Hope Flickering for Palestinian Peace-Seekers

The months of violent confrontations in the Mideast have left many moderate Palestinians, key to any renewal of a meaningful peace process, embittered, politically weakened and less willing to compromise.

Palestinians who have met with Israelis for years in grass-roots peace efforts say they cannot do so now, after Israel’s West Bank offensive, and with the government’s declaration Wednesday that it will recapture Palestinian-held lands and keep them indefinitely.

“I am too angry now, and my heart is too full,” said Fadwa abu Laban, 36, a coordinator for Palestinian women’s issues in Bethlehem who has taken part in dialogue sessions with Israelis for more than a decade. “I cannot think about contacting people on the other side.”

Even those who remain open to meetings with Israelis say it is hard now to express such views in public. Recent polls show Palestinians increasingly supporting violence over talks as the way to end the Israeli occupation and achieve political goals.

“For a time, people like me could sell our views of a peaceful resolution,” said Manuel Hassassian, a Bethlehem University political scientist who has met frequently with Israeli officials over the years. “But how can you keep talking about peace when everyone around you is in a mood for war?”

Israel launched the massive sweep through the West Bank in March after a series of deadly Palestinian attacks on Israelis. The offensive formally ended last month when the army withdrew from Bethlehem, one of six Palestinian cities it had reoccupied. But tensions remain high, with almost daily Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas to hunt for militants.

And on Wednesday, the day after a suicide bomber in Jerusalem killed 19 people besides himself, the Israeli government announced that it will seize Palestinian territory and stay there “as long as terror continues.”

For 21 months, since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising, Israelis and Palestinians have fought each other in an all-but-declared war. Palestinian suicide bombers blow themselves up in malls, markets and buses, killing and wounding Israeli civilians. Israel responds with raids into West Bank communities, and Palestinian civilians are injured and killed.

But the toll from the mounting violence now seems likely to reach beyond each society’s grief over its latest victims and shock at the scope of the destruction. What is at risk, many say, is the hope of reaching a real peace for the foreseeable future, as moderates on both sides lose faith.

Many Palestinians who believed most strongly in the land-for-peace deals at the heart of the defunct Oslo accords are now the most bitter at their failure. They are disillusioned that the years of negotiations produced neither peace nor an end to the occupation. And they are angry over Israel’s reentry into Palestinian-held areas.

Some express a sense of almost personal betrayal.

What “has been destroyed in this [Israeli] campaign is people like me, the Palestinian peace camp,” Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian Cabinet minister and senior peace negotiator, said. “You can rebuild a school or a water or sewage network. But how do you rebuild hope in the minds of the people?”

A former political science professor who is a member of the Palestinian parliament, Erekat said he is now so associated with the failure of the Oslo talks that “people want me to go home.”

He predicted that if the Palestinians were to hold elections now, he would get far fewer votes than the 58% he won in 1996.

“People like me, we’re the liberal middle class. Who believes us any more?” Erekat said. Eight years ago, Erekat said, he persuaded his daughter, then 12, to join Seeds of Peace, the program to help children from conflict-ridden regions learn to live together. Now, he sometimes wonders, to what end?

The majority of the West Bank remains under Israeli control, as it has since 1967. Under the Oslo process, Israel transferred authority over the big cities and nearby villages to the Palestinians but kept most of the land, including roads, water sources, Jewish settlements and military bases. After years of incremental progress, Erekat asked, “Am I going to find out that all I’ve done is reorganize the Israeli occupation?”

The months of renewed fighting have radicalized Palestinian society, with polls showing declining support for the peace process.

In addition, many more Palestinians now say they approve of the use of violence against Israelis, even civilians. In a poll published this month, 68% of those surveyed said they supported suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, up from about 26% three years ago.

“The majority has abandoned the position that negotiations are the most effective means” to end the occupation and achieve Palestinian statehood, political analyst Khalil Shikaki said.

The human bonds built up slowly, painfully, over many years are fraying.

A Palestinian association of nongovernmental organizations, for instance, recently called on its 92 members to halt all joint projects with Israelis.

