History will never know, but another outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence was barely averted earlier this month. Paradoxically, it marked the beginning of one of the more encouraging recent episodes in what we call the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP), something mostly conspicuous by its absence.
As a keynote event of the Herzliya Conference, the organizers advertised a speech by the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The night before, toward the end of a typical Israeli evening long on banter, argument, and jokes, and short on sleep, I bet one of the many friends a bottle of malt whisky against Fayyad’s making it to Herzliya. It was an educated guess, based on the nonappearance of scheduled Palestinian speakers at this and other Israeli conferences over the years. I was wrong.
Apparently I was not the only one to be surprised. When Fayyad walked in, accompanied by Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak, both got mobbed by a gang of battle-hardened Israeli photographers competing for the rarest of things—a picture of Israeli-Palestinian peaceful coexistence. Compared to the intensity of the onslaught, the Pope's visit to Israel last May was a tame media event. Chaos ensued. An innocent bystander, the governor of Israel’s central bank Stanley Fischer almost got trampled underfoot, with potentially disastrous consequences for the Israeli economy. Fayyad’s Palestinian close security detail was apparently unaccustomed to dealing with the rough-and-tumble Israeli media, and for a second it looked like the photographers were winning. Fortunately, Barak’s security detail responded and came to the rescue of their Palestinian colleagues, none too gently pushing and shoving the camera hounds back. It was a rather endearing sight.
Barak then spoke on the pressing need to restart and conclude the peace negotiations between the two sides. The sense of urgency underlined by the emotional delivery was strikingly different from the more measured if not leisurely approach of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and one could only speculate what Bibi would have thought of his coalition partner’s speech. No matter. Everybody was waiting for Fayyad.
There was not all that much new in Fayyad’s speech. He restated the Palestinian positions on the occupation, the settlements, and Jerusalem. He reaffirmed the commitment of the Palestinian Authority to the two-state solution. Still, one could not help being impressed not just by what he said, but how he said it. This was a serious man talking on a serious subject, not preaching, not embellishing, neither cajoling nor threatening, evidently meaning business.
The civility of the speech, so rare in the political discourse of the Middle East, pointed both to the strengths as well as the weaknesses of perhaps the only politician in the region who has as few enemies as he has supporters. The delivery, as flat as a long-opened bottle of champagne, suggested that while this was probably not the man who could lead his people in war, he might conceivably be the man who could lead the Palestinians to peace. The thought occurred, nonetheless, that he would find such a job easier if he were the Prime Minister of Switzerland. Still, one went to bed grateful for having been present at what might turn out to be a historical moment, and half-expecting the peace talks to start the next day.
The awakening was rude. There was a stamp-size photograph of Fayyad speaking, together with a short piece in one of the main newspapers, and nothing in the other. No mention of the Barak speech, no picture of the two of them together. As for restarting the talks, there were the usual rumors of maybe, when and if the other side did this, and refrained from doing that. I am sure it was similar in Ramallah.
The upside was that the friend of that night two days past had been apparently too tired to remember the bet. As for me, I had been apparently too tired to remember who the friend was. So this, in the spirit of full disclosure, is his opportunity to claim the prize.
Post scriptum. In Herzliya, I also met my fellow-WA-blogger Roya Hakakian for the first time. We seem to have hit it off rather well, discovering friends we had in common and comparing notes on the Velvet and Green revolutions. Roya is right, by the way: The link between security and democracy seems to have gone out of fashion, much to the detriment of both.
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