Fenced in: Economist

Fenced in

Apr 3rd 2008

Short-term safety is not providing long-term security, and sometimes works against it

A STRIKING new construction has sprouted on King George Street, in the centre of West Jerusalem, the Jewish side of the city. It is round, glass-walled from floor to ceiling, and set back from the road so as to leave plenty of room for outside tables. It is a café.

A few short years ago, only a lunatic would have contemplated building such a thing there. The second intifada, following from the failure of the Oslo peace process of the 1990s, was raging. Suicide-bombings had emptied the city's restaurants and brought security guards to every door. Yet since then the bombings have dropped to an average of one a year, and the most recent two were in the south, far from most Israelis' consciousness. The guards are still there, but now they look bored.

The reasons are several. At the intifada's height Israel reoccupied the West Bank towns that had been under Palestinian Authority (PA) control. Since then it has been energetically killing or arresting militants. At various points some militant groups have observed their own ceasefires.

The “security barrier”—part fence, part concrete wall—that Israel began building around and through the West Bank contributes too, though less than Israel likes to claim. Not only is it still incomplete, but security checks at many of its crossings are extremely lax, so as not to inconvenience the settlers who commute between their homes and Israel proper. Instead most would-be bombers are caught or deterred by over 550 checkpoints and roadblocks within the West Bank itself, much of which is off-limits to Palestinians (see map). The gunman who shot dead eight students at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem in March had Israeli residency, which allowed him to move freely.

This system is born of the post-peace era. The collapse of the Oslo process and the subsequent intifada convinced most Israelis that it was best to shut themselves off from the Palestinians and pull out of the occupied territories unilaterally, as they did from Gaza in 2005. If the PA could not deliver security, Israel would instead.

But nearly three years after the Gaza disengagement, that too has proved a false hope. The Islamists of Hamas, which offers a long-term ceasefire but not full-fledged peace with Israel, wrested Gaza from the PA forces loyal to the more secular Fatah last June. Crude rockets are fired from Gaza on to neighbouring Israeli towns almost daily, causing few casualties but keeping the population terrorised.

And for the new peace process now under way, the system that keeps central Israel safe is proving a liability. The talks launched at the Annapolis summit in November between Israel and Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, who remains in charge of the West Bank, are based on a simple theory. If they reach an agreement to create an independent Palestinian state in most of the occupied territories, and if Israel allows the West Bank's economy to thrive while imposing a near-total blockade on Gaza, then Mr Abbas will grow stronger whereas Hamas will be weakened.

The practice is something else. Leaving aside the fact that collectively punishing 1.5m Gazans in a crude attempt at electoral engineering is cynical, unethical and prohibited by international law, the very workings of Israeli security doom the plan to failure. Between June 2007 and mid-March 2008 at least 170 Palestinian civilians were killed, 70 of them children, as unlucky bystanders or mistaken targets of what Israeli military jargon breezily calls “targeted elimination”. All of them will serve as martyrs to the extremists' cause. So do the more than 8,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails. Some are indeed murderers, but many are serving long sentences on minor or dubious charges.

The checkpoints in the West Bank hugely increase travel times between Palestinian cities, turning them into virtual enclaves and stifling the economy. Promises to remove even a handful of the checkpoints have gone largely unfulfilled, partly because local army commanders, who enjoy considerable autonomy and fear getting the rap if a suicide-bomber slips through, err on the side of caution.

Meanwhile, the peace talks are floundering. One rightist political party, Yisrael Beiteinu, has already left Ehud Olmert's governing coalition and another, the religious Shas, threatens to do so if the talks broach the sharing of Jerusalem, as they eventually must. Israeli officials, contradicting what Mr Olmert signed at Annapolis, now say that the aim is not a full peace treaty, just the outline of one.

All this makes it politically hard for Mr Abbas's forces to crack down on militants, which Israel insists on as a precondition to implementing any peace deal. But it is just as politically hard for Israeli leaders to hand over responsibility to PA forces that cannot do the job as well as the Israeli army can. With foreign aid, getting the Palestinian forces up to scratch would take at least three years and cost around $5.4 billion, of which only a few hundred million have been pledged.

Hamas, for its part, has turned the starvation of Gaza to its advantage. When widespread power cuts turned the world's media spotlight on to the Gazans' plight, militants blew down the border wall with Egypt, a move they had been plotting for months under the nose of Israeli surveillance. As hundreds of thousands of desperate Gazans flooded across the border to buy supplies, Hamas's standing across the Arab world swelled. Recent polls show its popularity among Palestinians once again catching up with that of Fatah.

Helping the extremists win

• Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006 by a landslide partly because Israel had spent years sidelining Fatah's leader, Mr Abbas, and before him Yasser Arafat, for their failure to crack down on militants.
• Hamas took control of Gaza after Fatah, backed by Israel and America, tried to destabilise the Hamas government.
  
• Israel assassinated two centrist Hamas leaders, Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, during the second intifada, and led an international boycott of the Hamas government elected in 2006, which was headed by another centrist, Ismail Haniyeh.
  