For those still willing to pursue such contacts, the logistical challenges alone are enormous. New roadblocks, checkpoints and unpredictable violence mean that Palestinians often cannot meet with Israelis even when they want to.

Other constraints are societal.

“Some activists want to continue their work,” said Akram Attallah, who coordinates joint projects in the West Bank for a Norwegian nongovernmental agency. “But on the Palestinian side, people define you as a traitor now if you’re working with Israelis.”

The hostility is so great, Attallah said, that even his own children, influenced by the atmosphere at school, shocked their parents recently by cheering when they heard of an attack inside Israel. “We have had some debates about this in the family,” he said. “We don’t want them to go this way.”

In the Dahaisha refugee camp on the southern outskirts of Bethlehem, Fadwa and Saleh abu Laban have met frequently with left-wing Israelis since 1991, when Saleh served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid peace conference.

The Abu Labans have marched with Israelis in peace rallies, met them in dialogue groups and hosted them in their home, a cinder-block structure on one of the camp’s narrow alleys. They came to think of a few as friends, people who shared their vision of a peaceful Middle East and of two states, Israel and Palestine, side by side.

Yet in the wake of the Israeli offensive, including a near-constant curfew in Bethlehem and recent incursions into the camp itself, the Abu Labans say they feel angry and betrayed, not least by their contacts on the Israeli left.

“They didn’t do anything for us, to try to stop this situation,” Fadwa said. “We don’t make these meetings [with Israelis] just for the social relations. We don’t need the politics. We do it because we think it helps us reach peace. But what did it do?”

Saleh, 48, who served time in prison for an attack on Israeli soldiers when he was 15, underwent a dramatic evolution as he reached adulthood, becoming an outspoken advocate for a negotiated solution to the conflict. But recent months have hardened his views.

Today, he and his wife say they still believe in the land-for-peace formula enshrined in the Oslo accords and will continue to work with Israelis who share those goals. But, like many Palestinians, Saleh these days also strongly defends what he calls the Palestinian right to resist the Israeli occupation, by violence if necessary.

“This is a fundamental right under international law,” he says, cradling his 2-year-old son. “It shouldn’t be looked at as a weird idea to resist the occupation.”

The Abu Labans and other Palestinians also say they are disillusioned at how the Oslo process worked, and at the prevailing view, in Israel and the United States, that the Palestinians refused an extraordinary offer at Camp David in July 2000.

“Jerusalem was not solved, the refugee issue was not solved, the settlements were not solved,” Saleh said. “It did not give Palestinians control of any borders.... The water underground would not belong to the Palestinians, and the sky above would not. What kind of state is that?”

Across the sprawling camp, Mohammed Lahham, another former prisoner and longtime peace advocate, was similarly despondent.

Not long ago, during the Oslo process, peace seemed within reach, said Lahham, head of popular committees for all West Bank refugee camps. He worked hard to build a concept of peace in the camps, teaching young Palestinians in particular about the longing for peace that also exists in Israel.

But now, he said, with radicalism on the rise, he expects more attacks by Palestinians and more incursions by Israel. “We cannot talk about peace in the near future,” he said. “No one will listen.”

But even as most Palestinians take a step back from contacts with Israelis, a few continue to reach out.

Samia Khoury, 67, a longtime community volunteer from the Jerusalem village of Beit Hanina, was overcome by tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers recently as she and other Palestinians demonstrated with Israeli activists at a checkpoint near her home.

A board member of the Palestinian Christian group Sabeel, which promotes nonviolent resistance to the occupation, Khoury said such joint efforts are difficult now but have become even more essential.

“We’re all angry, we’re all hurt now,” she said. “But Israelis and Palestinians, we’re both victims of this occupation and we should not be quiet. It is our voices, the peace voices, that should be heard.”

Khoury said she will continue to work with Israeli organizations and to participate in the tiny demonstrations at the checkpoint.

Ultimately, she said, Israelis and Palestinians “are destined to live side by side. The Israelis are not going to transfer us anywhere, and we’re not going to throw them into the sea. The sooner we resolve this, the more lives will be spared.”

Trounson was recently on assignment in Israel and the West Bank. Special correspondent Maher Abukhater contributed to this report from Ramallah, West Bank.