On Talbiya, Israel and Palestine

Israelis are a politically vocal bunch.  So I wasn’t particularly surprised to encounter a mass of protestors gathered before the Prime Minister’s house, as I meandered through Jerusalem’s affluent Talbiya neighborhood. Not many people have much hope for the current round of peace talks. And to the average Israeli and Palestinian, made cynical by decades of failed negotiations, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon’s widely criticized characterization of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts—Yaalon called these “messianic” —seems all too accurate.  There’s especially profound disagreement over one aspect of the negotiations: Israel’s ongoing release of Palestinian prisoners. Israelis see convicted murderers set free to kill again; Palestinians see combatants who should have been released years ago with the cessation of hostilities and the signing of the Oslo accords. The disagreement illustrates a fissure in the Israeli-Arab conflict, and, more broadly, a deep tension in how Western governments relate to the problem of modern terrorism. I could discern much of this walking through Talbiya.  A small awning sits about 10 feet from the entrance to the street on which the Prime Minister’s house is located. Inside the awning, families of Israeli terror victims and their supporters keep a daily vigil, protesting the planned prisoner release. The walls and lampposts surrounding the street are plastered with banners, signs and posters. “We will neither forget nor forgive,” “only in Israel are murderers released,” “shame on you, ministers of Israel.” On the day I wandered by, teenagers unloaded generators and speaking equipment from cars and trucks as they prepared for a larger rally scheduled for later in the evening. Inside the awning sits a middle-aged woman, one hand holding a tissue and the other cradling a large photo of a loved one killed in a terror attack. She denounces the Prime Minister and his Cabinet as she gestures angrily to a large curtain that shields protestors from residents’ direct line of sight. “See, Bibi [Netanyahu’s nickname] can’t even bear to look at us!” This is a country which still lionizes Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s insistence that antiwar protestors be allowed to record the Lebanon War casualty count on his doorstep. Her words carry a particular bite. Most of the bereaved woman’s blame, though, is levelled at the Israeli street. Where are the mass protests? she asks. Bibi is under constant pressure from the Americans, and he can only resist by pointing to the streets and saying that the public will not allow the releases, she explains. The responsibility to stop the madness is yours, she insists to those gathered around her. Her audience sits rapt and nods emphatically. Despite the woman’s pessimism, there are signs that the message behind the protests is resonating in the halls of power. Polls show that as much as 85% of Israeli Jews oppose the releases, and for the last few days, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been delaying the final installment of the planned release. In response, the Palestinians have threatened to walk away from negotiations. And, in turn, Netanyahu has tried to make the release contingent on progress in, or at least continuation of, the seemingly intractable peace talks. This past week, Secretary Kerry raced to Amman in a desperate attempt to keep the talks alive. There is good reason why nearly the entire Israeli political spectrum is sympathetic to the bereaved families’ impassioned arguments. The prisoners scheduled for release all have “blood on their hands,” as the Israelis say, meaning the prisoners were convicted of direct involvement in terror attacks. Many have been sentenced to multiple life sentences. In order to secure their release, formal pardons will need to be signed by Israel’s (largely ceremonial) President. To the average Israeli, these men are common murderers, and their political and religious motivations make their crimes only more heinous. In this context, the Palestinian insistence that Israeli Arabs be included in the release is particularly galling. These are Israeli citizens, afforded all the rights and judged according to the standards of any other citizen, and now a foreign country demands their release as if they were simply prisoners-of-war returning home post-conflict? In the mainstream Israeli mind-set, it is a crime against justice. Of course, the release of convicted criminals is something that Israelis are sometimes ready to support. In fact, a nearly two-thirds majority supported the lopsided exchange of over a thousand prisoners for a lone Israeli sergeant, Gilad Shalit. And another prisoner release was agreed on as part of the Oslo accords. But Oslo is viewed as an abject failure for which Israel received nothing but an armed and angry Palestinian population. And now, most Israelis see no human or political gain justifying a gross injustice. A large banner at the site of the protest in Talbiya displayed a picture of the Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat alongside a quotation explaining that the Palestinians are committed to the negotiations only long enough to obtain the release of the prisoners. If the negotiations are simply a ruse to free murderers, why play ball? And when most Israelis see the images of the prisoners’ triumphant returns, they see the glorification of murderers.  This only further convinces Israelis that Palestinian society is not prepared for peaceful statehood. Palestinians could not see things more differently. These prisoners are from the pre-Oslo days, when Israelis had still not acknowledged a Palestinian right to self-determination. Some may have targeted civilians, but extreme means were necessary to jolt the oppressor out of its complacency. Besides, Israel promised to release all pre-Oslo prisoners as part of the Oslo accords, and so these prisoners have now languished for decades past when they should have been freed. Moreover, for Palestinians, the prisoners are fighters for a national cause and ought to be treated with the dignity that warriors are traditionally accorded. They used the weapons and means that they had, acting heroically against a far more powerful and technologically sophisticated enemy. What the West now calls terror has always been the tactic of outgunned and outmanned national liberation movements, including some early Zionists. Are these fighters to be punished simply because their liberation movement came 50 years too late? The prisoner release is thus about more than just politics. It uncovers a layer of conceptual disagreement that seems fundamentally insoluble. How can a national conflict ever be resolved if the fighters of one side will always be treated as criminals by the other? But, on the other hand, how can these fighters be treated differently, if their tactics reject the most basic principles of civilian-combatant distinction? And if justice must be shelved for the sake of peace, how confident must we be that the peace is real? These questions govern our handling of Guantanamo detainees and Afghanistan’s treatment of its Taliban prisoners as much as they affect Israelis and Palestinians. And in a world of asymmetric conflicts and terrorist tactics, the failure to find principled answers will doom us to a conflict as intractable as theirs.