The comparison is between: a delightful radio chat on the BBC in 1958 between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming; and a load of paranoid weirdness from Henning Mankell.

First, Chandler and Fleming. Listen to their talk. I rarely bother listen to
an entire half hour of anything online, but I’m telling you this is
beautiful. Both of them are unpolished as all hell. For anyone who’s been to
a book fair and seen the well-honed wisecracks and calibrated personae of today’s authors, this’ll be refreshing.

When Fleming asks Chandler to explain how a hit is done in America (which
surely seemed like a very dangerous place to the average BBC listener of
half a century ago), gruff old Ray puffs on his pipe and spins an unlikely tale of gunmen brought to New York from that den of iniquity, Minneapolis. It
impresses Fleming so much that he refers to it in summing up the broadcast
as something very enlightening and shocking and underground that Chandler
has given us.

But most of all from Chandler’s side there’s the news that he intended
another Marlowe novel in which the great shamus would be married (see the
end of “Playback”) and, though he’d love his wife, he’d be frustrated by her
friends and the ease with which he lives.

Fleming, meanwhile, is very British and self-deprecating, pointing out
several times that his novels are pale shadows of what Chandler writes. In
turn, Chandler is amazed that Fleming writes a novel in two months during
his annual Jamaica vacation, having never written one faster than three
months himself. He then opines that “you starve 10 years before even your
publisher knows you’re any good.” Amen to that.

This truly beautiful conversation – hearing the voices of these fellows is
priceless in itself – was in stark contrast to Henning Mankell’s appearance
in an Israeli newspaper last week.

The starting point for Mankell’s piece was his deportation from Israel a
year ago. He was among the pro-Palestinian activists aboard a flotilla of
ships headed for Gaza, which was intercepted by Israeli commandoes. Aboard one of the ships, the commandoes and activists fought and nine activists were killed. Mankell was among those brought back to Israel on the boats and then deported.

His article in Ha’aretz last week goes through the story of a Facebook page
opened in his name. It declared support for the Lebanese Islamists of
Hezbollah and other positions he claims not to share. Facebook took the site
down twice at Mankell’s request. Mankell wonders who was behind the Facebook page.

To anyone who’s been in the Middle East, the most obvious answer is: a
Palestinian supporter saw that Mankell was on their side and decided to
hijack his name for some other causes to which he or she thought Mankell
might be inclined. Or at least that they’d be causes to which readers might
assume Mankell was inclined, knowing his position on Palestine.

But no. With a circuitous logic never apparent in his plodding Wallander
novels, Henning tells us that he heard the Israeli government wanted to use
social media to attack its enemies. Is this behind the “Henning Mankell”
Facebook page? Twice he writes: “Who would benefit from this?”

“Obviously I cannot and will not claim that it is either the Israeli regime
or the Israeli embassy in Sweden that is responsible for my kidnapped
identity and the attempts to spread lies in my name. But the question
remains: Who would benefit from this?”

In other words, he said it was the Israelis.

Well, now that you mention it, Henning, of course Israel is so threatened by
Henning Mankell that its agents spread active propaganda in favor of
Hezbollah, which kills Israelis and may indeed benefit from the propaganda
on the HM FB page, just so that they can neutralize the danger of HM.

Anyone who reads my blog or my Palestinian novels will see that I’m no shill
for Israel. But Mankell’s article is the kind of paranoid crap that makes me
see why he was attracted to the Middle East in the first place. It’s a place
where conspiracy theories abound.

When you listen to Chandler and Fleming, you hear them thinking through
their positions and ideas as they speak. Fleming is clearly altered as a
writer after half an hour with Chandler. If only Mankell had as open a mind.

It got me thinking about all the guff that tourists have to swallow. How often do visitors stream to must-see attractions which are actually unattractive – and which are only worth seeing so you can tell other people you’ve been there. I decided to apply this theory to Jerusalem, a city that’s a major tourist attraction and where I’ve lived 15 years. Here’s the Honest Tours guide to a selection of sites all of which are listed in most guides as delightful spots for tourists:

The Israel Museum: Just completed a $100 million renovation. Ho-hum. Makes you wonder what at least $90 million of the budget went on. But the donations included a major one from the Marc Rich Foundation, so perhaps the whole thing was just a money-laundering scheme. Though the museum has some interesting archeological bits and pieces, give the art galleries a miss unless you thinks a pile of old school desks nailed together in a white room ought to be called contemporary art.

