on to something outside it, and the Americans provided the handle. But the difficulties were still formidable. The challenge was to ease out the former, largely corrupt, generation of armed personnel without them sabotaging the process. The solution that Dayton and Abbas decided on was to send the old guard into retirement with generous pensions. An important part of the foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority is now set aside for this purpose.
Some still don’t like the policing strategy. Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human rights activist, feels that paying off the old cops compromises the scheme, creating a “bought order” which precludes truly independent governance. The president’s own Fatah party don’t like them much; their opportunities for influence-peddling and graft are curtailed by the sweep of the new broom. Hamas supporters have also been hounded by the new forces, so have reason not to like them. But for ordinary people, daily life has been transformed.
So why has this good news been kept quiet? Part of the blame lies with the media itself. Dashed hopes and plummeting economic curves are what most reporters and readers expect from the West Bank. And just as Nablus’s bloody decline was too complicated, drawn-out and dangerous to attract much coverage, so its resurrection has been mostly ignored too. But a more interesting explanation lies in a regional conspiracy of silence. We don’t know about the good news from Nablus because (as John Deverell noted in Prospect, September 2009) none of the parties involved have an interest in telling us. Recent optimism has been greeted by quite a few sour faces. Israeli hardliners know their argument against Palestinian self-rule will weaken if law and order prevails. Anti-Israeli groups feel that recognition of improvements will let Israel off the hook for harassment at military roadblocks, and for violence against Palestinian farmers by settlers. And the PA is far from beating its chest in pride— aware of its own dependence on foreign aid, it fears that any fanfare would dampen the generosity of donor nations.
Yet you can’t argue with the results. During the violent period Nablus’s three cinemas shut, both because of Islamist opposition and because people were broke and didn’t venture out. In July, one of them reopened in a new shopping centre. There have been threats and calls for a boycott, but it flourishes and doesn’t censor French kisses or naked legs. A month before, I was in Nablus on a Saturday. Dozens of Israeli buses were parked around the old city. The kasbah and the Rafidiya restaurants were packed with Israeli Arabs. When I returned in October, it was to the barely believable sight of a contingent of Israeli Jews, arriving by bus from Haifa. Entering Palestinian territories is a criminal offence for Israelis. But there have been no attacks, shootings and attempts to kidnap or denounce the visitors. The alleys of the Nablus kasbah have changed from a dark netherworld to a tourist attraction.
Of course, the middle east is not Narnia. Even when things seem to be going in the right direction there are always obstacles. In October, the UN’s Goldstone report accused Israel of war crimes during its operations in Gaza in early 2009, and in November President Abbas, frustrated by the lack of progress, announced he would not stand for reelection. But Dayton himself is most aware of this precarious path to peace. He has acknowledged that his policies are contrary to the declared aims—and even more to the undeclared ones—of Israel’s government. As he made clear in a candid speech this May, his young recruits are only superficially there to create law and order. Their real task is to lay the groundwork for a Palestinian state, which they are not yet doing. “With big expectations come big risks,” he said. “There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you’re creating a state, when you’re not.”
***
As long as Washington keeps pushing for peace, the Dayton men will retain their standing. But if the US withdraws, the enemies of the Abbas-Fayyad government will find it easier to undermine the new forces. Peace depends in part on the issue of Israeli settlements. Frenetic shuttle diplomacy by US envoy George Mitchell has yet to overcome Israel’s unwillingness to cease building settlements in the West Bank. President Obama realised that the cost of a freeze would be an ugly clash with Netanyahu and backed off earlier this year. This was a huge setback to the Palestinian government in Ramallah. Hamas, Iran and other foes have scorned Abbas and labelled him as a puppet since his handshake with Netanyahu in September. To deflect criticism, Abbas has had to heap abuse on Israel.
Time will tell if Obama was unwise to get off Netanyahu’s back. The Israeli prime minister has painted his refusal to scrap the settlements as a victory against US arm-twisting. But the country’s poor international standing makes it more dependent on its friends than ever. Obama is quietly showing the Israelis that what was taken for granted during the Bush years is no longer there for free. The Dayton reforms have thus far hung on Abbas’s regime; now that Abbas is not standing for re-election, there is more than ever at stake—not least for the tea-house keepers of Nablus
It was in April this year that my old friend Kan’an called me. “Something is happening here. You must come and have a look. Rafidiya is coming alive again.” The Rafidiya quarter is part of Nablus, the largest city in the northern West Bank. The quarter is home to its upper classes, its budding bourgeoisie and one of the largest universities in the West Bank. Before the lights went out in spring 2002, Rafidiya’s boulevard was the best shopping and dining stretch in the whole of the Palestinian territories.
