Mutual fear and mistrust denying Palestinians a state

It is an axiom in negotiations that those who are especially good at the job have an ability to place themselves in the shoes of the people with whom they are negotiating: to understand why they think as they think, do what they do, say what they say.

This ability gives such negotiators two advantages. First, they know what offers and concessions to make, within their powers, that will sway the opposition. Second, they can identify useful weak points in the other side’s case.

A criticism often leveled at Israel is that its political leaders appear to be willfully ignorant of the genuine anger and frustration of the Palestinian people. It is not that they hear it and choose to ignore it: it is that they do not understand it in the first place.

Quite why this should be so is difficult to comprehend. Few Palestinian victims of the Nakba remain, but their descendants do, and the trauma of 750,000 people being driven from their homes and land at gunpoint has been passed down through families for more than 75 years. Nor did it end there. Successive generations have endured, at the hands of the Israeli state, systematic repression, subjugation, humiliation and denial of their nationality to an extent suffered by no other people on Earth for such an extended period of time. The catastrophe of 1948, and the oppressive military occupation and land grabs that succeeded it, are a collective trauma that defines the Palestinian identity: how could anyone — especially Jews, with their own long history of persecution — not grasp that?

So, the criticism of Israel is fair: you would be looking at Benjamin Netanyahu for a long time before “empathy” was the word that sprang to mind. Uncomfortably for many in the Middle East, however, there are also few people in this region who truly comprehend what it means to be Jewish. And that is just as debilitating as Israeli blindness to Palestinian pain.

A criticism often leveled at Israel is that its political leaders appear to be willfully ignorant of Palestinians’ genuine anger

Ross Anderson

Some of my best friends are Jewish, mostly in London, where I lived and worked for 20 years. In the British capital, the Jewish community, insofar as such a thing can be said to exist, is varied and diverse. It ranges from the 15,000 or so strictly Orthodox Hasidic Jews strolling the streets of Stamford Hill in North London in their quaintly traditional dress and hairstyles, to the slightly less committed who observe Jewish rituals and holidays but not the whole demanding lifestyle, to the completely secular bordering on atheist who are nevertheless deeply proud of their ethnicity and heritage.

Aside from their Jewishness, obviously, and the fact they are far removed from their fellow Jews in Israel and the Occupied Territories, all these people have one thing in common: they live in permanent, abject fear that something awful is going to happen to them because they are Jews. As with Palestinians and the Nakba, every Jew has been told stories by relatives who survived the Holocaust, or about other less fortunate relatives who did not. These stories do not inspire optimism about the benevolence of the human race. I have one friend in particular whose grandmother lived through the horrors of Auschwitz and achieved a healthy old age. But until the day she died, she kept a fully packed suitcase under her bed in case there was a knock on the door in the middle of the night and she had to flee before it all kicked off again.

The same friend believes that the chant of “From the river to the sea” heard at pro-Palestinian marches is an open threat to murder every Jew, beginning in Israel and then everywhere else. There is no point in telling him that this is not true, and that his fear is irrational; no point in telling him that he is safer in London than he currently would be in the country created, ironically, as a safe refuge for Jews; no point because the rational part of him already knows these things — but the irrational part, the visceral genetic memory, does not.

There are two significant differences between the Jewish experience and the Palestinian one. The first is the baseless nature of Jewish fear: Jews in Europe and America are not about to be murdered in their beds, the Holocaust will not happen again, and there is no realistic “existential threat to the state of Israel” — however much Netanyahu bangs on about it. Palestinian fear, on the other hand, is very much grounded in fact: you need only look at the daily death toll in Gaza and the organized violence of settlers in the West Bank to understand why.

Collectively, the ‘achievement’ of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Netanyahu in the past year has been to widen the mutual trust deficit

Ross Anderson

The other difference is that, while Palestinians were in no way responsible for the slaughter of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, the state of Israel is wholly responsible for the murder of countless Palestinians over the past seven decades — with the tacit connivance of a largely apathetic world.

Despite these differences, the mutual trust deficit remains: and, collectively, the “achievement” of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Netanyahu in the past year has been to widen it, ensuring that no meaningful steps on the path toward Palestinian self-determination can be taken for at least a generation. After the Hamas attack last October, no Israeli Jew alive today would countenance the creation of a Palestinian state on their doorstep. In a situation awash with irony, a prominent one is that, before Hamas’ butchery, the laid-back liberal Jews of southern Israel were more likely than most to entertain the concept of living in harmony with their Palestinian neighbors, for the good reason that many already did. Not any longer.

On the other side, Netanyahu’s vengeful bloodlust masquerading as self-defense in Gaza and Lebanon, and the assassination of the very people with whom Israel was supposed to be negotiating, guarantee that no sane Palestinian will sit round the table with Mossad for fear that their interlocutor will pull out a Glock and blow their head off.

It is self-evident, or should be, that Israel will never achieve safety, stability and a healthy relationship with its Arab neighbors (plus the bonus of shooting Iran’s fox) without a pathway toward a viable Palestinian state: and that, although external powers may have a role to play, only Israelis and Palestinians can take the first steps. Mutual fear and mistrust are not a good place to start.

• Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News.