Updates

Update from AIJAC

June 30, 2010
Number 06/10 #09

As readers may be aware, the public campaign for the release of Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in a raid across the Gaza border four years ago, has heated up in Israel in recent weeks (though it has been a highly important and emotional issue since his capture). This Update looks at the reasons why the plight of this one soldier is so keenly felt in Israel.

This Update leads with noted French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Levy, who explains why Shalit is not a prisoner but a hostage, and that, if you look at the circumstances of his capture and treatment, you can only call him a prisoner of war by positing a right to wage total war against Israel regardless of anything it does. He then looks at what Shalit has come to symbolise to Israel and why he has not attracted the same sympathy as another French dual citizen, Ingrid Betancourt, held hostage by the Columbian terror group FARC for six years. Finally, Levy examines and praises the morality of Israel’s willingness to trade hundreds of prisoners, many convicted terrorists, for Shalit’s release. For the rest of what he has to say, CLICK HERE. Another view arguing that Shalit is a symbol of how both Israelis and Palestinians are essentially hostages to the whole Gaza situation is here.

Next up is historian and Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren, who offers more on what the case of Gilad Shalit means to Israelis – and to others around the world who have taken up his plight. Oren describes his own encounter with Noam Shalit, Gilad’s father, and the endless spontaneous expressions of sympathy and good will he elicited from Israelis who met him by chance. Oren also looks at the dilemmas Israel faces in trying desperately to attain his release while recognising that to release large numbers of convicted terrorists to do so will mean others likely die as a result. For all of Oren’s evocation of what Shalit has meant to Israelis, and to others, over the past four years, CLICK HERE. A former Israeli general arguing that Israel’s emotional involvement with Shalit is clouding judgements is here, while a Jerusalem Post editorial on the “agonising dilemmas” associated with Shalit is here.

Finally, we bring you an enlightening interview about the state of the peace process with former British PM Tony Blair, now three years into his job as Quartet envoy to the Middle East. In his discussion with Jerusalem Post Editor David Horovitz, Blair canvasses his views on the blockade of Gaza, the possibility of Hamas participation in a peace process, the needs and prospects of both the Palestinian Authority and Israeli government in the peace process, and the realities of recent security and economic improvements in the West Bank. He delivers some important realities some people are unaware of, and comes up with a nuanced mix of optimism and realism. For the full interview, CLICK HERE.

Readers may also be interested in:

• American columnist Richard Cohen on the reality of Hamas-run Gaza. Plus, even Human Rights Watch records the extensive oppression being perpetrated by Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
  
• Masked gunmen in Gaza burned down a UN-run children’s camp, the second attack on such a camp in weeks.
• A Hamas-Fatah spat over payment leads to Gaza blackouts. Meanwhile, a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation committee breaks down in acrimony.
• A writer decries the lack of interest in the plight of the women of Gaza under Hamas rule.
• Meanwhile, Hamas and Egypt are also carrying out a war of words.
• More rockets and mortars fired from Gaza at Israel in recent days.
• Barry Rubin critically dissects recent statements about Gaza from the Obama Administation.
• Both Rubin and Daniel Pipes comment on the significance of the defiant confessions in court by the unsuccessful Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad.
• Bret Stephens on how to make a liberal case for Israel, plus Ben Cohen on the absurdity of progressives who want to boycott Israel.
  
• Some facts about the “Free Gaza” movement, which, with the Turkish Islamist group IHH, organised the flotilla affair.
• Some more opinion from legal experts on Israel’s actions vis-a-vis the flotilla.
• More incitement on the Palestinian Authority’s official television, where an interviewer pushes small children to declare “Jews” to be “our enemies” and Israeli soldiers “wild animals.”
• Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, often castigated as a hardliner, offers his blueprint for an Israeli-Palestinian resolution – and critics should note, it is unequivocally a two-state resolution, albeit with some controversial elements. Lieberman recently made headlines for saying there was “no chance” of a resolution by 2012 , but commentator Jonathan Toben argues Lieberman was right, if it is perhaps a bit impolitic to say so.
• An interview with Lebanese journalist and author Michael Young, detailing what Syria and Hezbollah have done to his country. Meanwhile, the generally reliable British journalist Con Coughlin reports that he has been told that Hezbollah may be planning to blow up a boat in a new Gaza flotilla and blame it on Israel.
• Iran, meanwhile, has cancelled its threatened Gaza flotilla.
  
