Israel-Palestine: No Simple Answers

I’ve just returned from a 10-day visit to Palestine and Israel. In another article I’ll write more about Israel, and what I learned about the Start Up Nation, but here I want to air my learnings on the political situation. Don’t expect an answer here, for, as several people told me during my stay, “If you think you’ve found a simple solution, you simply haven’t understood the complexity of Israel”.

My most immediate thought is one of hopelessness, not just for the Palestinians in the occupied territories and camps, but morally for the Israelis and the world as we decide that apartheid is acceptable. That, as one writer said, “the world’s largest open-air prison” is something that humanity will condone, even when it is next to one of the most vibrant economies on earth, a country with a deep felt sense of equality, and with charity and doing for others cardinal elements of Jewish life (tikkun olam).

The population of Israel is less than 9 million, 70% of whom are Jews (this does not include Palestine). There are only 15 million Jews in the world, so 1/3 live in Israel. When you consider that the Nazis exterminated 6 million, a huge percentage of the Jews in the world at the time, everyone here had someone who went to the Holocaust gas chambers. This country is still living with post-traumatic shock, which may help explains the aggressiveness of Israelis and their black & white reflex reactions to any attack or slight. Israelis don’t like to take orders or listen to rules: “When we followed orders and got on the train, we ended up in Auschwitz”. And it’s unlikely they will ever trust anyone, even Trump, to look after them, “Only we can look after ourselves”. They seem to have a siege mentality (see the history of Masada), and when they look next door at how Syria’s leader has slaughtered 200,000 of his own people and forced almost 12 million to be displaced or flee, it’s easy to understand why the Israelis guard the ramparts as well as they do.   

I was hosted on my first two days by UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Created in 1949, today it supports 5 million registered Palestinian refugees, providing schooling for 500,000 students in 700 schools (free of charge), health care (140 facilities, 3,000 staff and over 9 million annual patient visits), microfinance (self-sustaining, with almost 500,000 loans of a cumulative value of $530mio) as well as social services, emergency operations and camp improvements. All of this could be replicated by other agencies, whether that be Israeli, the Palestinian Authority or even Hamas, but the critical difference is that UNRWA’s mandate includes “the right of return” for refugees. Not just resettlement, but the hope of one day having a passport and returning to the homes they left in 1948 and 1967, or to be compensated in some way. UNRWA’s mandate will expire on June 30th, 2020, and the current US administration plans to let this happen.

I first spent some time in Bethlehem with the head of the West Bank Microfinance field office, learning how he runs his organization, how they evaluate potential clients, how they compete, and how they evaluate success. Microfinance began here after the Oslo Accords (1993 agreement between the PLO and the Israeli government). 

Parentheses: To get to Bethlehem I had to cross the border, to go through the wall. When you do this, there is no doubt that you are passing into another world. Many of those who visit here probably only see Rachel’s Tomb and the Church of the Nativity, and may not notice the barbed wire, bullet holes and flame marks on the wall.

From UNRWA’s office we drove into the Aida camp, home to somewhere between 6,000 to 10,000 people, in an area of 0.07 square kilometers (17 acres). The people originated from 35 villages near Jerusalem and the areas west of Hebron. The estimated population density (87,000 per square kilometer), is the highest in the world (by contrast, Singapore is the world's third most densely populated place with 18,500 people per square mile, or 7,000 per square kilometer). Consider the psychological pressure of living in squalid conditions, side-by-side with so many people, and little chance of escape.

We visited three of UNRWA’s clients. First a widow who has a small shop selling everything from plastic shoes and simple clothing to utensils and plates. Her clientele are her neighbors. She imports from Jordan. She’s been in business for 3 years, and earns enough to feed her family. She has a $1,000 loan from UNRWA. Next, we went into the home of a family; the husband is a sanitation worker with UNRWA, and his wife does embroidery. She learned to embroider from a training facility run by UNRWA and the women in the camp, and sells only here in the camp. When I asked if she could sell her beautiful wares in Bethlehem (which surrounds the camp) she said yes, but it would be hard. When I asked if she had considered selling in Jerusalem (9 kms away) she looked surprised that I would even ask the question, as it is not possible for her to legally cross the border. Last we met with a young man who has his own barbershop. He serves men between 15 and 30 years of age, who like the style that he has created. He hopes to expand and have at least one employee. All three people I met seemed happy, content with what they are able to do today, thankful to UNRWA for its support. Given my UNRWA host, whom I was traveling with, what else would they say?

