Nickdfresh
06-02-2007, 12:14 PM
Forty years on
May 24th 2007 | JERUSALEM
From The Economist (http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9222979) print edition
The aftermath of the war of 1967 has been a story of squandered opportunities and deepening divisions among Israelis and Palestinians alike
http://www.economist.com/images/20070526/2107EB1.jpg
Getty Images
WITH the damp of a rainstorm still hanging in the evening air, a human wave bore down on Jerusalem's old city from the west, engulfing the cool stone walls in a blue-and-white sea. Chanting, dancing and waving flags, thousands of young Israelis celebrated the capture of the ancient capital with a symbolic re-enactment—flowing through its narrow alleys towards the Western Wall, as Israeli troops did on June 7th 1967.
May 16th, the day that the “reunification” of Jerusalem fell this year by the Jewish calendar, was the day Israel marked the 40th anniversary of its greatest ever military victory, when it crushed three Arab armies and took control of nearly three times its own landmass in just six days. Like those conquering troops, this year's rejoicers wore a uniform, albeit of a different kind: casual clothes and skullcaps for the men, long skirts for the women. Other than religious Zionists, that subset (about a fifth) of Israeli Jews who believe that settling as much as possible of “Greater Israel” is a religious duty, few Israelis today think that Israel's finest hour left it with a lot worth celebrating. Many of the rest are as likely to see its capture of land and subsequent occupation as a tragedy for Israel.
The Palestinians who watched the march quietly from the sidelines, kept at a safe distance by police, have had still more cause to mourn. Just as the war made Jews the world over feel vindicated after 19 years of precarious statehood, the reunification of historic Palestine—Israel, Gaza and the West Bank—under Israeli rule seemed to give the Palestinians a chance to get their own struggle for a state back on track. Yet since then both societies have fractured to the point that their internal conflicts sometimes eclipse the one they have with the other side. And in the meantime a dispute over land has acquired the harsh absolutes of a religious conflict.
Many of the participants, historians now argue, were reluctant to go to war. Israel's leaders did not then believe in the doctrine of “strategic depth”, protection through holding more territory; that came later. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, had been cranking up the rhetoric about destroying Israel in an effort to maintain his position as a “pan-Arab” leader, but in reality kept warning his allies that Israel was still too strong to be attacked. Jordan's King Hussein had held secret talks with Israeli officials, who felt it in their interest to prop up his regime.
The main tensions were with Syria, which competed with Israel for the scarce waters of the Jordan river and supported raids on it by Palestinian guerrilla movements. Among these was the Fatah organisation, headed by a young engineer called Yasser Arafat, who argued that what would liberate Palestine was not Arab government talking-shops—such as the puppet Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) that the Arab League had created in 1964—but an armed struggle waged by the Palestinians themselves. The Israeli army under its hot-headed chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, also deliberately provoked the Syrians in an escalating series of clashes, and at one point Israel threatened to invade.
Syria appealed to Nasser, who had signed a defence pact with it. He ordered troop deployments in the Sinai and closed the Red Sea to Israeli shipping, hoping that this would get his allies off his back. Instead, it pushed Israel into launching a pre-emptive strike. Even so, Levi Eshkol, the prime minister, opposed it for two weeks. He caved in to pressure from the army only after a threat by some parties to quit the governing coalition forced him to bring the hawkish Moshe Dayan (pictured above) on board as defence minister.
Reading the historical accounts today, one wonders what the government commission that recently slammed Israeli politicians and generals for their rashness in launching last summer's war in Lebanon would have made of 1967. It was a war prompted by a gung-ho military (see article), a misreading of the enemy's intentions and political expediency; a huge gamble that stretched Israel's forces to the very limit, and could have destroyed the country had it failed.
No wonder Israelis were relieved and proud. But their feelings went deeper. The Holocaust had left many Jews with a crisis of faith: how could a caring God allow such a tragedy? The triumph in 1967 gave them reason to believe again. “For Jewry to be envied: that is a change indeed,” concluded The Economist's dispatch from Jerusalem that week (see article).
