[This article was published in The Badger, the student-run newspaper at the University of Sussex]

As the Bush administration scrambled late last year to corral a host of actors in the Middle East behind a re-launch of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I couldn't help but view it all with skepticism.

Scattered reports appeared claiming that Condoleezza Rice made a personal link between the Israeli checkpoints and her experiences of racial segregation in Alabama¹, but I didn't buy it.

It might seem that, following Bush's visit to the region and a handful of fruitless stop-and-start meetings between the parties, now would be an appropriate time to say I told you so.

But to be fair, I'm surprised. I expected the Annapolis conference's lack of meaningful content to catalyze a range of contradictions and set off another round of intra-Palestinian fighting over who could speak for whom in the Palestinian struggle.

Instead, we have seen a hardening of positions. Opinion polls show a slight shift in favor of Fatah, but both parties retain solid support among Palestinians² and both parties are sticking stubbornly to their strategies. I can only marvel at the rapid adaptation and normalization of crisis which has characterized the conflict.

If Annapolis is neither a success nor a failure, what is it?

Most importantly, the Annapolis conference and Bush's late-term push for peace in the Middle East is the outcome of the primary actors' dependency on the fantasies embedded in the idea of peace. For these actors, a resolution of long-standing issues is neither likely nor necessary.

The Fatah party's dependency consists primarily on the material benefits that spring from the fantasy: when the international community decides that Fatah is behaving appropriately, they reward them with strong financial backing, as donors demonstrated with a $7.7 billion aid pledge in December - aid that is intended to bypass Hamas and its control of the Gaza Strip.³

In Israel, Ehud Olmert heads a shaky coalition that ranges across the political spectrum from the center-left Labor party to the ultra-Orthodox Shas party on the right. Olmert's political survival after Ariel Sharon fell into a coma has been remarkable enough in its own right, but the Annapolis conference plays a crucial role in holding together his disparate coalition.

Each side is leveraging its presence in the coalition against the other in a bid to prevent Olmert from making substantial decisions, rendering both incapable of directly challenging him. What's left is a paralyzed leadership and, much to his chagrin I presume, the joint maintenance of Olmert's political position and the status quo.

As the Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar complained about the silence of the left, "it turns out that the Zionist left finds it easier to fulfill its mission when it is confronting leaders who are loyal to the platform of the right, than when it is confronting right-wing prime ministers who are willing to mention the word 'occupation.'"⁴

The fantasy of peace, the mere resumption of a process, is enough to buy Olmert the breathing room he needs.

For Bush, the indictment is all too easy. Annapolis serves two main purposes: distraction from the disastrous results of his invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and another element in that very same policy of intervention.

For all three, Annapolis functions within this context of intervention. The conference was called as an urgent response to the Hamas-Fatah split within the Palestinian movement, an active and overt attempt to boost support for Fatah by channeling handouts through them.

Strategy in dependency

Begging off the "good will" of the U.S. is the core of Fatah's strategy, and this strategy may not be as bad as it first appears. In a sad, depressing way, the U.S. is the primary pivot in this conflict. It wields enormous power.

When Palestinians voted Hamas into power in early 2006, the U.S. waged a broad campaign to topple the government by squeezing its resources. Donors and banks throughout the world, including the Arab world, were threatened with sanctions if they provided or processed money that would make its way under Hamas' budgetary authority.

Hamas and Fatah both took creative steps to find a distribution of power that might open the channels of funding, but the U.S. showed little interest. Palestinians were faced with a tough choice: give in to U.S. demands or suffer the consequences.

It's easy to criticize the pursuit of dependency capitulation entailed, but when staring economic collapse and likely military aggression in the face - and Palestinians are personally acquainted with both - the choice is not so easy.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), a heavily bloated proto-state apparatus, collapsed without funding. The Oslo peace process in the 1990s initiated a flood of international funding which sustained both the PA and nearly all aspects of the Palestinian economy.

Regardless of the mistakes made under Arafat's leadership, one thing seems clear: the Palestinian economy will never become self-sustaining until Palestinians have freedom of movement.

Tony Blair, the Quartet's new Envoy to the Middle East, has brought considerable international prestige to his role in promoting Palestinian development. But even a senior member of his staff has admitted that "without facilitation of movement, there will be no substantive change in the situation."⁵

The Palestinians have no good choices. Hamas' strategy to develop internally under the protection of a long-term hudna, or temporary truce, with Israel depends on freedom of movement. Israel holds the key here and only the U.S. has any leverage over Israel.

Fatah can only hope for action from the U.S. both in funds and pressure on Israel. A long institutional history as the managers of the Palestinian Authority leave them much more dependent on these funds and, in their struggle against Hamas, the staving off of economic collapse is about all they have to offer their constituency.

The collapse of Gaza

Perhaps the greatest failure in all of this is the collapse of Palestinian unity. For all the internal struggles that went on in the past, Palestinians were able to maintain a united front against the occupation. It remained the forefront of their struggle.

In the last year we've seen a dramatic change as both Fatah and Hamas have spent considerable energy accusing and demonizing each other. In the process, Palestinians suffer.

Gaza is crumbling. After Hamas took over in fighting with Fatah, Israel introduced a devastating blockade on the movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza. With a divided constituency, Palestinians were unable to muster much international pressure to open Gaza.

A report from the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance in December is depressing.⁶ Nearly 80% of Gazans now depend on food aid, hundreds of businesses and industries have been forced to close due to the ban on imports and exports, fuel shortages are threatening many basic services including the water supply, and eight out of ten households live below the poverty line.