On my second day I was asked to deliver a workshop on leadership for the UNRWA West Bank Field Management Team. I was humbled both by the task and the quality of the people in the room, almost all Palestinians, some of them leading teams of 300 people, and all working in difficult conditions. We spent several hours debating the different styles of leadership, emotional intelligence, how our own self-confirmation bias might impact how we evaluated the “good” and the “average” people in our teams, and the differences between leadership and management. I wish all my classes were this interesting and interactive!

I met with the UNRWA West Bank director. We talked about how hard the work is there, how difficult it is to keep people motivated, especially with huge budget cuts. The US, historically the biggest donor to UNRWA, ended its support last year, taking away $360 mio in funding (out of $1.2bio). Jared Kushner has announced that he wants to see UNRWA closed.

What would happen if UNRWA disappeared? Let’s assume that the US, Israel, the EU and Qatar (which needs friends these days) poured billions into the occupied territories and forced the UN to end UNRWA’s mandate. It’s highly unlikely that Israel would allow the refugees to become Israeli citizens (as that would decimate the ultra-orthodox dream of a purely Jewish state), and security concerns would probably still greatly inhibit Palestinians from traveling into Israeli, working there, or even crossing into other Palestinian territories. The “right of return” would evaporate with the end of UNRWA’s mandate and 5 million people would continue to be stateless and living in poverty. 

In my last UNRWA conversation, with the Commissioner General, he mentioned how many of the older Palestinians worry about the future because their children do not know any Israelis. The older generation had the opportunity to work in Israel and do business with Israelis, but the younger generation hasn’t had this. If they see an Israelis, he or she is likely to be a soldier. They have difficulty seeing Israelis as human beings; in their eyes Israelis have been dehumanized. Add to this that the middle-aged Palestinians were told that with the Oslo Accords, if they played by the rules and let politics and negotiations run their course, things would get better. That was 1993.    

Jason Greenblatt (one of Trump’s lawyers) wrote in a recent New York Times editorial that Hamas is the problem, and he’s partially right. Hamas is a terrorist organization, but the real question is why any Palestinians support Hamas. As one person said to me, Yasser Arafat, with all of the horrible things he did in the name of Palestine, accomplished more for the refugees than everything that has come since the Oslo Accords. If I was a young man in Gaza, with no passport, no right to anything at all, no future, no hope, and totally dependent on donors, on handouts, seeing how my parents and grandparents were treated, or “played”, and how unsuccessful they were, perhaps choosing terrorism would seem to be a logical choice. Perhaps the only choice. 

Over the next 7 days, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, all of the Israelis I met were very uncomfortable with what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but several pointed out that when Yasser Arafat turned down the Israeli offer in 2000, and Palestine was split between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the Israelis could legitimately argue that they no longer had a strong partner to negotiate with. The surrounding Arab nations do little to help, mainly because they’re worried their own populations would revolt and extremists would get the upper hand in their countries.

One evening we had the pleasure of a conversation with Sabine Sitruk, who worked for Shimon Peres at the time of the Oslo Agreements, when he was the Foreign Minister. She said that he wished to build sustainable economic relations between Jordan, Palestine and Israel, and called his vision "the new Middle East", sort of a Mediterranean Benelux. He thought that "the cooperation between the countries for their mutual profit and the benefit of their populations would mark the economic transition of the Middle-East from conflict to peace". I thought of this on my last morning as I watched a young woman I have a lot of respect for come to tears as she said “we seem to be getting further apart rather than coming together”.

On my last day Hamas decided to launch over 400 rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, in retaliation for Israeli airstrikes, which were in retaliation for Hamas snipers shooting 2 Israeli soldiers, and of course the Israelis immediately responded with more airstrikes. Dead and wounded on both sides of the border. When I asked an Israeli friend in Jerusalem if she’d heard (she hadn’t) and whether this was big news, she responded that unfortunately it was not, but that this would be what dominated CNN, rather than the good that I’d witnessed in the region. Another friend commented on how both sides, the Hamas leaders and Netanyahu, would cynically use this to their political advantage.

The recently retired French ambassador to the US gives Kushner’s supposed “deal of the century” a 1% chance of success. Is that good enough? I guess the question is whether the US and donors can buy off the Palestinians, alleviate their poverty a tiny bit, while at the same time making it crystal clear that there are no other options; the idea of a two-state solution is dead; the right of return is gone; be happy that you can survive day-to-day in the camps, and make the best of it. If you’re Palestinian or Israeli, apartheid is the reality that you will live and die with.

And though we’re complicit in this, the rest of us will just get on with our lives.