The fact that the West Bank was home to the major biblical sites—the old city of Jerusalem, the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, Rachel's tomb in Bethlehem—added to the sensation of a divine guiding hand. “Der Judenstaat”, the seminal tract by Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, is usually mistranslated as “The Jewish State” rather than “The Jews' State”, but now the mistranslation became apt. In the words of Michael Oren, an Israeli historian, the war “confronted the state of Israel with its Jewishness”.
That gave religious Zionism new credibility. Young idealists went out to the West Bank to put up impromptu settlements, which the army at first dismantled. But the rest of the country's interests quickly fell into line with theirs. The West Bank offered aquifers and made a good security buffer; it and the Gaza Strip provided cheap Palestinian labour and housing land; and building new Jewish neighbourhoods around East Jerusalem was a way for Israel to consolidate its hold on the holy city. It was two decades before the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, made mainstream Israelis question the wisdom of holding on to the occupied territories.
For some Palestinians, meanwhile, 1967 seemed like a gift. Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank could suddenly meet again after 19 years apart, although the million or so refugees outside were now cut off from them. It was easier to campaign against occupation by the Zionist enemy than by their Arab brethren. Moreover, Nasser had used the Palestinians' plight as a convenient rallying-cry to unite the Arab world around his leadership. The war's abject failure discredited pan-Arabism, allowing Arafat to bring the Palestinian cause itself to centre stage. Soon he was able to take over the PLO and step up the use of direct, violent attacks on Israel, taking Nasser's place as the leader that Arabs everywhere admired.
However, the war had longer-lived repercussions that ultimately made things more complex. One was a wider geopolitical shift. The key to Israel's victory, a massive aerial assault that destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground, was accomplished with French Mystère and Mirage fighter-bombers. Today the backbone of its combat force is American F-15s and F-16s. Only after the war did the United States sign its first big arms deal with Israel; today it supplies some $2.5 billion a year in military aid. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, cut off ties with Israel and strengthened them with the Arab world. Israel's success also galvanised diaspora Jewry, giving rise to the strong “Jewish lobby” in America and to the “refusenik” movement in the Soviet Union. By turning the refusal of exit visas for Soviet Jews into a political issue, it helped keep Jews there from assimilating. But the cold war, hitherto a fight for influence in Europe and Latin America, had now acquired a Middle Eastern axis, and Jews and Arabs were at its centre.
A second change was that, even as the war proved Israel's military deterrence, it made deterrence obsolete. Instead of tackling Israel head-on, its neighbours concentrated ever more on sponsoring proxies that entangled the army in the terrible complexities of guerrilla warfare, where victory is impossible to define and the combatants are hard to separate from civilians. Israel's last conventional war, and last clear victory (albeit at a heavy cost), was in 1973. Today it fights Iran and Syria through Hizbullah in Lebanon and various militant groups in Gaza. Last summer it launched campaigns on both fronts that killed many hundreds of innocents but could not wipe out the enemy. The idea that “strategic depth” of territory can protect the country has also taken a beating from Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles in the first Gulf war, from Gaza's and Hizbullah's rockets, and now from the impending menace of an Iranian nuclear missile. The army is getting an overhaul after the Lebanon debacle, but even the best-trained army cannot destroy the kinds of threats Israel faces today.
Third, the collapse of pan-Arabism left an ideological vacuum. It was partly filled by political Islamism, with its dream not merely of a single Arab state but of a united Islamic society or umma, run along the guidelines of Islamic law. As the new ideology took hold it spun off radical interpretations that came to threaten the region's existing regimes. Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979 was its first notable success. And in 1987 the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian franchise was reborn as the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and began its long path to taking control of the Palestinian cause. Hamas is to the Palestinians what the settlers are to Israel: it believes that the land was consecrated to Muslims by God, and is not negotiable.
Divide and misrule
Forty years of conflict have convinced most Palestinians and Israelis that they are best off separating into two states. Yet they seem incapable of getting there.