The Old City: I felt deep sympathy for businessmen who suffered during the economic deprivations of the second Palestinian intifada during the last decade. Except for the nasty traders of the Old City. They’ve been fleecing tourists in a particularly mean manner for years and it was time they got a dose of karma. If you like bad hummus and surly service, try the couple of hummus restaurants listed in all the guides as “the best hummus in Jerusalem.”

The Western/Wailing Wall: Prepare to have your mystical communion with the ancient stones interrupted by a guy who looks like he stepped out of Vilna circa 1822. He’ll shove his hand in your face and ask for charity. Not for nothing does Yiddish (which many of these guys speak) have the best word for “sponger” in any language (“schnorrer”). The place is a Mecca for them.

Yad Vashem: Who doesn’t want to relive the Holocaust when they’re on vacation? A relatively new addition to the site of Israel’s “Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority” has made it at least an interesting museum. But unless you’re determined to shed tears the eternal flame and the older elements aren’t worth schlepping out to Mount Herzl.

Dome of the Rock: Now this is a genuinely unmissable experience. Too bad you’ll have to miss it, unless you’re a Muslim. At the start of the intifada in 2000, the Muslim authorities closed the Temple Mount to all non-Muslims. A big yah-boo to the whole world, which they thought was ganging up on them, like a bawling kid taking his ball home to spoil everyone’s game. Some years later they opened the platform of the Temple Mount during certain hours. But non-Muslims can no longer enter the Aqsa Mosque or the golden Dome of the Rock. Of course, you can hang out at the doors to catch a glimpse inside and be told (often rudely, as if your intention was to burst inside and desecrate the place) that you mustn’t enter.

Mea Shearim: Talking of rude, Jerusalem’s main ultra-Orthodox neighborhood has become increasingly a law unto itself. One Israeli newspaper reported that yeshiva students have been chasing the police out, thus making it a no-go district patrolled by gangs of weedy little men in black hats who think that spitting on a woman because they can see her shoulders is a good way to protect the Torah.

Jerusalem Forest: If the Norwegians knew that the hardy Norwegian pine would one day spread across the hills of Jerusalem and destroy all the natural undergrowth, they’d surely have chopped down every last one. Don’t worry, though: Yad Vashem is expanding its “campus” and eating into the forest, and there’s a housing/land shortage in Jerusalem, so this particular “attraction” won’t be around much longer.

If you have suggestions for the Honest Tours Guide to World Travel, drop me a note. I’d like to formulate a post featuring all the top worthless or disappointing sites in the world. I think it’d be a very popular feature. Let me know.

I met a group of just over a dozen 15-year-olds (some of them may have been older than that, so I hope they aren’t offended when they read this, but when you get as old as me even a 25-year-old is a kid), half of them from a Palestinian school just outside the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City and the other half from an Israeli school on the campus of the Hebrew University. They’ve been coming together for some years at infrequent intervals to discuss books they read in English. This time, they read my Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN.

I was happy to be the first author who’d come along to meet the group, and was doubly pleased with the intelligence and perception they showed.

That’s not only because they all seemed to have really liked my book. Though that, of course, does show great perception. Their group aims to go beyond the politics of the region, to find common ground in literature. Even as journalists exult at the political mobilization of the Arab world, they ought to remember that all this political activity is intended to lead not to some goal that can be summed up in a simple nut-graph (which is what journalists call the “here’s what the story’s all about paragraph,” usually the third one in the story). It’s heading toward the personal fulfillment of every Arab in myriad ambitions and desires – something that’s probably beyond the stereotypical charactertizations and analyses of journalism to contend with.

One of the most impressive elements of the long discussion I had with the kids in a restaurant overlooking the walls of the Old City was that politics was entirely absent. It demonstrates, for me, that if Israelis and Palestinians have some other basis on which to meet – rather than the mutual claims of victimization on which their politicians thrive – they find a great deal in common.

