While perusing the internet for podcasts about the Middle East conference taking place in Annapolis, Maryland, on Tuesday, I was also clicking through my photos of Israel and Palestine, and came across this one. It’s of Jerusalem, the place at central in the conflict and one of many topics not brought up in negotiations.

I took this photo of the Old City in 2005. I took a similar one in 2003. Both were from the balcony of the same hostel, where one can look out on the area near where East Jerusalem abuts West and see what’s been described by some as the fault line from which comes all conflicts in the region. And like all fault lines, it’s pretty quiet for the most part. You see Palestinians and Jews going about life. Merchants selling, devout going to pray at this mosque or that temple, idle teens everywhere. Oh, and lots of Israeli soldiers.

As an atheist, it’s a little strange to me at times that Jerusalem would be among my most favorite of cities. But as someone who values history, culture, and vibrancy that comes with non-homogeneous societies, there’s virtually no place better. So, I wonder, in a globalized world where borders are supposedly dropping (unless you’re a Republican talking about Mexico) why would people want to wall off this place, the meeting point for the three ideas responsible for so much in the East/West clash? To me, the last thing that would be good for this region or the world would be to see a “United Jerusalem,” at least in the way people who use that term define it. So why wasn’t it, or any other actual sticking points, brought up in Annapolis?

Fault lines are where the edges huge slabs of subterranean plates grind against one another. When the pressure on the rock gets to great, it breaks, and we get an earthquake. Earthquakes happen in nature and there’s nothing to be done about it. Most people don’t want any more of them than the earth already provides for. But there is something called anthropogenic seismicity, or human-created earthquakes. National Geographic tells me that “human activity has caused at least 200 earthquakes.” This summer’s magnitude 3.9 quake in Utah, caused by a coal mining operation, was a perfect example.

There is that slow rumbling of social tectonic activity running through Jerusalem. It happens where ever people with striking differences in beliefs mix, and yet most of us are fairly wary of the types of Apartheid and segregation projects that keep people apart, for justifiable reasons, chiefly, that they tend to create more pressure, which leads to a quake. Some social quakes, usually fairly small ones, occur naturally, such as the recent incident in Sudan, where the foreigner teacher didn’t possess the knowledge to know that pictures of teddy bears called Mohammed might not go over well. Then, there are the more created sort, which is what we see when partisan policy wonks and governments who are already betting on one side get involved.

Since the Annapolis “conference” was a blip on the radar of failed and false attempts to end an occupation, recognize a Palestine or securing any sort of actual peace deal, let’s not spend too much time dwelling on it, except to note that it re-affirms what really is needed if some sort of peace process were to be effective. All that is not in the Annapolis statement and the White House-pushed “Road Map” peace plan.

You can read the tepid Annapolis statement here, or to gain a better understanding about the historical context it ignores, you can check out Noam Chomski’s analysis or get some spiritual/policy perspective from one of the few religious leaders worth taking seriously: South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Book-ended on either side of the Bush presidency are the brief three days spent pushing the Road Map at the beginning, and this one-day Annapolis meeting at the end. In the middle rests the huge chasm of the Iraq war and occupation. In geologic terms, we have the United States, which has been mining (or undermining, if you will) the region for some time, causing external pressure. A perusal of Middle East history going back 3,000 years, give or take, will show that whenever these sort of major quakes happen, it’s most often the result of an external force, rather than anything internally intrinsic about the people or place.

So the this mine shaft under Jerusalem, started with a duel promise for statehoods to Jewish and Palestinian people by the British under the mandate period, was quickly bought out by the U.S., who mined much deeper than anyone though possible. Propped up with billions of dollars each year to support continued mining, we are now seeing the resulting earthquakes. The best thing for the people of this region is likely (in certain lines of thinking) the least profitable for certain business interests, and definitely out of line with some fundamentalist religious views that seem to hold too much sway in things; fill in the mine. In terms of this conflict, that would mean a real resolution aimed at restoring the ground that has been ripped out.