Though most Israelis have come to accept that the Palestinians should have independence, most still think they are not automatically entitled to it, but first need to earn it by providing Israeli security. For their part, though most Palestinians are willing to let Israel exist if it leaves them alone, most think armed struggle of some sort is justified as long as it continues to occupy their land and kill suspected militants and innocent bystanders alike. Neither side has ever had a leadership willing to override those views.
In the meantime the Israeli settlements that dot the West Bank like holes in a Swiss cheese keep growing. The measures that protect them from Palestinian extremists, such as special settler-only roads and hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks, stifle the West Bank's economy and drive even more Palestinians to extremism.
On top of this, the attrition of the conflict has left the two societies deeply divided. On the Israeli side, the chronic instability of the governments elected in its system of proportional representation makes them hostage to minority interests, and the settlers are one of the most determined and organised minorities in the country. Their politicians can forge alliances with other groups, such as the growing ultra-Orthodox factions, who used to be wary of Zionism but are ever more pro-settler, and secular nationalists, many of whom immigrated from the debris of the Soviet Union and share with the settlers a dislike of Arabs.
Young settlers are just as militant as their parents were a generation ago, setting up small West Bank outposts and resisting their dismantlement in fierce, well-publicised mass protests. Israel's pull-out of the settlements in Gaza in 2005, which seemed at the time to have broken the settlers' spirit, now appears to have left them more united and emboldened. And the interface between ultra-Orthodoxy and religious Zionism has spawned a new breed of young settlers known as hardal (a Hebrew acronym that also means “mustard”), who are more fanatical than ever.
On the Palestinian side, the 1967 war laid one slow-burning fuse by cutting off Gaza and the West Bank from the rest of the Arab world. That turned Arafat and his cronies into a leadership in exile. They grew so detached from the Palestinians under Israeli rule that the first intifada in 1987 took them completely by surprise. Hamas took advantage to claim some of the credit for that popular uprising. Arafat and company were allowed back after signing the Oslo peace accords with Israel in 1993. But in trying to impose a system of authority based on loyalty to himself, he created a lasting rift in Fatah between his “outside” people and younger local leaders. Corrupt and unpopular, Fatah could not even produce a united list for last year's Palestinian election. That played a large role in Hamas's landslide victory.
To complicate matters further the Oslo accords, which gave the Palestinians in the occupied territories partial autonomy, and the second, much bloodier intifada in 2000, which prompted Israel to pull out of Gaza and put up its barrier in the West Bank, have fragmented the Palestinians even more than they were before Israel occupied them. Today Gaza is nearly cut off to visitors, and residents can get in and out only sporadically, via Egypt. Visas for Palestinians outside to visit the West Bank are getting harder to come by. None but a select few from the occupied territories can visit Israel, and Palestinians who live in Israel are finding it increasingly difficult to visit the territories. Those who live in refugee camps in neighbouring countries have always been isolated—they cannot return to Palestine, they are often stateless and their host countries impose a variety of restrictions ranging from the annoying to the oppressive.
That has heightened the differences in Palestinian society. The urban, urbane elite in the West Bank look down on the more Islamist denizens of Gaza and scratch their heads in disbelief at the deadly factional violence there; some still recall with a shudder how a wave of Gazans (“sharks”, as one Ramallah resident calls them) arrived in the West Bank seeking work in the 1990s. The Palestinians in Jerusalem, who have held Israeli residence permits since 1967 but considered themselves a cut above the rest long before that, look down on the occupied ones. The cosmopolitan, progressive Palestinians from northern Israel who hold Israeli citizenship look down on the conservative, clannish Jerusalemites. And everyone else treats the Palestinian-Israelis as suspicious collaborators because their grandparents did not flee in 1948.
Reuters More divided than ever
Political agendas have diverged too. Hamas is much more powerful in Gaza, and even within Hamas the West Bankers are more willing to hint at a compromise with Israel than the Gazans. Refugees, especially those “outside”, cleave to their “right of return” more fiercely than Palestinians in Palestine. “If they all come here we have a big problem too, not just the Israelis,” confides the (Hamas) mayor of one West Bank town.