Of course, what I’ve aimed for with my four Palestinian crime novels is an approach that transcends the political clichés of the region where I find myself. So I was pleased that the kids picked up on that, too.

One of them won my heart by telling me that when my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef and other characters spoke she felt she was listening to real Palestinians speak. It’s quite the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me about my books, because I’ve tried to capture the rhythms and formalities of Arab speech in the novels.

Our discussion turned to the events across the region. I pointed out that Omar Yussef was ahead of the game when, in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, he chided the Arab nations and the US for failing to back Arab democracy.

That was as close to politics as we got. Unlike my meetings with journalists who often want to discuss present Middle Eastern diplomacy with me, rather than my novels, the kids asked fascinating questions about the actual writing of a book, the plotting and characterization. Clearly more than a few of them, Israeli and Palestinian, are budding writers, so I made them pose for this photo with the hard-edged expressions of crime writers on book jackets. I look forward to seeing their work on the shelves. (Well, they’re young, so maybe I’ll see them on a Kindle…)

Some people see the Middle East only through a political prism filled with simplistic slogans and obstructive literalism. My books defy that. They’re meant to be instructive, but entertaining — they’re crime novels, after all. These kids showed that they — like the characters in my books – don’t want to be defined and stereotyped by their often-devastating politics. They want to be real, too. And they’re smart enough to understand that fiction, strangely, can help lead them there.

After the city’s economy was devastated by the Palestinian intifada over the last decade, Bethlehem’s economic recovery has picked up pace in the last year with gross domestic product rising by 9 percent. This Christmas the city’s streets are packed with tourists and pilgrims, and if the holy family were to arrive today they would, once more, discover that there’s no room at the inn — Bethlehem’s hotels are filled to capacity.

Locals see this as an important marker on their road back to normality. “Tourists are coming. Things are all right in Bethlehem,” said Walid Zawahra, a taxi driver.

Zawahra stood beside his yellow Mercedes cab, watching tourists pour through the massive gate in Israel’s security wall around Bethlehem. The gate is opened only once a year, for Christmas, so that the Roman Catholic Patriarch can enter in procession with his entourage from Jerusalem. The rest of the year, visitors must pass through a smaller entrance at the nearby checkpoint.

Security remains a factor, however. The streets beyond the gate were closed to traffic. Palestinian security forces were out in force on the roads around Rachel’s Tomb, which Jews believe to be the site of the burial of the biblical matriarch and where Israeli soldiers still stand guard. The tomb, which has taken on the dimensions of a fortress in the last decade, is a frequent point of friction between the soldiers and Palestinian rioters, and the authorities don’t want Christmas marred by any violence.

The Church of the Nativity, which stands over the site of Jesus’s birth, opened Friday after a 24-hour security closure, as police swept it for bombs before the Patriarch’s arrival for Midnight Mass.

In Manger Square, outside the church, two new cafes have been doing a bumper business, hosting local families and tourists late into the night. A stage built against the buttresses of the Armenian monastery at the front of the church hosted live musical performances in the evening.

The Bethlehem area also has something novel to entertain its young people — namely, something to do after dark. Until recently, youngsters in Bethlehem complained that their city shut down at twilight. Two night clubs opened in the last few months in the largely Christian district of Beit Jala. One of them is named Taboo, because it serves pork and, therefore, contravenes the proscriptions of Islam by which most West Bank restaurants operate.

The intifada, which began in 2000, devastated Bethlehem’s tourist-oriented economy. Almost 90 percent of the souvenir shops in the city closed. Many of the city’s residents emigrated to the United States or South America. Most of those who left were Christian Palestinians, making a shrinking minority feel even more threatened.

This year, the relative quiet has encouraged tourists to return. The Palestinian Tourism Ministry says a record 1.5 million people have visited Bethlehem this year, 60 percent more than last year.

The Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce says there are 31 hotels operating in the city, compared to only six in 1995. Three more hotels are under construction.

Officials at the Chamber of Commerce add that the biggest disco in the Middle East will begin construction in Bethlehem in March.

As always in the Middle East, there remain plenty of reasons to cry “Humbug” in the face of this Christmas spirit. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians are stymied, meaning that there’s always the chance violence could engulf Bethlehem once more. And local Christians point out that their numbers have dwindled to a mere 2 percent of the West Bank population, raising the possibility of future Christmases more or less without Christians.