To get there I had to pass an Israeli checkpoint on foot and squeeze into a yellow collective taxi on the other side. I introduced myself to my fellow passengers: “Please tell me what has been happening here lately, with you and with the economy.” The first time I dared to make such a declaration, many years ago, I winced with embarrassment. In Sweden, where I live, a request like this from a stranger would be met with awkward silence. But in Palestine, within seconds I was in the midst of a heap of complaints, tragedies, rumours, and pleas for help, while the cab rolled and spun wildly along the teeming road. The detachment of the young driver was impressive. To him the children, fowl and donkeys in our way seemed no more real than the obstacles in a computer game.
Such reckless driving is a hot issue in Nablus. Frequent taxi accidents often lead to clan blood feuds, and it is a measure of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s fearlessness that he has begun to set up speed traps. Fayyad is a strange politician in this part of the world, seemingly not content with siphoning public assets into his relatives’ bank accounts. He believes in changing things, one student tells me with awe. In Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital further south, the government is routinely cursed, but its leader is usually exempt, and even called bayad, the term for a chicken that lays many eggs.
Fayyad’s competence is much resented by the old-school, pocket-stuffing, back-door dealers of the Fatah movement. But the effect he has had on Nablus is remarkable. The town’s revival, and in particular the overhaul of its police force by the US general Keith Dayton, has been little reported in the western media. But it is a giant step forward for the people of this region and the first move to reverse the devastating effects of the violence that derailed the peace process in 2000.
I met up with Kan’an Jamal at the Baqalewi tea house in Nablus’s old city. “We are like mice peeking out of their holes after a long, evil night,” he said. He is a trader of hyssop, a herb known as za’atar. Mixed with olive oil and accompanied by pitta bread, it is the staple diet in hard times. Kan’an’s village, Asira, a few miles north of Nablus, is the olive oil capital of Palestine. By the old yardstick, which measured wealth in acres and barrels of olive oil, his family was well off. But after Israeli clampdowns in 2002, they went hungry for the first time in living memory. First the Israelis forbade them to sell their oil outside the village. Then Palestinian bureaucrats helped them to get the oil out and sold it, but kept the money.
The last time I was in Nablus, in early 2008, Israeli commandos were firing missiles inside the kasbah, at what they believed to be a rocket factory. (Palestinian rockets are normally associated with the Gaza Strip. None have yet been fired against Israel from the West Bank, although there have been attempts to produce them.) Yet this time, in spring 2009, there was a sense of relief in the air. Merchants spoke at normal volume, standing beside their carts with huge tomato towers and pumpkin pyramids. Instead of looking over their shoulders, shoppers scrutinised each vegetable for blemishes, the way they have always done. I didn’t hear a single shot during our five-hour visit, nor on subsequent visits.
***
This was in contrast to my visit in early 2007. Returning to the middle east after many years in Latin America, I intended to spend the afternoon lounging in a coffee house in the old kasbah soaking up the atmosphere. It was not to be. At dusk the old town resounded with shots and cries, while from the mountains came the rumblings of Israeli helicopter cannons. Gangs clashed in the bazaar, and in the gutters of Butcher’s Lane the blood of humans mixed with that of sheep. Nablus is the market hub of the region. But where it once had been busy, good-natured and scenic, it was now an ongoing Tarantino movie. Mothers prayed while waiting for their children to return from school. No one served or ordered coffee outdoors and shop-owners scurried home before dark.
What had happened? In September 2000, the Oslo peace process broke down with the start of the second Palestinian uprising. Then, in spring 2002, Israel launched a military offensive to destroy the regular Palestinian forces. At that time Palestinian security had been carved up by Yasser Arafat into a dozen or more services, none powerful enough to defy him and all indebted to him via client-patron networks. As Arafat lost control, his armed power reverted to familiar patterns of clan, family, refugee camp and neighbourhood. The unofficial units—the al-Aqsa Brigades, Fatah Hawks and Tanzim militia—also regrouped and dug in where they could, often led by local strongmen of doubtful ideological purity.
Some of these groups continued to confront the Israelis. Many died or were jailed. But others tired of fighting a better-armed enemy and turned their weapons against easier prey. Local interests replaced the lofty aims of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, and there was soon a bewildering free-for-all. Gangs formed, dissolved and reassembled in amoeba-like fashion. At one point in 2004 there were four groups in Nablus claiming to be the real Fatah. Elsewhere, Islamist groups moonlighted as robbers, and robbers masqueraded as Islamists. The locals lost interest in such distinctions and gave them the collective name of zu’aran, bad guys.
