“It’s not about peace; it’s about conflict management.”

André Marty is a Swiss Television correspondent in Tel Aviv, where he has followed Israeli and Palestinian politics for a number of years. Even before the recent war in the Gaza Strip, he had stopped speaking about a “peace process”. This interview was held in mid-December 2008.

What strains did you witness in Israel and Palestine due to the suffering there in December 2008?

The political dialogue with the Palestinians isn’t a priority at the moment. If either Israeli politicians or the public are concerned about anything, then it’s Iran’s nuclear programme. On the Palestinian side, a large number of people have ceased to believe there’s any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The majority of Palestinians trust neither their own politicians nor the Israelis, let alone any of the potential outside peace negotiators – from the U.S. or Europe, for example.

You yourself have experienced many bad things in this conflict. What keeps you going?

What matters here is not the comfort of a few correspondents; what matters is that here is a conflict that shapes the daily lives of millions. But it’s also a conflict that affects you in Europe, directly and immediately. Just look at your heating oil bill, or the discussions about the clash of Western and Oriental cultures: all this shows that the realities in the Middle East affect the rest of the world, too. As long as the dominant tendency in European politics is just to look away, it’s the correspondent’s job to pay even closer attention, to report and to inform. That’s not much, but it’s certainly better than surrendering the field to the cynics and the power-mad, without any journalists being there.

Do you think that we in Europe tend to expect too much of the politicians?

We can never set our expectations high enough; but when we do that, we mustn’t be too disappointed when the parties in-country arrange their priorities quite differently. Observers from abroad often find themselves faced with the fact that people on site are a lot more concerned about their daily fight for survival than about policy. In contrast to the U.S., which almost no one in the Middle East takes seriously as an independent peace broker, many people think that the Europeans could handle a much more active role, and even encourage them to do so. Yet many European countries content themselves with a ritual of issuing occasional communiqués questioning some aspects of the Israeli occupation policy, and sending humanitarian aid to the occupied areas via the U.N. – mainly as a band-aid for their own conscience.

Is there too much talk about “peace”?

Just get rid of the word “peace”, even if it hurts. Considered realistically, the chances for even reasonably workable conflict management are not all that good. Of course, that doesn’t mean abandoning the people here and any involvement in the conflict. Quite to the contrary: I am firmly convinced that it is only increasing pressure – political, economic, judicial and social – that will keep the perpetrators of this conflict reminded that there can be no military solution. To do this, we need regular, factual news reporting in Switzerland, Germany and Austria – not ideology or hyped-up emotion.

You were on the ground in the Gaza Strip several times, until journalists, too, were prohibited from entering. What were conditions like there?

There were justified warnings against sealing off the Gaza Strip, from U.N. aid organisations, the U.N. Secretary General, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and dozens of NGOs (non-governmental organisations) – for it means that many of the 1.5 million Gaza Strip inhabitants are paying the price for the de facto economic blockade and devastating policy of isolation imposed by Israel and the U.S. and supported by the E.U. The sketchy food supply comes in – is smuggled in – from Egypt via tunnels. The health care situation is becoming increasingly precarious. Most medical supplies such as bandages or syringes are considered contraband. A Swiss doctor active in an organization aiding Gaza’s deaf children is even forbidden from importing children’s hearing aids into the Gaza Strip.

Is it possible to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as long as the Palestinians are divided internally between Hamas und Fatah?

The “fraternal” struggle within Palestinian society has left a deep rift that will be difficult to bridge for a long time to come. Right now, it’s Hamas’s militarist, extremist arm that is calling the shots within the movement: there’s no doubt about that. These people’s “policies” are the Kassam rockets they fire at Israel – in flagrant violation of international, humanitarian law. Fatah followers were either brutally rubbed out during Hamas’s bloody takeover of the Gaza Strip, or they knuckled under to the radical Hamas regime. The security services of Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas were just as ruthless with their Hamas rivals on the occupied West Bank. In addition, the Fatah movement did not seem prepared to accept the lessons of their electoral defeat in January 2006: as before, the corrupt power clique in Ramallah is still in charge; as before, the Fatah power elite is unwilling to share any authority with younger party members; and as before, there is hardly any reform in the Palestinian Authority.