Crawling from the Wreckage Read online

  Palestinians are turning more and more to Islamist movements that reject the whole notion of a permanent division of the land between Israel and a Palestinian state. Hamas’s popular support has risen so fast that Abbas postponed the parliamentary elections scheduled for this summer, since a vote now might give Hamas and its allies a majority of seats. The Bush administration has given Sharon a green light, and he is going to move as fast as he can.

  Later in 2005, Sharon’s leadership of the Likud Party was challenged by Binyamin Netanyahu, who had been prime minister between 1996 and 1999. Their real goals were identical—to preserve the West Bank settlements and prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state—but Netanyahu tried to exploit the gap between what Sharon could say in public and what he actually intended to do in order to paint him as a traitor to the settlers’ cause and a sell-out to the left.

  Sharon saw Netanyahu’s challenge off, but was felled by a stroke shortly before the elections of March 2006. Further intrigues between Netanyahu and the radical settler faction in Likud had driven Sharon to walk out of the party, taking the less extremist members with him, and to found a new centre-right party, Kadima. With Sharon permanently incapacitated, it was Ehud Olmert who led Kadima to victory in the elections—and by then, Hamas had also won the Palestinian parliamentary elections. On both sides, the whole-hoggers were in charge.

  March 23, 2006

  AFTER THE ISRAELI ELECTION

  “It’s a trade-off,” said Dror Etkes, director of the Israeli organization Settlement Watch, just after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon carried out the dramatic withdrawal from the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip last August. “The Gaza Strip for the settlement blocks; the Gaza Strip for Palestinian land; the Gaza Strip for unilaterally imposing borders. They don’t know how long they’ve got. That’s why they’re building like maniacs.”

  But they are going to have lots of time: Ariel Sharon may be in a permanent coma but his project is doing just fine. Nor is there any doubt about what acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will do once he is prime minister in his own right, with a solid majority behind him. In far blunter terms than Sharon had used in recent years, Olmert sketched out the new government’s policy last month.

  “Reality today obliges us to separate ourselves from the Palestinians and to remodel the borders of the state of Israel,” said Olmert, “and this is what I will do after the elections. This will force us to evacuate [some] territories currently held by the state of Israel [in the West Bank, but] we will hold on to the major settlement blocks. We will keep Jerusalem united. It is impossible to abandon control of the eastern borders of Israel.”

  In other words, there will be no more peace negotiations: the Palestinians will just have to live within the 680 kilometres of tall fences that mark out Israel’s new borders, in a pseudo-state surrounded and almost cut in half by Israeli settlements. The whole Jordan valley will stay in Israel’s hands, cutting Palestinians off from the rest of the Arab world except for one Israel-controlled border crossing into Jordan at the Allenby Bridge and one that crosses into Egypt from the Gaza Strip.

  The two hundred thousand Arabs living in the old city of Jerusalem are already cut off from the rest of the Palestinian territories by a ring of new Jewish suburbs and a maze of gates that they cannot pass through without magnetic cards. New settlements linking the existing Jewish suburbs east of Jerusalem with the settlement block of Ma’ale Adumim will push Israel’s frontier most of the way across the West Bank in the centre, effectively cutting off the northern West Bank from the southern part.

  All the big settlement blocks in the West Bank—Ariel, Gush Etzion and Ma’ale Adumim—will formally become part of Israel, sheltering behind the wall that divides them from the misery and desperation on the other side. Some isolated settlements will be abandoned, and the estimated 60,000 Jews who live in them will be moved to join the 185,000 people who already live in the bigger blocks. The Israeli army will police the areas that remain Palestinian, making incursions as necessary. And there you have it: the permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

  Israelis justify this unilateral “solution” with the argument that there is nobody on the Palestinian side to negotiate with, and with the victory of the radical Hamas Party in Palestinian elections two months ago, that argument sounds almost plausible. But we arrived at this sorry situation because Israel was unwilling to negotiate fairly with any of the previous, more reasonable incarnations of the Palestinian leadership. The settlements always got in the way.

  For twenty years, while one peace initiative after another died due to Israeli stalling and the patience of moderate Palestinians eroded, the settlements doubled and redoubled in population, taking up more and more Palestinian land. So now, since the Palestinians are too radical to talk, the settlements must become part of Israel. Most Israeli voters are willing to accept this logic for the time being, but it does not serve Israel’s long-term security.

  At the moment, Israel holds all the cards in the Middle East. Its army and economy are incomparably stronger than those of its Arab neighbours. It has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and they have none. And it has 110 percent support from the United States, the world’s only superpower. But a prudent Israeli leader would conclude that now is therefore the right time to make a permanent peace with the Arabs, including the Palestinians, because nobody can be certain that Israel will still hold all of these cards in twenty-five or fifty years’ time.

  Israel cannot have a permanent peace and the settlements, too. It is making a bad trade.

  Actually, Israel cannot have the settlements with or without a peace deal, because the international law changed after 1945. It is illegal to change a border by force, and the international community (that is, all the other countries in the world) will not recognize such a change.