• Indonesia’s Justice Minister says he supports arming and sending Indonesia jihadists to fight Israel – though this is quickly knocked on the head by a spokesman for Indonesian President Yudhoyono.
• An interesting piece on the strange situation of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and Washington’s failure to speak up in the face of new efforts to try him for “sodomy.”

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Three Questions (and Answers) Concerning the Soldier Shalit

Bernard-Henri Lévy
French philosopher and writer

Huffington Post, Posted: June 24, 2010 01:11 PM

Why so much emotion about the soldier Shalit ? Don’t all conflicts produce prisoners of war, and isn’t the young PFC from a tank crew, abducted in June, 2006, just a prisoner among others? Well, actually, no. For there are, first of all, international conventions governing the status of prisoners of war, and the sole fact that this one has been sequestered for four years, the fact that the Red Cross, which regularly visits Palestinians in Israeli prisons, has never been granted access to him is a flagrant violation of the laws of war. But moreover and most of all, we must never tire of repeating this: Shalit was not captured in the fury of a battle but during a raid in Israel, when Israel, having evacuated Gaza, was at peace with its neighbor. In other words, calling him a prisoner of war is tantamount to judging that the fact that Israel occupies a territory or has ceased to occupy it changes nothing in terms of the hatred one believes it deserves. It means accepting the idea that Israel is at war even when it is at peace, or that we should make war against Israel because Israel is Israel. And if we do not accept that, if we refuse this logic that is Hamas’s own logic and which, if words mean anything, is the logic of total war, we must begin by completely changing the rhetoric and the lexicon. Shalit is not a prisoner of war but a hostage. His fate is comparable to that of, not a Palestinian prisoner, but a kidnap victim being held for ransom. And he must then be defended as we defend the hostages of the FARC or the Libyans or the Iranians — we must stand up for him with the same energy devoted to the defense of, say, Clotilde Reiss or Ingrid Betancourt.

Hostage or prisoner, no matter, why all the fuss over a single man? Why this focalisation on an individual “of no importance to the community,” a man “made of all men, worth them all and of the same value as anybody” [Sartre]? Well, it is because Shalit is, precisely, not just anybody, and that he is going through what sometimes happens, in times of extreme tension in world history, to individuals in no way predisposed to play a part who suddenly become the captors of this tension, those who attract the resultant lightning, the points of impact of forces that, in a given situation, converge and clash. The dissidents of the era of communism were such, as are the persecuted of China or Myanmar today. Or, yesterday, this or that humble Bosnian figure an unparalleled concentration of adverse circumstances catapulted to prominence, turning him into a sort of a chosen one, in reverse. So it is with Gilad Shalit. Thus this man whose face is still that of a child incarnates, most unwillingly, the unending violence of Hamas; the mindless urge to exterminate of its supporters; the cynicism of those “humanitarians” who, like those of the Free Gaza flotilla, refused to take a letter from his family; or, once again, the double standard whereby he does not benefit from the same wealth of sympathy as, precisely, a Betancourt. Is a Franco-Israeli worth less than a Franco-Colombian? Is the signifiant Israel enough to degrade him? Exactly why hasn’t his portrait been hung next to that of the heroic Colombian, on the facade of the Hotel de Ville in Paris? And how can one explain that, in the little park in the 12th arrondissement where it was finally displayed, it has been so regularly vandalized, and with such impunity? Shalit the symbol. Shalit, like a mirror.

One last question, that of the price the Israelis seem ready to pay for the liberation of the captive and the related question of hundreds, some mention a thousand, of potential assassins who will then be released. This is not the first time the problem has occurred. Already, in 1982, Israel freed 4,700 combatants being held in the camp of Ansar in exchange for eight of its own soldiers. In 1985, 1,150 of them (including the future founder of Hamas, Ahmed Yassine) were set free in return for three of theirs. Not to mention the bodies, just the bodies, of Eldad Regec and Ehud Goldwasser, killed at the outset of the last war in Lebanon, traded, in 2008, for several leaders of Hezbollah, some of them sentenced for serious crimes. The idea, the double idea, is simple, and it is to Israel’s credit. Against the cruelty, first of all, of the famous reasons of State, against the workings of the cold monsters and their terrible laziness, at the opposite of the glacial intransigence Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia was not afraid to decry in the wake of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping by the Red Brigades and the way he was abandoned by his “friends,” calling it another face of terrorism, this categorical and irrefutable imperative: between the individual and the State, always choose the individual. Between the suffering of only one and the turmoil of the Grand One, the one alone must prevail. A man may be worth nothing, but nothing — and especially not the swaggering, chest-inflating pride of the Collective — is worth the sacrifice of one man. And then, against a pseudo “sense of the Tragic” that serves as an alibi for so many instances of cowardice, in the face of the dime-store dialecticians rambling on ad infinitum about the possible perverse effects this action or that (the potential rescue, in this case, of a Daniel Pearl) might provoke in the distant future when faced with a situation of which we are presently unaware, this principle at the heart of Jewish wisdom, admirably summed up in Ecclesiastes (III: 23): do not concern yourself with that which goes beyond your works — in your ignorance of the kingdom of ends and purposes and its ruses, just save the soldier Shalit.