In short, the area’s policing broke down. There was little business, no investment and no order. Roaming gangs would extort protection dues from merchants. If intimidating or bribing constables was not enough, the thugs would enter courtrooms and shoot judges in the legs. War-torn Ramallah was on track for recovery in 2006, but as Nablus tore itself apart it began to lose its significance in Palestinian politics.
Nightly incursions of Israeli troops looking for militants didn’t help. Today Nablus’s alleys are plastered with the resulting martyr posters. Many of the photos of young men in keffiyehs brandishing AK-47s have been photoshopped to appear in close embrace with Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and others. But some images are of robbers and racketeers styled as guerillas and patriots. As I toured the arched lanes of Nablus’s old city this year with a university lecturer, he spat at the ground and shook his head at the garish memorials. “The richer the crook, the more glorious the announcement.”
Abu Jabal was one small-time boss who rose after Arafat’s fall. One day in 2007, he entered an electronics shop near the kasbah and pointed out items he liked. “He said they were for a cousin who was getting married,” the owner told me. Jabal and his ilk won prestige and support by helping the needy and playing rich uncle to friends, relatives and clients. But as the shopkeeper wrote out a bill, Jabal’s brow darkened. “Deliver, or be sorry,” he said, and left. When the shop owner didn’t, a burst of automatic fire was sprayed at his storefront every day. After a month he gave in. “The business started to go. People knew they might get shot if they entered my shop.”
Abu Jabal’s gang also attacked charities and local radio stations. A few policemen wanted to confront them, but their superiors refused to let them return fire. Some policemen resigned in disgust. The merchants and dignitaries of Nablus sent delegations to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, imploring him to act. The shopkeepers, meanwhile, began to buy guns. “I got one,” says Farid, who runs a plant nursery. “Not that I hoped to fight them off, but so that they’d know I was armed and pick on the next guy.”
***
Barely two years later the scene at Za’adunat, an outdoor restaurant along the Rafidiya boulevard, was tranquil. Two matrons in traditional dress puffed contentedly at their hubbly-bubblies. Their children sipped tamarind juice and jostled on the terrace. Above the ravine, where Nablus lies wedged between the mountains Ebal and Gerizim, an orange moon rose like a paper lantern.
Keeping watch over us that evening were policemen in dapper, navy-blue uniforms. Palestinian security men traditionally look like their Egyptian, Jordanian or even Israeli peers, depending on which surplus warehouse has handed down their kit. But these new Palestinian police officers had American gear. They are sometimes known as Dayton soldiers, after General Dayton. His work began in May 2005, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accepted, without much enthusiam, President Bush’s plan to rebuild the Palestinian Authority. This being the Bush era, each rebuilt area of government was meant to be part of the plan to fight terrorism. But this justification was enough, and six months later Dayton set out to overhaul the fragmented and battered Palestinian forces.
His first goal was to find better people. All new police applicants were screened by the CIA, the Israel Security Agency, the Jordanians and the Palestinian services to weed out potential criminals, Islamists and troublemakers. The new cadets were then trained in Jordan, and later in Palestinian-run Jericho on the West Bank. In the summer of 2008, Israel finally allowed the first Dayton battalion into Jenin, the most chaotic and violent city on the West Bank, and the one hardest hit in the 2002 Israeli offensive. It was a success.
But Dayton’s achievement is limited and fragile. Many Palestinians resent being policed by a force chosen, trained, dressed and paid for by the US and co-ordinated with the Israelis. And the policing improvement is both a cause and consequence of an economic revival that could easily be snuffed out. (The standard of living in the West Bank is still lower than a decade ago, and even if Israel further lifts its restrictions on movement, real income per capita in 2012 will still be about 20 percent below its 2000 level.) Yet most people in Nablus shrug off objections to the Dayton cops. They do everything the police should do. They fight crime. They chase crooks. They treat people with civility. As of yet, I have found no instance of any of them angling for baksheesh (bribes) or protection money.
This is all the more surprising given the dismal history of Palestinian policing. During the first uprising against Israel, from 1987 to 1991, Palestinian policemen serving in the Israeli police force—which at that time policed the West Bank—were branded as collaborators. Most were forced to resign. Israeli border police, with their rougher ways, took over until the Oslo agreements were implemented in 1994-95. At that point tens of thousands of policemen came back from exile in Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere, returning to local adulation.
But the joy was brief. Many of Arafat’s policemen had come of age in the alleys of Beirut and Tunis. Few had any notion of the rule of law, and many sought to boost their earnings. The tangled mess of Arafat’s competing security services was clumsily grafted on top of clan rivalries, well-oiled customs and sheikh-run informal courts. They had no local knowledge and no awareness of local sensibilities. In the West Bank villages, where justice is upheld in traditional ways and crime rare, they brought more trouble than they prevented.