  April 13, 2006

  OLMERT: DREAMING IN TECHNICOLOUR

  “We have a very tight timetable [for drawing Israel’s final borders], because we seek the support of the U.S. administration and President Bush. It has to be done by November 2008,” said Yoram Turbowicz in an interview with the Yediot Ahronoth newspaper on April 11.

  Turbowicz, who will be chief of staff to prime minister Ehud Olmert when the latter takes over as prime minister of Israel’s new government, was only saying publicly what most members of the Kadima Party think in private, but it’s interesting how foolish it looks when you see it in cold print.

  Olmert imagines that he can carry out Sharon’s grand plan, since he has the letter that President Bush wrote to Sharon last year that drastically changed U.S. policy, declaring that Israel could not be expected to return to its pre-1967 borders, “in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers.” Just get it all done in the next thirty-two months, as Yoram Turbowicz said, before Mr. Bush leaves office at the end of 2008.

  One of Turbowicz’s assumptions is dead right: Israel cannot expect to have Washington’s support for expanding its borders in such a dramatic way from any successor administration, whether Republican or Democratic. No previous administration in Washington would have backed such a project either. The Bush administration is an aberration, both in its contempt for international law and in its belief that American national interests and the desires of the current Israeli government are identical. So the deadline is real.

  But Turbowicz is dead wrong in assuming that U.S. support will be enough to make the change in Israel’s borders legal, permanent and widely accepted. The world does not work like that, and even if America’s power were as great as Olmert seems to think it is, Washington could not make other countries accept such a gross breach of international law. The post-1945 international law, written into the United Nations Charter, states that territorial changes imposed by force will not be recognized by UN members. Full stop. It’s about taking the profit out of war and thereby reducing the temptation to go to war, and for more than sixty years, it is the one UN rule that has al
most never been broken. Indonesia conquered East Timor and held it for a quarter-century, for example, but nobody ever recognized East Timor’s annexation as legal and finally Indonesia had to leave.

  Israel conquered East Jerusalem (together with the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights) in the Six Day War of 1967, and immediately proclaimed that a unified Jerusalem (including Arab East Jerusalem) was its new capital forever more. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and all the other government departments moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and, since 1967, Israeli domestic law has treated East Jerusalem as just another part of Israel. But no foreign government recognized the annexation of East Jerusalem as legal, and no foreign embassies moved from Tel Aviv—not even the U.S. embassy.

  Look at the website of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, and you’ll read that “the information contained in this website applies specifically to American citizens residing in or travelling through the Tel Aviv Consular District (which is comprised of “greenline” Israel) [that is, the country within its pre-1967 borders]; residents of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza should visit http://jerusalem.usconsulate.gov/.” The U.S. State Department knows the law, and it applies it.

  It is possible (though unlikely) that the Bush administration might yet browbeat the State Department into “recognizing” not only Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem but the far greater expansion of Israel’s borders that Olmert now has in mind. But it is simply inconceivable that President Bush could persuade other countries to accept such a gross violation of international law.

  Olmert cannot deliver; the deadline is meaningless. His government can build walls, dig ditches, move settlers around, proclaim that Israel’s eternal borders are now some distance to the east of where they were last week, maybe even get the Bush administration to agree to the change, but none of it will have any legal force. The whole exercise will take up enormous amounts of time, effort and newsprint over the next few years but it is, in the end, only a charade.

  6.

  MISCELLANY I

  September 7, 2006

  SMEED’S LAW

  I was in a taxi in Beijing this morning, in heavy traffic moving very slowly, when a truck tried to change lanes and push in front of us. The taxi driver was having none of that, so he nosed forward to block the truck. The truck driver held his course, the taxi driver pushed forward again, and fifteen seconds later came the inevitable crunch. Small accident, nobody hurt.

  You see this sort of thing almost every day here, and you sometimes wonder why Chinese drivers are such idiots. But they aren’t. They’re just first-generation drivers.

  China still has less than one car for every fifty people, but even ten years ago, more than one hundred thousand people were dying on its roads annually. The death toll is probably much greater now, because car ownership has grown at least fivefold since then. But I’ll bet that it is already falling in terms of deaths per vehicle-kilometre driven. There is a national learning curve in driving, and China is climbing it. So is the rest of the developing world.

  Around the world, about 1.2 million people are killed in road accidents each year. An astounding 85 percent of those deaths happen in developing countries, although they own less than one-fifth of the world’s cars and trucks. There’s no getting round it: they are very, very bad drivers in China, India, Africa and the Middle East. (And they are almost as bad in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.)

  Take Liberia, for example. If the Liberian death rate per million kilometres driven were transposed to the United States, six million Americans per year would be killed on the roads. Actual American road deaths are about forty thousand per year, so it is 150 times more dangerous to drive in Liberia than in the U.S. You can’t blame all that on poor brakes and bad roads. What can you blame it on?

  Back in 1949, R. J. Smeed, Professor of Traffic Studies at University College London, proposed a statistical “law”—more a rule of thumb really—which was, to say the least, counterintuitive. He said that a growing number of cars on the road leads to a decrease in the number of accidents per vehicle. A growing car population means a big, persistent annual fall in the death rate per million kilometres driven.