Since Arafat's death in 2004, the leadership has fragmented, and not just between Hamas and Fatah. Hamas's exiled chief, Khaled Meshal, is frequently at odds with leaders in Gaza. Meanwhile, as the peace process has faded, Palestinians living in Israel have adopted a more local agenda, campaigning against discrimination that they suffer in the Jewish state, and for an internal right of return to their ancestors' villages that has nothing to do with the return of refugees from abroad.
The general erosion of political authority, especially in Gaza, has created a power vacuum that clan chieftains and criminal bosses have been quick to fill. The lawlessness is fertile soil for jihadi extremists. These are anathema to the other Palestinian factions, which do not want to be dragged into the West's war with al-Qaeda. In Gaza such extremist groups are a tiny fringe, often probably no more than façades for criminals. But they have taken a stronger hold in some of the more desperate refugee camps abroad (see article).
War and peace
Today, the most positive spin on the 1967 war is that it paved the way for peace between Israel and its neighbours. Defeat made the Arabs begin to accept that the Jewish state could not be destroyed. The end of the dream of a pan-Arab state forced them to deal with Israel one-on-one. The lands that it had captured gave them something to negotiate over. The return of the Sinai to Egypt in 1982 set the example. Peace with Jordan followed in 1994. Talks with Syria came close to success in 2000. Finally, 35 years after those historic six days, the Arab world did the equivalent of admitting defeat. In 2002 the 22 members of the Arab League offered Israel full normalisation of relations in return for a full withdrawal from the territories captured in 1967, and repeated their offer earlier this year.
But as tends to happen in the Middle East, events had already been overtaken by other events. The Arab League's first offer came at the blood-soaked height of the second intifada; its reiteration found both Israeli and Palestinian politics at new lows of divisiveness and desperation. Israel now sees itself as fighting not just 200m Arabs but 1.2 billion Muslims, armed with weapons it cannot resist and an ideology it cannot counter. Palestinians feel that a viable state is practically impossible, so deeply has Israel encroached on their land and dismembered their society. Like many wars, 1967 created opportunities. A shame that everyone has squandered them.
http://www.economist.com/images/20070526/CFB900.gif
May 24th 2007 | JERUSALEM
From The Economist (http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9222979) print edition
The aftermath of the war of 1967 has been a story of squandered opportunities and deepening divisions among Israelis and Palestinians alike
http://www.economist.com/images/20070526/2107EB1.jpg
Getty Images
WITH the damp of a rainstorm still hanging in the evening air, a human wave bore down on Jerusalem's old city from the west, engulfing the cool stone walls in a blue-and-white sea. Chanting, dancing and waving flags, thousands of young Israelis celebrated the capture of the ancient capital with a symbolic re-enactment—flowing through its narrow alleys towards the Western Wall, as Israeli troops did on June 7th 1967.
May 16th, the day that the “reunification” of Jerusalem fell this year by the Jewish calendar, was the day Israel marked the 40th anniversary of its greatest ever military victory, when it crushed three Arab armies and took control of nearly three times its own landmass in just six days. Like those conquering troops, this year's rejoicers wore a uniform, albeit of a different kind: casual clothes and skullcaps for the men, long skirts for the women. Other than religious Zionists, that subset (about a fifth) of Israeli Jews who believe that settling as much as possible of “Greater Israel” is a religious duty, few Israelis today think that Israel's finest hour left it with a lot worth celebrating. Many of the rest are as likely to see its capture of land and subsequent occupation as a tragedy for Israel.
The Palestinians who watched the march quietly from the sidelines, kept at a safe distance by police, have had still more cause to mourn. Just as the war made Jews the world over feel vindicated after 19 years of precarious statehood, the reunification of historic Palestine—Israel, Gaza and the West Bank—under Israeli rule seemed to give the Palestinians a chance to get their own struggle for a state back on track. Yet since then both societies have fractured to the point that their internal conflicts sometimes eclipse the one they have with the other side. And in the meantime a dispute over land has acquired the harsh absolutes of a religious conflict.