A recent update on conditions in Gaza recognized that "it is probably time to stop worrying about when Gaza's economy will collapse and acknowledge that it already has."7 Indeed, last week Gazans took it upon themselves to blow holes in the wall dividing Gaza from Egypt and streamed across the border in massive crowds to buy supplies.

Israel's isolation of Gaza includes extremely personal methods. Gaza lacks the facilities to support many life-saving medical procedures, but as Saleh Al-Naami has reported for Al-Ahram Weekly, those who gain permission to enter Israel for such treatment are often pressured to act as informers against their society.⁸

In the case of one Palestinian man, the Israeli interrogator "flooded him with questions about Palestinian resistance movements for five and a half hours, demanding he divulge information before being allowed to reach Jerusalem and undergo his operation."⁹

The axis of delusion

No doubt, there is a certain pessimism in claiming that dependency on the U.S. is the unavoidable pivot of any Palestinian strategy. But at this point, alternatives are lacking.

The U.N. would seem the first alternative, but decades of abusive rallying and barricading around the conflict in the General Assembly and the Security Council leave little hope that it can act persuasively against powerful actors.

The European Union has made several gestures expressing a willingness to get involved, but at this point they haven't demonstrated their capacity for significant policy independence from the U.S. or the influence over Israel that would be needed to break the deadlock.

Local grassroots movements present a range of alternatives, but these are far from popular and unlikely to make a significant impact anytime soon.

For now, we're left with the U.S., and Bush's self-possessed affability so painfully demonstrated in Ramallah. If you didn't catch it, Bush shrugged off a question about the situation of Palestinians under occupation by joking about the checkpoints. "You'll be happy to know, my whole motorcade of a mere 45 cars was able to make it through without being stopped."¹⁰

For Palestinians, this connects not only with the immense, personal and - for many - life-long degradation they experience at Israeli checkpoints, but also with the frustration they feel over the political elite who, by virtue of their cooperation and coordination with Israeli authorities, are able to use VIP checkpoints and move more easily throughout the West Bank.

It's precisely this dichotomy between the "moderate" class of professional politicians in Fatah and the party-of-the-people persona cultivated by Hamas that Bush is exploiting, poking his finger into a painful wound in the Palestinian struggle and undermining the delicate balance through which Fatah is maintaining support.

More than just another of his common Bush-isms, his statement cut to the heart of American delusions, for it is not only Bush who believes that America's "good nature" is enough to win the hearts of the people and the right to rule. This trait runs through the American soul.

A brief scan of the Democratic candidates' positions on foreign policy and the opinions that dominate media discussions leaves much to be desired. Even Barak Obama, who is basing his campaign on a fresh approach to politics, treats the Iraq war as a mere aberration in a pattern of benevolent American rule.

In this way, Bush and the invasion of Iraq are merely scapegoats in an attempt to comfort America's battered sense of superiority, a reaffirmation of America's right to rule.

As Reza Aslan wrote in the The Washington Post late last year, "a curious and dangerous consensus seems to be forming among the chattering classes, on both the left and the right, that what the United States needs in these troubling times is not knowledge and experience but a 'fresh face' with an 'intuitive sense of the world,' and that the mere act of electing Obama will put us on the path to winning the so-called war on terror."¹¹

As frightening as this is, I can't help but agree with Aslan's summation. And when we confront the situation in which Palestinians and Israelis find themselves, this delusion only intensifies.

In this context, at least one thing seems to be clear from the results of the Annapolis conference: we all have to set our clocks back. The glittering promises and angry noise today are fundamentally about political survival, an entrenchment of the very strategies and ideologies that set off the crisis between Fatah and Hamas.

So learn the road now, because we'll be down it again soon.

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Footnotes

¹ Aluf Benn and Shmuel Rosner, "What's the hurry?", Ha'aretz, 27 Dec 2007, Retrieved on 28 Dec 2007

² PSR - Survey Research Unit, "Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 26: A Total Lack of Confidence in the Annapolis Process Keeps Hamas's Popularity Stable Despite Worsening Conditions in the Gaza Strip", 7 Jan 2008, Retrieved on 15 Jan 2008

³ BBC, "Palestinians 'win $7bn aid vow'", 17 Dec 2007, Retrieved on 14 Jan 2008; The total was then reassessed at $7.7 billion, Reuters, "Aid pledges to Palestinians increased to $7.7 billion", 17 Jan 2008, Retrieved on 22 Jan 2008

⁴ Akiva Eldar, "Where are Labor and Meretz?", Ha'aretz, 24 Dec 2007, Retrieved on 24 Dec 2007

⁵ Akiva Eldar, "Barring Blair", Ha'aretz, 13 Jan 2008, Retrieved on 13 Jan 2008

⁶ UN OCHA, "The closure of the Gaza Strip: The Economic and Humanitarian Consequences", December 2007, Retrieved on 15 Jan 2008

⁷ Jewish Voice for Peace, "JVP News Roundup", 23 Dec 2007, Received by email on 24 Dec 2007

⁸ Saleh Al-Naami, "Treachery for treatment", Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue No. 866, 11-17 Oct 2007, Retrieved on 14 Oct 2007

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Al Jazeera English, "Gaffe overshadows Bush visit", Al Jazeera, 10 Jan 2008, Retrieved on 15 Jan 2008

¹¹ Reza Aslan, "He Could Care Less About Obama's Story", The Washington Post, 30 Dec 2007, Retrieved on 6 Jan 2008 from list-serv.