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Gilad Shalit: Hostage of Hamas

The struggle to bring the soldier home has become a national passion for Israelis.

By MICHAEL OREN

Wall Street Journal, JUNE 25, 2010

In a small Jerusalem café, I sat with Noam Shalit and tried to discuss his son, Gilad. I say tried because each time Noam, a soft-spoken, bespectacled man, began a sentence, the owner of the café rushed over with complimentary plates of humus, salads and desserts. Passersby, glimpsing Noam through the window, burst inside to embrace him. “We are with you,” they cried. “We will get our Gilad home.”

That our is the key to understanding the devotion that Israelis feel for Gilad Shalit. The Israel Defense Forces is a citizens’ army in which most young men serve for a minimum of three years, followed by several decades of reserve duty. Young women serve for at least two. Our soldiers are literally our parents, our siblings, our children. Israel is also a small country with few if any degrees of separation between families. Even those who have never met the Shalits know someone who has. And all of us have loved ones—a brother, a son—who could suffer the same ordeal that Gilad began four years ago today.

Early on the morning of June 25, 2006, Hamas terrorists—using a tunnel secretly excavated during a cease-fire with Israel—infiltrated across the Gaza border and attacked an IDF base. Firing rocket grenades and automatic weapons, they killed two soldiers—Lt. Hanan Barak and Sgt. Pavel Slutzker, both 20—and kidnapped the 19-year-old corporal, Gilad Shalit. The IDF promptly launched a massive manhunt in Gaza, suffering an additional five fatalities, but failed to find the abductors. Hamas, meanwhile, demanded that Israel release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, most of them convicted terrorists, in exchange for Gilad’s freedom.

Since then, Gilad’s parents, Noam and Aviva Shalit, have only received three letters from their son as well as a brief video showing an emaciated hostage with a haunted expression and lightless eyes. Hamas has refused to allow the Red Cross or other NGOs to visit Gilad, or to permit mail or aid packages to reach him. And to mock the Shalit family’s suffering, Hamas has staged re-enactments of the kidnapping, most recently in a Gaza summer camp, and plays in which actors portraying Gilad beg for their release. An animated Hamas film depicts an aged Noam Shalit grieving over his son’s coffin.

The plight of Gilad Shalit poses painful dilemmas. Should Israel negotiate with Hamas, a terror organization sworn to its destruction, and unleash hundreds of terrorists, many of whom will quickly return to murdering? Or can Israel leave Gilad to languish alone indefinitely, prolonging his family’s agony and undermining the faith in which other families send their children to battle?

There are no easy answers. Yet Israel has consistently sought to secure Gilad’s freedom through the good offices of intermediaries, all the while striving to reconcile the nation’s security needs with the time-honored Jewish principle of pidayon shivuyim, the redemption of prisoners.

The struggle to bring Gilad home has become a national passion for Israelis. His birthday and the anniversary of his abduction are both commemorated with dramatic public events. In one such rally, some 2,000 young people sailed a “freedom for Gilad” fleet of homemade rafts across the Sea of Galilee. Photographs of Gilad as a whimsical teenager loom from public walls and flutter on flags from car antennas. His name is emblazoned on bracelets popular among Israeli youth and the days of his captivity are displayed on a booth near the prime minister’s residence.

But the campaign to free Gilad Shalit is hardly limited to Israel. The mayors of Miami and New Orleans have made him an honorary citizen, as have the cities of Paris and Rome. President Nicolas Sarkozy has declared Gilad’s release “a top French priority,” and President Barack Obama has further condemned his “inhumane detention.”

