if in doubt, start an intifada

COMMENT

Pres Obama has made some brave and bold statements about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict this week. He says the starting point of the negotiations should be the return of Israel to its pre-1967 borders, since when they have eaten away at Palestinian territory (usually taking the best bits, the water sources, the olive groves, etc) and, since 2005, walling off the troublesome Arabs behind their 7 metre high concrete segregation wall. If you visit the West Bank, one of the first things that strikes you is that every hill is topped with large (and illegal, under UN rules) Israeli settlements. From a distance they look like huge sink estates but they are there, occupying the high ground as good militarists should, and should the borders revert, thousands and thousands of Israeli Jews are going to find themselves, essentially, behind enemy lines.

No wonder the Israeli leadership is appalled by Obama's radical ideas.There are already plans in place which should scupper the negotiations nicely. When Fatah got into bed with Hamas, the Israelis expressed their disapproval by suspending their payments to the Palestinian authority, meaning that hundreds of civil servants, doctors, lawyers and teachers are literally no longer being paid. And there's nothing like being told to work for nothing to get people out on the streets voicing their protest in no uncertain terms. "You see?" the Israelis will say, as they fend them off with rubber bullets and live ammunition, "this is what we have to deal with: they're all terrorists trying to throw us into the sea". Actually the vast majority of Palestinians simply want to get on with their lives and enjoy the kind of human rights taken for granted in the West. But the all-powerful Jewish lobby in the US won't spin it like that. Can Obama resist their cries of outrage, or will his plans go the way of his health reforms- buried under a welter of unreasoning opposition from vested interests and a misinformed public?

Or, will, as Jeremy Bowen has suggested, events on the ground in the Middle East run ahead of negotiations, where a new political landscape is being born on the streets and in the coffee houses all over the Arab world?