Many of the participants, historians now argue, were reluctant to go to war. Israel's leaders did not then believe in the doctrine of “strategic depth”, protection through holding more territory; that came later. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, had been cranking up the rhetoric about destroying Israel in an effort to maintain his position as a “pan-Arab” leader, but in reality kept warning his allies that Israel was still too strong to be attacked. Jordan's King Hussein had held secret talks with Israeli officials, who felt it in their interest to prop up his regime.
The main tensions were with Syria, which competed with Israel for the scarce waters of the Jordan river and supported raids on it by Palestinian guerrilla movements. Among these was the Fatah organisation, headed by a young engineer called Yasser Arafat, who argued that what would liberate Palestine was not Arab government talking-shops—such as the puppet Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) that the Arab League had created in 1964—but an armed struggle waged by the Palestinians themselves. The Israeli army under its hot-headed chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, also deliberately provoked the Syrians in an escalating series of clashes, and at one point Israel threatened to invade.
Syria appealed to Nasser, who had signed a defence pact with it. He ordered troop deployments in the Sinai and closed the Red Sea to Israeli shipping, hoping that this would get his allies off his back. Instead, it pushed Israel into launching a pre-emptive strike. Even so, Levi Eshkol, the prime minister, opposed it for two weeks. He caved in to pressure from the army only after a threat by some parties to quit the governing coalition forced him to bring the hawkish Moshe Dayan (pictured above) on board as defence minister.
Reading the historical accounts today, one wonders what the government commission that recently slammed Israeli politicians and generals for their rashness in launching last summer's war in Lebanon would have made of 1967. It was a war prompted by a gung-ho military (see article), a misreading of the enemy's intentions and political expediency; a huge gamble that stretched Israel's forces to the very limit, and could have destroyed the country had it failed.
No wonder Israelis were relieved and proud. But their feelings went deeper. The Holocaust had left many Jews with a crisis of faith: how could a caring God allow such a tragedy? The triumph in 1967 gave them reason to believe again. “For Jewry to be envied: that is a change indeed,” concluded The Economist's dispatch from Jerusalem that week (see article).
The fact that the West Bank was home to the major biblical sites—the old city of Jerusalem, the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, Rachel's tomb in Bethlehem—added to the sensation of a divine guiding hand. “Der Judenstaat”, the seminal tract by Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, is usually mistranslated as “The Jewish State” rather than “The Jews' State”, but now the mistranslation became apt. In the words of Michael Oren, an Israeli historian, the war “confronted the state of Israel with its Jewishness”.
That gave religious Zionism new credibility. Young idealists went out to the West Bank to put up impromptu settlements, which the army at first dismantled. But the rest of the country's interests quickly fell into line with theirs. The West Bank offered aquifers and made a good security buffer; it and the Gaza Strip provided cheap Palestinian labour and housing land; and building new Jewish neighbourhoods around East Jerusalem was a way for Israel to consolidate its hold on the holy city. It was two decades before the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, made mainstream Israelis question the wisdom of holding on to the occupied territories.
For some Palestinians, meanwhile, 1967 seemed like a gift. Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank could suddenly meet again after 19 years apart, although the million or so refugees outside were now cut off from them. It was easier to campaign against occupation by the Zionist enemy than by their Arab brethren. Moreover, Nasser had used the Palestinians' plight as a convenient rallying-cry to unite the Arab world around his leadership. The war's abject failure discredited pan-Arabism, allowing Arafat to bring the Palestinian cause itself to centre stage. Soon he was able to take over the PLO and step up the use of direct, violent attacks on Israel, taking Nasser's place as the leader that Arabs everywhere admired.
However, the war had longer-lived repercussions that ultimately made things more complex. One was a wider geopolitical shift. The key to Israel's victory, a massive aerial assault that destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground, was accomplished with French Mystère and Mirage fighter-bombers. Today the backbone of its combat force is American F-15s and F-16s. Only after the war did the United States sign its first big arms deal with Israel; today it supplies some $2.5 billion a year in military aid. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, cut off ties with Israel and strengthened them with the Arab world. Israel's success also galvanised diaspora Jewry, giving rise to the strong “Jewish lobby” in America and to the “refusenik” movement in the Soviet Union. By turning the refusal of exit visas for Soviet Jews into a political issue, it helped keep Jews there from assimilating. But the cold war, hitherto a fight for influence in Europe and Latin America, had now acquired a Middle Eastern axis, and Jews and Arabs were at its centre.