Nevertheless, Gilad Shalit remains in solitary confinement—in spite of the protests and his parents’ unflagging appeals to the international community. Lost in the recent tumult surrounding Israel’s efforts to block Iranian and Syrian arms shipments to Hamas, which has fired 10,000 rockets at Israeli civilians to date, is the unending nightmare of the Shalit family. Their pain is shared by countless Israelis and well-wishers worldwide. We must not rest until our Gilad is once again safely at home.

Mr. Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

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Editor’s Notes: Still the optimist

By DAVID HOROVITZ

Jerusalem Post, 25/06/2010   

Tony Blair, after mediating Israel’s new Gaza import policies, is marking three years as Quartet peace envoy.

 
Next week, Tony Blair will mark three years as the Quartet’s Middle East envoy – the official tasked by the UN, the EU, the US and Russia with coordinating efforts to achieve an Israeli- Palestinian peace accord.

He took up the post immediately on resigning as British prime minister after a staggering 10 years in that job, and has played a critical behind-the-scenes role in this one. Notably, for instance, he has coordinated between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority on the easing of restrictions on movement in the West Bank and the facilitation of major West Bank infrastructure projects. He was also a central player in this week’s Israeli government decision to change its policy on imports to Gaza – from one that barred everything that wasn’t on a permitted list, to one that allowed everything that wasn’t on an outlawed list.

Blair has long styled himself, and been perceived, as a firm friend of Israel. There are those who argue that his gradual slide from office in the UK, in fact, though primarily associated with his deeply unpopular partnership with President George W. Bush in the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, was also a consequence of his similarly unpopular support for Israel, notably at the time of the Second Lebanon War. Simultaneously, he has been a firm advocate of the statebuilding efforts of the Palestinian Authority leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad.

Throughout his three years in the Quartet envoy’s post, indeed, he has been consistently optimistic – “stupidly so,” he half-joked, in a self-deprecating aside during our interview – about the prospects of a viable Israeli-Palestinian accord. But he has always stressed the need for “a bottom-up approach” in which improvements in daily life on the ground for Palestinians, and in security for Israelis, create the climate for political progress. “When that’s aligned, you’ve got a chance,” he said in our conversation this week, which took place at his rooftop headquarters at Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel.

Excerpts:

The decision to ease the blockade presumably means it will now be easier for Hamas to maintain its hold on Gaza. If the goal remains Hamas no longer running Gaza, how now might that be achieved?

The only way of making sense of this for the future is that either the grip of Hamas on Gaza is loosened or alternatively Hamas changes. I personally think that for those Palestinians who want to see peace, it is better that life for the people in Gaza is improved.

People say to me: ‘Well, Hamas get the benefit’ [of the easing of the blockade]. I’m not sure that’s true. In a way, it suits those elements that don’t want peace to have Gaza in the situation where they can say that ‘there’s a sort of humanitarian crisis that’s been caused by Israel,’ where they can smuggle stuff through the tunnels and where the legitimate economy is squeezed.

Long term, all of this comes back to the same thing, which is that if you can create a serious and credible momentum for peace, then Hamas is weakened if it does not change its positions. If there is no momentum for peace, then [Hamas is] strengthened.

But there hasn’t been progress on the diplomatic front. There haven’t even been direct talks for more than a year now.

There are two positive directions: First of all, whatever the stalemate diplomatically, the fact is there has been progress on the West Bank. The economy is growing 10 percent [per annum] there. We just held this Palestinian investment conference. There were hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment announced.

[Second], the way the Palestinian Authority is operating on the security front is a world away from where it was a few years ago. You go to Nablus, Jenin and places like that, and there is a proper Palestinian security presence.

And I hope that in the next couple of months we will turn these [George Mitchell-brokered] indirect talks into direct negotiations. There’s no reason really not to.

Except that the PA says it doesn’t want to.

Well you can create circumstances in which they understand it’s in everyone’s interest to sit down and talk and see if there’s a basis for agreement.

My theory for this is and always has been something very simple: It is hard for Israel to contemplate a Palestinian state unless it can be sure that state will be securely and stably governed. That’s the basic problem.

As I say to people, if Israel thinks that what’s happened in Gaza is about to happen on the West Bank, it would be absurd to say that could be treated with indifference. This is not just a question of borders; it’s a question of the nature of the Palestinian state, how it’s governed, whether there is a stable, predictable basis for long-term peace.

