The Long Telegram

Ramallah, West Bank

I spent three months between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. I visited every major population center from Haifa (up) to Eilat (down). Mind you, this isn’t really hard to do considering I visited those last two cities over the span of one day. Most of the time, I was reporting from Jerusalem, but on the weekends, I tended to venture out on my own for video projects (coming soon) and photography. Nomenclature in this region is tough. So, Israel/Palestine really just refers, in my mind, to everywhere I could go without getting a new passport stamp.

Now, I thought I was no slouch when it comes the international peculiarities and issues at stake in this region before I went. I quickly realized that I’d never actually argued with anyone about the problems presented by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was woefully under-prepared to challenge the stubborn rhetoric of people from both sides of the armistice line. Over time, I got better, and I want to share with you what people in the region told me.

First off, it’s easy to see why this spit of land is worth fighting over. The geographic diversity across such a small area is simply breathtaking. I could sit for hours on the mountains overlooking the Dead Sea into Jordan. I have sat for hours on the beaches of Tel Aviv looking out on the Mediterranean. In the Golan, the space between the sky and the hilltops seems to converge and you could touch the ceiling if you reached just a bit further. That being said, most of the real jewels are in modern-day Israel. The Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank get their beauty mainly from their ruggedness.

A Palestinian man smokes hookah in his olive grove overlooking Jerusalem in the West Bank village of Walaja.

In his piece on the impending death of liberal Zionism, Peter Beinart points to an “epidemic of not watching” among American supporters of Israel. To me, it’s obvious that this extends also to the Israeli public. Granted, the debate within Israel over the future of the region is much more robust than anything going on in the United States. Some Israeli columnists would be drummed out of Washington and tarred as anti-Semite (Some have.). But along the coast and especially among Russian immigrants to Israel – many of whom I spoke with – there is little to no knowledge of the ins and outs of Palestinian life today. There is a wide sense of largely uninformed support for the policies of the current Israeli government on matters relating to Palestinians.

This is particularly maddening because of the proximity of everything in this region. One of my main goals was just to experience the distance between people. And its easy to see how selective vision has become the norm among Israelis and Palestinians. Russian immigrants living in the Ma’ale Adumim settlement know little of the Palestinians living at the base of their hilltops. Settlers in Hebron deny the ethnic existence of people that live in the sun-spotted alleyways directly beneath them. Palestinians in Nablus paint anti-Semitic murals of Jews that seem to use the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as their reference material.

Not seeing and not understanding is the central symptom and the central cause of the conflict. Some, including Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, call this apartheid. Whatever the political definition, the result of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is ideological apartheid.

Beinart lionizes the Israeli left, in particular the protesters who show up every week in Sheikh Jarrah to scuffle with police and denounce Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. But it seems to me that even these Israelis who sympathize with the Palestinian cause do so only in the abstract. Their voices are not represented in the halls of power and, for the most part, their shouting about human rights does not cut to the core of the Palestinians’ problems.

Those Palestinians, in cities like Nablus and Hebron, are some of the most welcoming people I have ever met. I can not walk five minutes through Hebron without an invite to coffee and an earful – in English – about the state of Israeli-Palestinian politics. “You are welcome” seems to be the first words they learn from the sub-titled American television shows that drone in the background. Almost everyone in these cities will say they don’t trust Fatah and the Palestinian government. Usually their mistrust is directed toward Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. They are tired of endemic corruption and tired of an economy that runs on the fruits of foreign aid with little trickling down.

They seem to be split on the efforts of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to build governmental institutions by 2011 that could form the basis of the Palestinian state. Many are jaded but most trust that he is trying.

Overall, the sense that I got from speaking with Palestinians, from hours of conversation over hookah pipes in restaurants and on hilltops, is one of utter resignation. The most determined will speak of non-violent resistance. (Caveat: I did not get a chance to spend any time in Gaza, where the story may be very different.) But nearly everyone I spoke with uses rhetoric referenced by John Mearsheimer in his recent speech on the future of the conflict.

There will be no political solution, they say, and Palestinians are merely biding their time until the situation becomes politically untenable, both locally and globally. Many Palestinians want a one-state solution, and they believe demographics combined with international pressure will give it to them over time. They are weary about the prospects (the poverty and the violence that will occur) in waiting for that day.

No high-level Israeli official in any of the briefings facilitated by well-funded advocacy groups spoke to this. Instead, they play their roles as acolytes in spreading the “false religion of Mideast peace,” because their support in America depends on the repetition of the tenets of that faith laid out by Aaron David Miller in Foreign Policy.

An ultra-Orthodox, right-wing Jewish man protests Israel's construction freeze in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Al Aqsa mosque is in the background.

Some Palestinians have accepted a two-state solution. One man, looking over Jerusalem from his olive grove, told me that he would be happy to have a border between himself and the encroaching Israeli development. Israeli troops guarded a construction site where they were building a road, and eventually a wall, 100 meters from his house and through his grove. “I’m happy for them to have their state. I’d just like them to build this wall over there,” he said, pointing 500 yards in the distance where the original 1948 armistice line was marked with a checkpoint and a railroad track.

Other Palestinians deal in a sort of well-worn obstinacy about the peace process, justified perhaps under international law but totally unrealistic. They say out loud that Israel is not going away, not now, not ever. In the same breath, they say that the whole place should belong to them and that any governmental attempts by Abbas to make peace would be invalid because every Palestinian refugee and every descendant of a Palestinian refugee must unanimously approve any such agreement.

Settlers far from the walls in Jerusalem are the most apt to speak the truth about the prospects for peace (almost zero). But their realism comes with the worst of generalizations about those outside their gated compounds. I will have more on settlers in a video piece I did with a couple of settlers in the south of the West Bank. But you should definitely read the definitive piece on settlers by Jeffrey Goldberg.

Being in Israel can be unnerving. Teens walking through the street with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. The strident patriotism and constant specter of conflict. Keeping constant watch over your passport because you will be stopped and someone will want to see it as you cross borders that exist on no map.

At the same time, being an interested expat in Israel is by far one of the best experiences of my life so far. To do so, is to be a world traveler in a span of minutes, going from what is essentially the 51st state in a developed nation to a slice of the Middle East. You can be puffing a nargileh after the last intonations of Friday afternoon prayers in Nablus and be salting your Shabbat challah by sundown in Jerusalem. For two years before arriving in Israel, I spent a lot of my time learning about Jewish culture and politics, which I have a deep appreciation for. Israeli society reflects a lot of what I find fascinating and inspiring about the Jewish people, both in the diaspora and in their homeland. My goal for this trip was to set foot in the Arab world for the first time and understand that place better. I liked what I saw, and I wish more people in the region could see some of what expats like myself get the opportunity to experience.

Maybe they don’t wish it, but I wish it for them.

My time in Jerusalem ended just as the fallout from Israel’s boarding of an aid flotilla to Gaza died down. I don’t have a lot to report on the ideological ins and outs of that incident. I was more focused on finding out details about those involved. I’ll save Gaza for my next trip to Israel.