The organization Jewish Voice For Peace recently offered some key ways in which this could happen:

• Make Israel’s announced settlement freeze permanent
• Engage Syria and Israel in talks to end their long-standing dispute over the Golan Heights
• Find a way to engage Hamas so that a cease-fire stopping the shelling of Israeli towns near Gaza can be brokered and so that Hamas will not oppose other steps toward peace that Israel and the Palestinians might take
• Israel must take down the sections of its wall that cut into the West Bank
  and to work on resolving the issues of permanent borders based on the pre-1967 lines, the status of Jerusalem and a just and practical solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees.

All are great points to work from, but none of them are going to happen with a U.S. government-led effort, and that’s because the U.S. government is ideologically (due to the religious or philosophical proclivities of those who run it) with certain fanatic parties within Israel and within the religious and business communities in the U.S., and against anything that will create stability there. A party that has chosen a side cannot act as some sort of mediator in good faith. But then, good faith might not be on the agenda.

Phyllis Bennis, with the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote of the outcome to Tuesday’s back on November 15, including the prediction of a rushed coercion of Mahmoud Abbas to sign the agreement. Nothing will come of it. Embedded in the U.S.-Israeli plan is poverty and continued subjugation and exile for one group (Palestinian), and the continued task of being prison wardens for the other (Israel). The vast majority of people want neither outcome, yet it remains.

Bennis writes:

Borders

A Palestinian “state” would be announced on a series of non-contiguous truncated Bantustan-like cantons comprising something less than 50% of the West Bank plus Gaza.Israel might, with great fanfare, charitably “adjust” very slightly the current route of the Apartheid Wall to seize slightly less land that the current route (which Israeli Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni earlier announced would be the basis for any border).All of the West Bank’s major water aquifers will remain on the Israeli side of the Wall.

Settlements

All the major West Bank settlement blocs would remain intact on the Israeli side of the Wall, leaving between 180,000 and 200,000 of the current 250,000 West Bank settlers in place. With great fanfare most of the 105 small symbolic “outpost” settlements constructed since 2001, which together house only about 2000 settlers, will be dismantled.The entire Jordan Valley would remain in Israeli hands. In exchange, Palestinians would be offered a “land swap” which would almost certainly involve a significantly smaller amount of land, of far less arability and viability.

Refugees

The Palestinian right of return, codified not only in general international law but specifically in UN resolution 194 (1949), has already been officially rejected by Israel but also by the United States, in the Bush-Sharon letter exchange of April 2004. Israel’s Annapolis agenda plans to reassert that rejection though a demand that the Palestinians accept language recognizing the “Jewish character” of Israel, or accepting the definition of Israel as “the state of the Jewish people” as opposed to a state of its own citizens.So far Palestinian officials have indicated they will not accept that language, which Israeli Prime Minister Olmert says is a precondition to any negotiations. The rejection of the right of return will be further entrenched by an Israeli “offer” to Palestinian refugees the privilege of “returning” to the erstwhile new “Palestinian state,” rather than the right to return to their actual home territory inside what is now Israel.

Jerusalem

International law (UN Security Council resolution 181, which divided Palestine into what was supposed to become a Jewish and an Arab state) calls for Jerusalem to belong to neither state, but rather to be a “separate body” under international jurisdiction. Virtually no governments (not even the U.S.) recognize Israel’s annexation of occupied Arab East Jerusalem, and numerous UN resolutions have reaffirmed that East Jerusalem is occupied territory. The Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem (known as neighborhoods, not settlements) include over 200,000 Israeli settlers, and they will remain in Israeli hands. The Israeli position in Annapolis will call for continuing Israeli control of all of Jerusalem, with some kind of Israeli-controlled “autonomy” for Palestinian neighborhoods and parts of the Old City’s Muslim shrines.

The charade of a negotiation in Annapolis was just a temporary diversion from attention to the digging still under way in an already dangerous mine. As it took place, a by-pass highway continued to be constructed in the West Bank, which diverts Palestinian traffic away from Jerusalem entirely, and is meant to cut off the people there from the part of the city that is still recognized by the international community to be in their territory. In Gaza, prisonlike conditions remain. And in the West Bank, settlement construction continued as usual. In the old city, fundamentalist believers prayed at the Western Wall for any and all negotiations with Palestinians to fail.

Jerusalem is a city loved by many people for various reasons. It sits on a fault line, above a deep, empty mine shaft. And the hole gets deeper.

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