A second change was that, even as the war proved Israel's military deterrence, it made deterrence obsolete. Instead of tackling Israel head-on, its neighbours concentrated ever more on sponsoring proxies that entangled the army in the terrible complexities of guerrilla warfare, where victory is impossible to define and the combatants are hard to separate from civilians. Israel's last conventional war, and last clear victory (albeit at a heavy cost), was in 1973. Today it fights Iran and Syria through Hizbullah in Lebanon and various militant groups in Gaza. Last summer it launched campaigns on both fronts that killed many hundreds of innocents but could not wipe out the enemy. The idea that “strategic depth” of territory can protect the country has also taken a beating from Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles in the first Gulf war, from Gaza's and Hizbullah's rockets, and now from the impending menace of an Iranian nuclear missile. The army is getting an overhaul after the Lebanon debacle, but even the best-trained army cannot destroy the kinds of threats Israel faces today.
Third, the collapse of pan-Arabism left an ideological vacuum. It was partly filled by political Islamism, with its dream not merely of a single Arab state but of a united Islamic society or umma, run along the guidelines of Islamic law. As the new ideology took hold it spun off radical interpretations that came to threaten the region's existing regimes. Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979 was its first notable success. And in 1987 the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian franchise was reborn as the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and began its long path to taking control of the Palestinian cause. Hamas is to the Palestinians what the settlers are to Israel: it believes that the land was consecrated to Muslims by God, and is not negotiable.
Divide and misrule
Forty years of conflict have convinced most Palestinians and Israelis that they are best off separating into two states. Yet they seem incapable of getting there.
Though most Israelis have come to accept that the Palestinians should have independence, most still think they are not automatically entitled to it, but first need to earn it by providing Israeli security. For their part, though most Palestinians are willing to let Israel exist if it leaves them alone, most think armed struggle of some sort is justified as long as it continues to occupy their land and kill suspected militants and innocent bystanders alike. Neither side has ever had a leadership willing to override those views.
In the meantime the Israeli settlements that dot the West Bank like holes in a Swiss cheese keep growing. The measures that protect them from Palestinian extremists, such as special settler-only roads and hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks, stifle the West Bank's economy and drive even more Palestinians to extremism.
On top of this, the attrition of the conflict has left the two societies deeply divided. On the Israeli side, the chronic instability of the governments elected in its system of proportional representation makes them hostage to minority interests, and the settlers are one of the most determined and organised minorities in the country. Their politicians can forge alliances with other groups, such as the growing ultra-Orthodox factions, who used to be wary of Zionism but are ever more pro-settler, and secular nationalists, many of whom immigrated from the debris of the Soviet Union and share with the settlers a dislike of Arabs.
Young settlers are just as militant as their parents were a generation ago, setting up small West Bank outposts and resisting their dismantlement in fierce, well-publicised mass protests. Israel's pull-out of the settlements in Gaza in 2005, which seemed at the time to have broken the settlers' spirit, now appears to have left them more united and emboldened. And the interface between ultra-Orthodoxy and religious Zionism has spawned a new breed of young settlers known as hardal (a Hebrew acronym that also means “mustard”), who are more fanatical than ever.
On the Palestinian side, the 1967 war laid one slow-burning fuse by cutting off Gaza and the West Bank from the rest of the Arab world. That turned Arafat and his cronies into a leadership in exile. They grew so detached from the Palestinians under Israeli rule that the first intifada in 1987 took them completely by surprise. Hamas took advantage to claim some of the credit for that popular uprising. Arafat and company were allowed back after signing the Oslo peace accords with Israel in 1993. But in trying to impose a system of authority based on loyalty to himself, he created a lasting rift in Fatah between his “outside” people and younger local leaders. Corrupt and unpopular, Fatah could not even produce a united list for last year's Palestinian election. That played a large role in Hamas's landslide victory.