That’s why I’ve always said the bottom-up approach is the right approach. Which is not to say that substitutes for a political negotiation. But it is only when there is an alignment between what you’re trying to negotiate politically, and what is actually happening on the ground – which for the Palestinians is about daily life, and for the Israelis it’s about security – that you’ve got a chance.

When that’s not aligned, you’ve got no chance – which is why the political negotiations up to now haven’t worked.

The narrative we hear from the Prime Minister’s Office is that the negotiating process can’t work because the Palestinians think that if they just wait, the EU or the US are going to impose a solution.

There is no solution that can simply be imposed.

Does the PA recognize this?

I think so, yes.

The most that certain parameters can ever do is help define a direction the parties [already] wish to go in. The idea that you suddenly slap down a solution, and say, ‘That’s it, there you are, I’ve decided it’ – that’s not the way it works.

Personally, I think that the Palestinians understand that this has got to be built over time. They simply want to know that the Israelis are serious about giving the Palestinians a state, and that the negotiations will be credible. That’s what they say to me, and I think that’s perfectly reasonable.

PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is building a state in the West Bank. But is he building a state ready to reconcile with Israel?

Yes. He’s a total supporter of a two-state solution.

And is this Israeli government prepared to take the necessary steps?

Yes, I think they are, in the right circumstances. People ask me from the outside, ‘Is Bibi Netanyahu prepared for a Palestinian state?’ I say, ‘yes, in the right circumstances.’ And they say, ‘Well, you’re qualifying it.’ And I say, ‘You’ve got to qualify it.’

The truth is that if the circumstances are right – and those circumstances, from the point of view of Israel, are about their long-term security – then yes, I think people are prepared to recognize that a Palestinian state is the right solution.

But if you can’t deal with the security issue, the circumstances aren’t right.

This is why I think that what Fayyad is doing is so important.

In the end, security is not just a question for Israel. It’s a question for the Palestinians. If you want a properly governed state, you’ve got to have proper functioning security forces.

You’ve got to have one rule of law. You’ve got to have courts, prisons, prosecuting authorities.

You’ve got to have the full infrastructure of a judicial and criminal system. And if you don’t have that, you’re always at risk of a disintegration of the most basic function of statehood, which is to provide law and order.

This shift that you’ve mediated now, on what goes into Gaza, was a consequence of pressure on Israel following the fatal interception of the Mavi Marmara…?

I’ve been talking about this with the prime minister and his colleagues for a long time, actually. My argument was and always has been that there is a very clear distinction, the only distinction in the end you can sensibly justify, between the security needs of Israel and [the] daily life [needs of Gazans].

This is a position I actually believe the prime minister feels more comfortable with, because you can justify it.

So the previous policy, aimed at weakening Hamas and placing pressure for the release of Gilad Schalit by imposing restrictions that affect every Gazan, was a mistake that should have been corrected in any case?

The trouble is you have the tunnels, which Hamas have a complete grip over. There was and is an alternative means of goods coming into Gaza.

Your statement in support of the new Gaza arrangements on Sunday was interpreted by the Prime Minister’s Office as saying that you, and as a result the international community, now recognize Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. Is that wishful thinking?

No. I think people understand that Israel is going to insist that any stuff that comes into Gaza is checked. That’s not the point, frankly.

The point is not to get things into Gaza port; the point is to get things into Gaza. And if you have this new policy in place, you can do that.

This was seen here as very significant because there are other boats coming. If you stand up and say, ‘the naval blockade is legitimate,’ then Israel feels it has greater legitimacy to act against those boats.

Yes. Where I divide from some others in the international community is that I think that Israel has got a genuine security concern that it is entitled to meet. For me the fact that Israel says, ‘Look, we’re not going to allow things into the [Gaza] seaport but you can bring them to Ashdod, and we can check them, and then they can come on to Gaza,’ I think that is a reasonable position.

What you can’t justify is saying that basic foodstuffs and household items can’t go into Gaza.

Under the new arrangements, would you say to anybody who is considering joining a flotilla to bring aid to Gaza, shouldn’t be doing so?

What I say to anybody organizing a flotilla is that if we implement this [new eased] policy, so that the things that people are trying to bring in by flotilla you can bring in through the legitimate existing crossings, do it that way. That is the more sensible way to do that.