  Common sense tells us the opposite. It says that, other things being equal, the number of single-vehicle accidents (driving into trees, running over pedestrians) ought to increase more or less in direct proportion to the number of cars on the road. Two-car crashes and multi-car pileups ought to increase as the square of the number of vehicles. But it doesn’t work like that.

  The amount of road traffic in the United States has grown fourteen-fold since 1925. If the number of American deaths per million kilometres driven had stayed steady at the 1925 rate, there would now be three hundred thousand deaths per year on American roads, not forty thousand. Americans have become much better drivers—and eventually everybody else will, too.

  Smeed offered no explanation for this phenomenon, but I think that there is a collective learning process as more and more people become experienced drivers, and particularly as the generations turn over and children grow up in families that already own cars.

  In thirty years, the mass stupidity that was Mexico City’s road scene in the 1970s—make six lanes where there are only three, block the intersections, and blow your horn incessantly—has morphed into the relatively disciplined, relatively silent Mexico City traffic of today, which flows more smoothly now even with three or four times as many cars on the road.

  Between 1925 and 1984, the U.S. road death rate per million kilo metres driven fell steadily by 3.3 percent per year. In Britain, between 1949 and 1974, it fell by 4.7 percent per year. You can’t just attribute this to safer cars because even modern cars in the hands of first-generation, Third World drivers still achieve kill rates as high as those of 1920s Americans in their Model T Fords. Better engineered roads may make a bit of difference, but, on the other hand, there are far more cars on the road.

  Eventually, you hit diminishing returns: in the last ten years, U.S. road deaths per million kilometres driven have fallen at less than 2 percent a year. When almost everybody is a third-generation driver, what’s left to learn? But Smeed’s Law still holds, because the number of kilometres driven per year in the U.S. isn’t growing fast anymore either.

  So this year’s 1.2 million traffic deaths will not soar to five or ten million when all the people in the developing countries get cars, too. It will rise for a while, due to the huge surge of new drivers, and then it will fall back as they gain experience, perhaps even below the current figure.

  Which leaves only two problems. The long-term one is that the world will go into climate meltdown because of those two or three billion cars on the road. (The current global car population is about five hundred million.) The short-term one is that Beijing, where an extra thousand cars are put on the road every day, will achieve total gridlock just in time for the 2008 Olympics.

  Wrong again: they avoided gridlock in Beijing by banning half the vehicles from the road (licence plates ending in odd numbers one day, even numbers the next) for a month before the Olympics and a month afterwards. Prophecy is an art, not a science.

  And so, on to the ever-popular topic of gun control, on which I have repeatedly been wrong in the past. But I think I finally got it right.

  April 16, 2007

  GUN COUNTRY

  You can imagine lots of countries where a candidate for the presidency might lie about owning a gun so as not to alienate the voters, but only in the United States would he lie and say he does own a gun when he doesn’t. That was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s sin earlier this year—and he compounded it by claiming that he was a lifelong hunter. Diligent reporters checked and found that Romney had never taken out a hunting licence anywhere. (Where were they when President Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”?)

  The notion that the voters might punish a candidate for not owning a gun would seem simply bizarre in m
ost jurisdictions, but it is a serious political reality in the U.S. That’s why hardly anybody in the U.S. is using the latest mass slaughter by some enraged loser (thirty-three dead at Virginia Tech) to argue for more gun control. There’s not even pressure to renew the federal law banning the sale of assault rifles, which was recently allowed to lapse.

  Gun control is a dead issue in the United States, and it isn’t coming back. There is a sound political reason for this, and there is also a rational explanation for it (which isn’t the same thing).

  The political reason was simplicity itself: the Democratic Party realized that it wasn’t going to win back a majority in either house of Congress if it didn’t stop talking about gun control. The party’s leaders looked at the political map after the 2004 election, a sea of Republican red with a narrow strip of Democratic blue on either coast, and realized that their problem was more than just George W. Bush’s fatal charm. They weren’t winning in “heartland” states because they were seen as trying to take Americans’ guns away.

  There are other issues even in Montana, of course, but enough people care passionately about their guns in Montana that it’s hard to get elected there if you are seen as anti-gun. So now the Democratic Party’s national platform commits it to uphold the Second Amendment—the right to keep and bear arms—and in the 2006 election, it won both the Senate seat that was being contested in Montana and the governorship of the state, for decades a Republican stronghold.

  The campaign manifesto of the new Democratic senator from Montana, Jon Tester, claimed that he would “stand up to anyone—Republican or Democratic—who tries to take away Montanans’ gun rights.” The new Democratic governor of Montana, Brian Schweizer, says that he has “more guns than I need but not as many as I want … I guess I kind of believe in gun control: you control your gun, and I’ll control mine.” It’s a whole new image for Democrats, and it won them control of both houses of Congress in 2006. (Yes, the war helped, too, but by itself it wouldn’t have been enough.)