"Twenty-four hours a day of rolling news to fill," lamented the
senior producer of an all-news radio station recently, "and only two hours
of actual news to fill it." But his problem is minor compared to that of
people condemned to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where there is
now almost nothing new to report at all.
There is plenty of incident, of course. More than two hundred
rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip against nearby Israeli towns in one
week recently. Some were a new, longer-range version that reached Ashkelon,
a large town that had never been hit before. One Israeli died, and several
were injured.
Israel retaliated with massive raids on the northern Gaza Strip by
land and air. Two Israeli soldiers were killed, and about 120 Palestinians.
Israel says 90 percent of the Palestinian casualties were fighters;
Palestinian sources say half were civilians, including 22 children. Given
the crowded living conditions of the Gaza Strip, the latter estimate is
more plausible, although it would make no sense for Israeli forces to
target civilians deliberately.
Then, on 6 March, a Palestinian walked into Merkaz Harav religious
school in Jerusalem and killed eight young Israelis before being shot down
himself. All of these events were extensively covered in the rolling news,
but in what sense was there anything new about them?
It was also the same old stories on the diplomatic level.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, whose influence only extends
to those parts of the West Bank not directly controlled by Israeli soldiers
or settlers, declared that he would not take part in further "peace talks"
with the Israelis until they agreed a cease-fire that included the Gaza
Strip.
The shaky coalition that governs Israel was undismayed by this,
since any concessions to Palestinians in the peace talks, should they
occur, would ignite internal quarrels that would bring down Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert's government. But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in
the region as part of her untiring quest to create a legacy for the Bush
administration, insisted that both Olmert and Abbas show willing.
So Olmert said that the Merkaz Harav killings would not make him
break off talks with Abbas, and the latter said that he would resume talks
-- until Rice left town, after which he reverted to saying that there could
be none until there was a cease-fire in Gaza. But Abbas has no control
over Gaza. Hamas, which does, said nothing but smiled quietly.
This is all so familiar that the media would not report it in any
detail if there were something more exciting to hold the ads apart. Apart
from the fact that the Palestinians are now split between a Fatah
government in the West Bank and a Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip, it could
be a week of stories from the first intifada in the early 1990s, or from
the second intifada at the beginning of this decade.
The Palestinian-Israeli quarrel has re-entered one of those lengthy
phases when neither side can agree on what terms it would be willing to
offer the other for a peace settlement. In Israel, the split is embodied
in the government itself, with various coalition parties drawing "red
lines" about which concession or gesture would cause them to quit. Among
the Palestinians, it is now incarnated in a formal division of territory
between Fatah and Hamas.
From Washington, it is possible to conjure up some flimsy optimism
about the situation -- "Ten months is a long time. There's plenty of time
to get a deal done," said President Bush last week -- but no deal is going
to happen while Bush is still in office. Whether it might happen under
another administration is another question, but not one that is likely to
have a happier answer.
Imagine that at this time next year President Obama, or President
McCain, or President Clinton (H.) decides to spend some political capital
in the Middle East. Could it achieve anything?
Unless there has been some a political earthquake in the meantime,
there will still be two rival Palestinian governments, one of which is
formally committed to waging relentless war against Israel (even if the
reality is a little more negotiable). Israelis will have every right to
claim that there is nobody to negotiate with.
The two Palestinian authorities will still be struggling to gain
the upper hand in the internecine power struggle, which means that neither
party can afford to make significant concessions to the Israelis. So
nothing can happen until Fatah re-establishes control over the Gaza Strip
(unlikely), or until Hamas dominates a reunified Palestinian authority that
includes the West Bank.
Even if that happened, Hamas would still have to decide that it
really wants to negotiate with Israel, and the Israelis would then have to
decide that they were willing to talk to Hamas. Not only that, but to offer
Hamas serious territorial concessions in return for a cease-fire or peace
treaty.
None of that is at all likely. There will be no substantive peace
talks this year, and there will be none next year either. It's all just
diplomatic posturing punctuated by killing. Both sides hate the phrase
"cycle of violence," because it implies that both sides are responsible for
it. But it is the correct phrase, and "cycles" aren't news.
As long as Fatah and Hamas are fighting each other for power, there will be no peace. Not that I had my hopes up to begin with. I don't think the Palestinians will all march under one banneranyway.
I do feel badly for the kids in Gaza. The Israelis really turned that place into a wasteland. I'm not sure they've really madeany steps forward toward better security in the process, either. On the other hand, in five or ten years, there will be a whole new batch of Gazan jihadis ready to put the war back on boil.
No News in the Cycle of Violence