To complicate matters further the Oslo accords, which gave the Palestinians in the occupied territories partial autonomy, and the second, much bloodier intifada in 2000, which prompted Israel to pull out of Gaza and put up its barrier in the West Bank, have fragmented the Palestinians even more than they were before Israel occupied them. Today Gaza is nearly cut off to visitors, and residents can get in and out only sporadically, via Egypt. Visas for Palestinians outside to visit the West Bank are getting harder to come by. None but a select few from the occupied territories can visit Israel, and Palestinians who live in Israel are finding it increasingly difficult to visit the territories. Those who live in refugee camps in neighbouring countries have always been isolated—they cannot return to Palestine, they are often stateless and their host countries impose a variety of restrictions ranging from the annoying to the oppressive.
That has heightened the differences in Palestinian society. The urban, urbane elite in the West Bank look down on the more Islamist denizens of Gaza and scratch their heads in disbelief at the deadly factional violence there; some still recall with a shudder how a wave of Gazans (“sharks”, as one Ramallah resident calls them) arrived in the West Bank seeking work in the 1990s. The Palestinians in Jerusalem, who have held Israeli residence permits since 1967 but considered themselves a cut above the rest long before that, look down on the occupied ones. The cosmopolitan, progressive Palestinians from northern Israel who hold Israeli citizenship look down on the conservative, clannish Jerusalemites. And everyone else treats the Palestinian-Israelis as suspicious collaborators because their grandparents did not flee in 1948.
Reuters More divided than ever
Political agendas have diverged too. Hamas is much more powerful in Gaza, and even within Hamas the West Bankers are more willing to hint at a compromise with Israel than the Gazans. Refugees, especially those “outside”, cleave to their “right of return” more fiercely than Palestinians in Palestine. “If they all come here we have a big problem too, not just the Israelis,” confides the (Hamas) mayor of one West Bank town.
Since Arafat's death in 2004, the leadership has fragmented, and not just between Hamas and Fatah. Hamas's exiled chief, Khaled Meshal, is frequently at odds with leaders in Gaza. Meanwhile, as the peace process has faded, Palestinians living in Israel have adopted a more local agenda, campaigning against discrimination that they suffer in the Jewish state, and for an internal right of return to their ancestors' villages that has nothing to do with the return of refugees from abroad.
The general erosion of political authority, especially in Gaza, has created a power vacuum that clan chieftains and criminal bosses have been quick to fill. The lawlessness is fertile soil for jihadi extremists. These are anathema to the other Palestinian factions, which do not want to be dragged into the West's war with al-Qaeda. In Gaza such extremist groups are a tiny fringe, often probably no more than façades for criminals. But they have taken a stronger hold in some of the more desperate refugee camps abroad (see article).
War and peace
Today, the most positive spin on the 1967 war is that it paved the way for peace between Israel and its neighbours. Defeat made the Arabs begin to accept that the Jewish state could not be destroyed. The end of the dream of a pan-Arab state forced them to deal with Israel one-on-one. The lands that it had captured gave them something to negotiate over. The return of the Sinai to Egypt in 1982 set the example. Peace with Jordan followed in 1994. Talks with Syria came close to success in 2000. Finally, 35 years after those historic six days, the Arab world did the equivalent of admitting defeat. In 2002 the 22 members of the Arab League offered Israel full normalisation of relations in return for a full withdrawal from the territories captured in 1967, and repeated their offer earlier this year.
But as tends to happen in the Middle East, events had already been overtaken by other events. The Arab League's first offer came at the blood-soaked height of the second intifada; its reiteration found both Israeli and Palestinian politics at new lows of divisiveness and desperation. Israel now sees itself as fighting not just 200m Arabs but 1.2 billion Muslims, armed with weapons it cannot resist and an ideology it cannot counter. Palestinians feel that a viable state is practically impossible, so deeply has Israel encroached on their land and dismembered their society. Like many wars, 1967 created opportunities. A shame that everyone has squandered them.
http://www.economist.com/images/20070526/CFB900.gif