• As a result, those now calling the shots in Gaza are from the group's hardline wing.

• Similarly, Israel's attempt to destroy the Palestinian leadership in exile by invading Lebanon in 1982 fuelled support for Hizbullah, a Shia group that shooed the army out of Lebanon 18 years later and gave it a drubbing in the summer war of 2006.
  
• And Israel's killing in 1992 of Abbas Musawi, Hizbullah's leader, opened the job to the charismatic Hassan Nasrallah.
• Though Hizbullah took a severe beating in 2006, it showed that Israel was sorely unprepared for the new kind of war being waged in the Middle East, against a guerrilla force supplied with the weapons of a conventional army.
  
• The Israeli forces, after years of dealing with Palestinian militants, thought they were facing the same sort of thing in Lebanon.
  
• The Winograd commission, which probed the army's performance in painstaking detail, concluded that it fought most of the war as a series of routine anti-terrorist operations.
  
• The UN-supervised ceasefire has kept the border quiet since, but has not stopped Hizbullah from re-arming.

• However, the rise of Hamas and Hizbullah is also part of a trend that Israel cannot control.
  
• Political Islamism is growing across the Middle East, stoked by anger with corrupt local autocrats, resentment of the West, schisms within Islam and the Arab-Israeli conflict itself.
  
• George Bush's “war on terror”, by deliberately blurring the distinction between political Islamism and the nihilist jihadism of people like Osama bin Laden, adds to the enmity.

This is starting to chill Israel's already lukewarm peace with two of its neighbours. Egypt's ageing president, Hosni Mubarak, now looks fearfully over his shoulder at the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas's parent organisation. Jordan's King Abdullah, likewise, cannot ignore the rise of the Islamists in his own mostly Palestinian population. Israel has refused to hold peace talks with the autocratic but less ideological Syrian president, Bashar Assad, unless he first renounces ties to Israel's arch-enemies, Iran and Hizbullah. But finding a peace partner will become even harder if the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria—brutally repressed by Assad's father—revives, destabilising the already much weaker son.

Farther afield, Israelis are worried that America's next president will be less slavishly pro-Israel than George Bush. Public opinion in Europe has shifted against Islam, which many Israelis think is to their advantage. But like Mr Bush's backing, a more supportive European position also risks turning Israel into more of a target. A real peace deal with the Palestinians could yet sap the Islamists' power, but as long as it is predicated on eliminating Hamas first, it seems unlikely to happen.

A few senior Israelis therefore say that it is better to talk to Hamas and even agree, for now, to peace on its non-binding terms. Ami Ayalon, a government minister and a former head of the Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency, argues that Hamas has already shown the potential to become more moderate. “There has been a movement in its priorities from 'education, charity and jihad now' to 'education, charity and jihad-can-wait',” he says.

Within the establishment, though, that remains a minority view. And in any case, thanks to Israel's energetic efforts to keep Hamas down, there may not be any influential moderates left to talk to. At the other end of the spectrum from Mr Ayalon, Moshe Ya'alon, a former head of the army, argues that the only way to deal with Hamas is to send the army in to retake the Gaza Strip—sector by sector, street by street, house by house, the way it did in the West Bank during the intifada.

And then? “Wait until the Palestinians are capable of running it themselves. For as long as it takes.” It sounds extreme. But as long as talking to Hamas is off the table, anything less than a total assault will not change the strategic balance.

Perhaps Israel can contain the Palestinian problem indefinitely—though at a terrible cost to the Palestinians, and also to its own army that used to be the glue of Israeli society (see article). Would it be able to contain a nuclear Iran?

Israeli hopes that the United States would lead an attack on the suspected Iranian weapons facilities have dimmed. Within the Israeli government, secret debates rage over whether, and when, Israel should strike Iran alone. Outside it, squadrons of ex-spooks and retired generals hold conferences on the future of a polynuclear Middle East. Soothing voices counsel that for all the inflammatory statements about wiping Israel off the map, Iran wants a bomb for national pride and self-defence, not unprovoked aggression.

But in a country obsessed with security, the hawks tend to have more sway. Shmuel Bar, a former agent of the Mossad, Israel's foreign-intelligence service, and an Iran expert at the Interdisciplinary Centre (IDC) in Herzliya, points out that “the most volatile period in the cold war was the first ten years, when mutually assured destruction hadn't been established yet.” Besides, he argues, that kind of deterrence will not work in this region. The chain of command over Iran's nuclear programme is too diffuse, other states will want to get their own weapons, and the Middle East's multiple fracture lines—Sunni versus Shia, Iran versus Arabs, Israel versus the rest—make for an unstable balance of forces.

However, the more probable threat to Israel is not that Iran will bomb it. It is the risk that an Iranian bomb, even if it seems likely to stay in its silo, will prompt the best and brightest Israelis, who are also the most mobile, to emigrate and tip the economy into an irreversible decline. A survey commissioned for the IDC's annual Herzliya policy conference this year found that 14% of Jews in Israel (and some 40% of Arabs there) would consider leaving the country if a hostile state acquired nuclear arms. The country's greatest vulnerability is not military but economic.