But the city the Patriarch enters today is more attuned to the message of hope inherent in the Christmas holiday than it has been for years.

(I posted this first on Global Post.)

As far as the Palestinian Authority is concerned, the priests may as well have been speaking, well, Greek. Because the road was built by Israel over land the Palestinians consider their own, officials in Ramallah condemned the priests’ participation in the road’s inauguration ceremony.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad “expressed surprise” that the Orthodox priests joined the director-general of the Israeli Tourism Ministry Tuesday at the monastery, which clings to a cliff side over Wadi Qelt, a deep canyon running down to the Jordan Valley. Another Palestinian minister said the monks’ presence “gave a deceiving impression” about the status of the land around St. George’s.

Like other stretches on the rocky road that still clings to the misnomer “peace process,” the Palestinian protest will fade like a mirage in the desert surrounding St. George’s. More important in the end is the (literally) concrete path laid out for pilgrims to visit one of the most important and most beguilingly beautiful sacred sites in the Holy Land.

Archbishop Aristarchos, the secretary of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem and the leader of the brief prayer service, was diplomatic in his comments, when asked about Palestinian complaints over the road.

“This is a monastery of prayer for peace in our region, for peace in the Holy Land,” Aristarchos said. “The road brings full access for pilgrims who are messengers of peace to the Holy Land.”

The $500,000 road cuts over from the main Jerusalem-Jericho highway in front of the entrance to an Israeli settlement. It snakes around dusty dunes and dry wadis. To the east, the view is hazy down over the Jordan Valley to the mountains rising in the Hashemite Kingdom. After a 10-minute drive, visitors arrive at a parking lot.

The ride used to take over an hour in a four-by-four vehicle or considerably longer for hikers.

Tourism in Israel is at record levels, according to the Tourism Ministry, mainly fueled by pilgrimages. This year 3.1 million visitors came to Israel, which is higher than the bumper year of 2000, when the visit of Pope John Paul II brought a boost. After the papal visit, the violence of the intifada made for a six-year tourism nightmare in which most people were too scared to come to sites in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem.

About two years ago, I noticed an increase in the number of tour buses pulling up at the tiny Greek Orthodox monastery on my street. Hunched Greek ladies wearing black shuffled toward it, cooing at my son as I took him to play in the park next door. Presumably these friendly old crones were in no physical condition to make it through the desert tracks to the monasteries in the Judean Desert.

That’s a shame, because the desert outposts are very important to the history of Christianity in the Holy Land and it’s why Archbishop Aristarchos will surely not sweat the Palestinian protests about the new road too much.

St. George’s stands on the place where Christians believe the Prophet Elijah secluded himself. A bird brought him food. It’s also where Joachim wept with joy when he heard the news that his wife would give birth to Mary, later to be the mother of Jesus.

Built in the fifth century, St. George’s was destroyed by Persian invaders in the seventh century and not fully reconstructed until 1901. The monastery is made of the same khaki limestone as the cliffs on which it nestles. The only splash of color is the turquoise dome of its chapel.

St. George’s is home to some gory relics. In its chapel, visitors can view the bones and skulls of priests killed by the Persians, kept in silver boxes. In a side-chapel, a Romanian monk who died in 1960 has been preserved. His brown, mummified face leers with a full set of teeth through his glass casket.

After the prayer service, nuns brought out baklava, juice and fruit for the guests. Archbishop Aris Shirvanian, a senior official in the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, tucked into a sandwich on brown bread.

“It’s very important for pilgrims to come to make us local Christians feel supported,” he said. “We’re the living stones of the Church in the Holy Land.”

The people who travel the new road are more important than the authority that built it.

(I posted this first on Global Post.)

What kind of place is Jerusalem? Sure, most of us know that there’s a Green Line somewhere north to south that divides West Jerusalem — now Israeli since the country’s independence in 1948 — and East Jerusalem, which was governed by Jordan until the 1967 Six-Day War and whose population used to be almost all Arab. But what else do we know?

It’s a place with great symbolic significance and deep political sensitivities, often with no basis in reality.

Here are some facts about the city.