What is the thinking about how to give the PA credit from this? There’s talk about putting the PA at the crossings. Has Israel signed an agreement…

The PA does not benefit, and President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad do not benefit, from the conditions for people in Gaza being bad. Improving the conditions of people in Gaza, by whatever means, is helpful to the overall cause. So, yes, there’s an issue obviously about the PA at the crossings, and that’s something that will be explored now. Likewise, the European Union mission at Rafah. These are conversations that we will have.

What do you think of those of your international colleagues who believe some effort should be made to reach out to Hamas?

 It would be better if Hamas were part of this process. But it’s their choice, really. When people say the international community should reach out to Hamas, it’s not as if Hamas aren’t being spoken to. People talk about this as if there was some failure of communication.

There are plenty of people that talk to Hamas. The Egyptians are talking to Hamas constantly. People talk to Hamas, and Hamas know perfectly well what they need to do in order to come into the process.

It’s very important to describe these Quartet rules [which require Hamas to recognize Israel, renounce terrorism and accept previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements as pre-conditions for international legitimization] not in the sense of a piece of bureaucracy.

The point is that if you want to be part of a negotiation for a state of Palestine and a state of Israel, one, it’s quite difficult to do that in circumstances where you’re sitting across the table from people and saying, ‘We reserve the right to kill your citizens at the same time as we’re having this talk.’ That in my view doesn’t work as a negotiation. And two, obviously, it’s quite difficult if you say, ‘But we don’t actually accept that you should have state, that your state exists.’ These [Quartet rules] actually derive from a sensible political analysis. They don’t derive from some capricious folly on the part of the international community.

Sometimes there are statements that come out of the Hamas leadership that seem to indicate they’re prepared to make a change.

But then, other times, they don’t. Take the Gaza situation now: If you really want to make this work, to take the change that’s been made by Israel in its policy, and say, ‘Right we’re going to get behind this and use this as an opportunity to boost the whole process,’ I mean, what would you do? You’d release Gilad Schalit, wouldn’t you? And you’d say, ‘Now we can get a whole lot of prisoners released from the Palestinian side,’ and everyone would feel better.

So if they want to play a constructive [role], the door is absolutely open. But they’ve got to want to be part of it. I don’t think this is a failure of ours – that we’re not reaching out, or failing to communicate. They know perfectly well what we’re saying and why we’re saying it.

Yet we see Abbas trying, or purportedly trying, for some kind of reconciliation with Hamas – when, if he is reconciled, that complicates any prospect of moving forward.

When people, particularly from the Arab media, say, ‘Don’t you think Palestinian reconciliation is a good thing?” I say, ‘Yes, it’s a really good thing, but the only reconciliation that ever works is one that’s genuine.’ The question is: On what terms can you achieve that unity? For example, if the unity was to be at the expense of the progress we’ve made on Palestinian security, that would not be a sensible deal.

When you take a step back and you analyze this whole situation, the basic problem is that people have lost faith in the political process to deliver a credible solution – on the Palestinian side and on the Israeli side. It was only when I came back to this after leaving office [as British prime minister ] that I understood the impact of the [second] intifada and the disengagement from Gaza on the Israeli mindset. The combination of those two things fundamentally changed the way Israelis look at this situation. Their position now is to say, ‘Show us that if we make peace, it’s a genuine, lasting peace with a Palestinian state that we can predict, that is stable, and that is a secure partner for us. Show us that, and we’ll give it a go. But if you can’t show us that, the experience of the last 10 years makes us very doubtful.’

And are we being shown that? What you have are contradictory elements.

If you look at what’s happened in Gaza with Hamas, then you would be skeptical. All I’m saying to Israeli [public] opinion, is that if you look at what Fayyad has done with Palestinian security and the changes in the economy on the West Bank, you should at least factor that in and therefore not exclude the possibility that we can actually make progress.

This will only work if you build the state and its institutions bottom-up as well as negotiate these traditional political issues top-down.

How troubled are you, and how troubled should we be, about the demonization and delegitimization of Israel?

It does trouble me because I think that the security of Israel is a fundamental part of our security too, in countries like mine.

The lesson is to take the ground that is always justifiable. And there is ground that is justifiable. That’s why the policy we’ve now articulated on Gaza is a sensible policy. I, as a friend of Israel, can go out and justify this policy. As you put it in your paper, ‘Coriander, yes; Kassams, no.’ I can justify that policy.

What I found hard to justify was ‘Coriander, no.’ There is a constant battle here [against delegitimization] that anyone in Israel is well aware of. That’s why the smart thing is always to be on the ground that you can defend most easily.

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