Time for a positive change

One day last week, some Palestinians at a cafe in Ramallah were watching TV, where there was talk about the possibility of peace with Israel. "Didn't we get peace 10 years ago with the Oslo agreement?" someone threw into the air. "What do you care if we get some more?" his friends answered in chorus.

Yes, the main message from the Palestinian side is that there's been enough of peace. The peace that began with the Oslo Accords promised a Palestinian woman that a day after the signing, the Israeli Border Police would disappear from the view out her kitchen window, that her son would come home from prison and that her husband would no longer have to make his way at three in the morning through humiliating checkpoints to make a living.

None of that happened. This peace, which sowed destruction and sorrow, and brought thousands of dead and tens of thousands of wounded, has already been tried, they are saying over there. The time has come to fight for improved standards of living. Therefore, the coming elections for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority will, in effect, be a vote of confidence for the man with the best chances to bring a change to the day-to-day existence in the Palestinian street.

The agenda of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who go to the polls on January 9 is a little different from that of the Israelis, and also different from their leaders' agenda. It's not Abu Mazen, Marwan Barghouti or the Communist Party up for election, but the Palestinian prisoner associations.

We shouldn't be surprised by that. The hierarchy built in Palestinian society over 37 years of occupation and two intifadas put the shaheed at the top of the pyramid, followed by the imprisoned, and then the exiled, and then the person whose home was demolished. In the second tier - with all due respect to the peace proposed in President Bush's road map - the Palestinians will be demanding a campaign against unemployment, which has reached 60 percent in the West Bank, and giving a chance to live in Gaza on a little more than $2 a day.

The sounds of joy Israelis are making about "seeing positive signs" in the Palestinian leadership, and particularly in the Islamic bloc, should be regarded with a considered degree of caution. It's not peace they are talking about over there, but about freedom for the prisoners, lifting the checkpoints, and work permits.

Abu Mazen's pleasant words, the surprisingly soft terms of Hassan Yusuf, the Hamas leader freed from prison, and even the encouragement that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak gave Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should be seen as a well-orchestrated chorus of compliments motivated by expectations to see a more open Israel.

In any random street poll nowadays on the Palestinian street, at every meeting of a Palestinian leader with a visitor from abroad, and at every Palestinian gathering, four issues come up in the following order: freeing the prisoners from Israeli jails, evacuating the soldiers from the city centers, easing restrictions on freedom of movement, and ending the pinpoint prevention assassinations.

It must be admitted that over the last 10 years there was not a single stage where the Palestinian society had something to lose. The signals coming from over there now indicate that the Palestinian side is internalizing the idea that maybe in the future they will have something to gain.

For clear reasons, mostly the continuing terrorism, the Israeli government has never tried to initiate a positive change in Palestinian society. Maybe the time has come for it. If we were to better understand how things operate on the other side, maybe we could consider our steps wisely and know how to avoid disappointment.

The instrument through which this can be done is the Palestinian elections for president. Before the pressure on Israel begins to mount, before a spectacular terror attack by the association of opponents of peace torpedoes the last bit of willingness to turn a new page, it would be wise if at our own initiative we responded to those signals.

If there is any chance for a change in the position of the Palestinian public toward Israel and an end to terrorism, it does not go through Abu Mazen's office nor even Marwan Barghouti's cell. It passes, whether we like it or not, through the gates of the Shata Prison and at the Hawara checkpoint.

The writer was the first head of the joint security mechanism with the Palestinian Authority and is now a researcher at Haifa University.