It is nearly one year since 7th October and—words I have written before but still can’t quite believe—the Gaza war is still happening and hostages are still being held in the Strip. The grim data accumulates. Just this week: 19 killed in an Israeli strike on a tent camp in a humanitarian zone in Gaza; six killed in Israeli army raids in the West Bank; Israeli strikes on central and southern Lebanon; two Israeli soldiers killed in an army helicopter crash in Rafah; an Israeli critically wounded in a truck-ramming attack in the West Bank. Polio has been discovered Gaza’s sewage. Israel is still not allowing foreign media to enter the Strip.
It has been one year since 7th October and months of, so far, fruitless diplomacy. The last hostage, prisoner exchange and ceasefire deal was agreed in November. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the press and the public with a map (from which the Green Line was conspicuously absent) to explain why Israeli soldiers need to stay in the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow, nine-mile strip of land along the Egypt-Gaza border. Control of this territory was transferred to Egyptian and Palestinian authorities when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and Israel regained control in May. Israeli presence there is a dealbreaker for Hamas. Netanyahu pulled his map stunt the week after Hamas had killed six Israeli hostages, some of whom were on the list for release under the truce deal that has so long been in the works.
The months of diplomacy have been so fruitless that, on 16th August, the US, Egypt and Qatar published a joint statement urging both sides to just accept the truce deal already. As their communiqué implied, neither Hamas nor the Netanyahu government has done everything in their power to make an agreement happen.
Words like “hope” seem cheap in the context of this year of blood. There have been some glimmers of it, though, in people still able to see humanity on both sides of this conflict, or the work of groups such as Standing Together, which unites Jews and Arabs in direct action, or in the partnership of Abu Aziz Sarah and Maoz Inon, a Palestinian and an Israeli travelling the world with a message of peace. The former lost his brother in Israeli detention; the latter lost his parents on 7th October. They show that the crucial mutual recognition of pain is possible, even now, even after all of this.
And what of negotiations? What of an agreement that might one day end these decades of war? At a seminar I recently attended, two members of Israeli centre-left parties spoke as if the very idea was practically irrelevant after 7th October. For a decade at least, perhaps longer, no Israeli (Jew, was the subtext) would want to hear about anything as preposterous as peace.
And yet, Israel’s 12th prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and a former Palestinian foreign minister, Dr Nasser Alkidwa, have gone public with a joint initiative for peace. The pair “agreed to work together”, says a document dated 17th July that both co-signed, “to promote the achievement of peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and peace in the Middle East in general through an agreement… on the basis of 1967 borders”. On Sunday, Olmert told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that the conflict is at an inflection point: “It’s time to change direction.”
Olmert and Alkidwa are calling for an immediate ceasefire, hostage release and prisoner exchange deal, the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza, and the creation of a Council of Commissioners, linked to the Palestinian Authority, to administer Gaza and rebuild the Strip. They also call for Palestinian elections within 36 months, a donor conference for Gaza, a temporary Arab security presence that would work with Palestinian forces to ensure stability, and they endorse the “territorial solution” presented by Olmert to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, which included land swaps of 4.4 per cent of the disputed territory and the division of Jerusalem.
As Zakaria put it to the pair on his show on Sunday, public support for compromise has only been dwindling. In Israel, parties of the left have haemorrhaged votes in the most recent elections. “The whole point of the exercise,” however, “is to build hope”, veteran hostage negotiator Gershon Baskin, who has been putting this together behind the scenes with Samer Sinjilawi, chair of the Jerusalem Development Fund, told me.
The intervention had been months in the making. Baskin originally approached Olmert before 7th October. He asked him whether it would be possible to close the gap between him and Abbas from all those years ago. Olmert’s political life began on the right-wing of Israeli politics, in Netanyahu’s Likud party, but he ended up in the centre. A former mayor of Jerusalem, Olmert followed the former PM Ariel Sharon into a new party, Kadima, in 2005. Sharon formed the party in order to carry out Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, a move unpopular with much of the right. In 2006, Olmert became acting prime minister when Sharon suffered a stroke, and he went on to win an election and form his own government. Olmert’s career ended with convictions on various counts of bribery, breach of trust and tax evasion. The former PM was fined and spent time in prison.
Baskin approached him, he told me, because Olmert is the Israeli leader who has come closest to peace with the Palestinians. If they could find a Palestinian partner, an agreement between them wouldn’t change reality, necessarily, but it could give Israelis and Palestinians something they desperately need: “a belief that this conflict can be resolved.”
With Olmert on board, Sinjilawi and Baskin brainstormed ideas for a Palestinian counterpart. Alkidwa, nephew of Yasser Arafat, a former foreign minister and permanent observer at the UN, seemed right. He was legitimate, respected, not corrupt, and probably brave enough to do it. The pair “hit it off”, says Baskin.
The two worked out their positions over a series of online meetings. One of these, on 8th June, was a conversation hosted by Prospect, a transcript of which was published in our summer issue. An edited recording was released on the Prospect Podcast. Throughout that conversation, the two men were able to listen to each other, despite disagreeing on key issues and basic facts of the conflict.
Olmert and Alkidwa’s document isn’t a detailed plan. It isn’t a peace agreement, and neither man is in a position, now, to put it into practice. But they have started to take it to foreign ministers. They have met with Josep Borrell, vice-president of the European Commission, and have plans to meet with more foreign ministers, in the UAE, Germany, Spain and Britain. They also hope to address the EU’s monthly meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels when it next takes place. At a ministerial meeting of the League of Arab States in Cairo on 10th September, Borrel said the joint initiative was exactly the kind of “attempts at dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis” that Europe and the Arab states need to facilitate. There will be a series of op-eds soon, too, in the English, Hebrew and Arabic press, and launch events in Israel and Palestine.
It was hard to set up a public conversation between an Israeli and a Palestinian political figure, especially during this war. The Palestinians in particular did not want to share a platform with an Israeli. This week, I asked Alkidwa why he agreed to do it in the first place. “Because we ran out of options,” he said, “and this massacre and this situation has to end.”
Neither are under any illusion that the current Israeli or Palestinian leadership will take up their outline for a future negotiation. On Sunday, CNN’s Zakaria asked Olmert if he was planning to re-enter politics. Olmert declined to discuss his personal plans (in politician speak: yes, he is, but likely not with a view to becoming PM). Alkidwa has similar intentions. “I don’t have the urge for power,” he told me. “Maybe I was lucky in life to understand that there are more important things than power, but I won’t run away from it if I’m needed.”
Before going public, a draft of the document was leaked. There was positive response in Fatah circles, as well as criticism, including of Alkidwa for presuming to represent the Palestinians instead of Abbas (which, Baskin explains, is not the intention at all).
In the Hebrew media, some are commenting that finally they have something to hope for, says Baskin. Others say that says Olmert is not a legitimate figure, because of his convictions and time in prison. Others see him as the only Israeli leader with “a vision and a way out of our mess”.
Since the CNN interview, there has been other criticism in the Palestinian press, too, that the plan enables Israeli annexation of the West Bank and the judaising of Jerusalem. But this, says Alkidwa, is a minority view. He believes that Palestinians, including in Gaza, can get behind his and Olmert’s vision. The critics are “a small minority,” he said. “It doesn’t count. What really counts is public support.”