Political will is not enough to combat violence and corruption. Improved policing usually takes generations. But, even though General Dayton’s solution for West Bank security is a temporary fix, it is still a remarkable turnaround. To get out of a swamp you must hold on to something outside it, and the Americans provided the handle. But the difficulties were still formidable. The challenge was to ease out the former, largely corrupt, generation of armed personnel without them sabotaging the process. The solution that Dayton and Abbas decided on was to send the old guard into retirement with generous pensions. An important part of the foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority is now set aside for this purpose.
Some still don’t like the policing strategy. Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human rights activist, feels that paying off the old cops compromises the scheme, creating a “bought order” which precludes truly independent governance. The president’s own Fatah party don’t like them much; their opportunities for influence-peddling and graft are curtailed by the sweep of the new broom. Hamas supporters have also been hounded by the new forces, so have reason not to like them. But for ordinary people, daily life has been transformed.
So why has this good news been kept quiet? Part of the blame lies with the media itself. Dashed hopes and plummeting economic curves are what most reporters and readers expect from the West Bank. And just as Nablus’s bloody decline was too complicated, drawn-out and dangerous to attract much coverage, so its resurrection has been mostly ignored too. But a more interesting explanation lies in a regional conspiracy of silence. We don’t know about the good news from Nablus because (as John Deverell noted in Prospect, September 2009) none of the parties involved have an interest in telling us. Recent optimism has been greeted by quite a few sour faces. Israeli hardliners know their argument against Palestinian self-rule will weaken if law and order prevails. Anti-Israeli groups feel that recognition of improvements will let Israel off the hook for harassment at military roadblocks, and for violence against Palestinian farmers by settlers. And the PA is far from beating its chest in pride— aware of its own dependence on foreign aid, it fears that any fanfare would dampen the generosity of donor nations.
Yet you can’t argue with the results. During the violent period Nablus’s three cinemas shut, both because of Islamist opposition and because people were broke and didn’t venture out. In July, one of them reopened in a new shopping centre. There have been threats and calls for a boycott, but it flourishes and doesn’t censor French kisses or naked legs. A month before, I was in Nablus on a Saturday. Dozens of Israeli buses were parked around the old city. The kasbah and the Rafidiya restaurants were packed with Israeli Arabs. When I returned in October, it was to the barely believable sight of a contingent of Israeli Jews, arriving by bus from Haifa. Entering Palestinian territories is a criminal offence for Israelis. But there have been no attacks, shootings and attempts to kidnap or denounce the visitors. The alleys of the Nablus kasbah have changed from a dark netherworld to a tourist attraction.
Of course, the middle east is not Narnia. Even when things seem to be going in the right direction there are always obstacles. In October, the UN’s Goldstone report accused Israel of war crimes during its operations in Gaza in early 2009, and in November President Abbas, frustrated by the lack of progress, announced he would not stand for reelection. But Dayton himself is most aware of this precarious path to peace. He has acknowledged that his policies are contrary to the declared aims—and even more to the undeclared ones—of Israel’s government. As he made clear in a candid speech this May, his young recruits are only superficially there to create law and order. Their real task is to lay the groundwork for a Palestinian state, which they are not yet doing. “With big expectations come big risks,” he said. “There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you’re creating a state, when you’re not.”
***
As long as Washington keeps pushing for peace, the Dayton men will retain their standing. But if the US withdraws, the enemies of the Abbas-Fayyad government will find it easier to undermine the new forces. Peace depends in part on the issue of Israeli settlements. Frenetic shuttle diplomacy by US envoy George Mitchell has yet to overcome Israel’s unwillingness to cease building settlements in the West Bank. President Obama realised that the cost of a freeze would be an ugly clash with Netanyahu and backed off earlier this year. This was a huge setback to the Palestinian government in Ramallah. Hamas, Iran and other foes have scorned Abbas and labelled him as a puppet since his handshake with Netanyahu in September. To deflect criticism, Abbas has had to heap abuse on Israel.
Time will tell if Obama was unwise to get off Netanyahu’s back. The Israeli prime minister has painted his refusal to scrap the settlements as a victory against US arm-twisting. But the country’s poor international standing makes it more dependent on its friends than ever. Obama is quietly showing the Israelis that what was taken for granted during the Bush years is no longer there for free. The Dayton reforms have thus far hung on Abbas’s regime; now that Abbas is not standing for re-election, there is more than ever at stake—not least for the tea-house keepers of Nablus