Jerusalem’s population of 800,000 is 35 percent Arab. The rest is Jewish. Some of the Arabs have Israeli citizenship, but most don’t, though they receive health and social benefits from the Israeli state. In Israel’s other two big towns, the proportion of Arabs in the population is 10 percent in Haifa and 4 percent in Tel Aviv.

Almost 500,000 of Jerusalem’s people live in areas that weren’t Israeli in 1967, either because they were in Jordan or they didn’t exist. That’s 60 percent of the population. About half are Jews living in neighborhoods whose construction successive American governments have opposed.

When Obama said Tuesday that he was “concerned that we’re not seeing each side make the extra effort involved to get a breakthrough,” he was of course talking to the complacent Palestinian government, which seems content to sit on its hands while Israel builds new settlements and makes an eventual territorial deal less favorable to them. But his main target was the continued expansion of these Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. They more or less encircle the Arab areas and make it very hard to imagine a way to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank that would have a land link with the Palestinian areas of Jerusalem.

Netanyahu wants to continue building in those neighborhoods because he needs to boost the city’s Jewish population, which grows at 2 percent a year. The Arab population goes up 3 percent a year. His assumption is that if he builds, the population will expand to fill the real estate. It helps that the new apartment blocks might help complete the circle and cut off chances of splitting Jerusalem in peace talks, with the eastern part going to the Palestinians.

It’s a long-term issue for Israeli governments. Since 1967, the Jewish population of the city is up 150 percent. The Arab population has grown 290 percent from what it was when the Jordanian’s surrendered the place.

That demographic battle means it’s a city where birthrates count. I was at the bar mitzvah of a friend’s son last month. He stood up and introduced his two children to the crowd. Only two kids? For a moment, I wondered if there was something wrong, perhaps some fertility issue, so accustomed have I become to seeing large families after a decade and a half living in Jerusalem. After all, women average about four kids here.

Those kids don’t die as often as they used to, particularly in the Arab sectors of the population. Infant mortality among Jerusalem’s Arabs was 45 deaths per 1,000 births in 1972. Now it’s 6 per 1,000. For Jews, it’s 2.6.

That makes for a youthful city (though you wouldn’t know it by the nightlife.) Of Arabs, 41 percent are less than 14 years old. The median age for the entire city is 23, meaning that half the population is less than 23.

Though Palestinians often make much of their lack of rights, despite centuries in the city, compared to immigrant Israelis, only 9 percent of the population is made up of Israelis who immigrated since 1990. Most are from the former Soviet Union, though in the last decade Americans predominate.

Of the city’s Jews, 29 percent are ultra-Orthodox — four times the rate in Israel as a whole. Only 20 percent of Jerusalem’s Jews describe themselves as secular.

The perceived increase in the religious population’s power among secular Israelis has lead to a steady drain of Jews, compared to those who come to live in Jerusalem from elsewhere in Israel. There’s an annual deficit of about 5,000.

The large ultra-Orthodox population makes for poverty because many of the men study in yeshivas and don’t work. So 43 percent of people in Jerusalem live below the poverty line.

Only 45 percent of the population works a job, and among Palestinians it’s only 38 percent. Average household income is about $3,000 a month. But remember all those kids. These are big households to live on such a paltry sum.

They live tightly, too. In Jewish households, there’s one person per room in 150,000 apartments. In Arab neighborhoods, there are two people per room and only 41,000 apartments.

Despite the Israeli announcement this week, building has been in decline for years.

Statistics from the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, the muncipality of Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem Development Agency.

I posted this on Global Post this week.

Just when it seemed as though no amount of building in Israel’s settlements and harsh statements at the United Nations by the country’s foreign minister could truly provoke new violence between Israelis and Palestinians, the Jerusalem municipality came up with something guaranteed to steam up some hotheads.

The city’s planning committee is considering a proposal to build an underground parking lot for the Old City by breaching the 16th-century walls of Suleiman the Magnificent and digging into the rock beneath the ancient Jewish Quarter.

“This is illegal,” said Ghassan Khatib, director of the Palestinian Authority’s government media center in Ramallah. “These illegal changes would provoke the Palestinians and many others, Muslims and Christians. This will aggravate the tension between Israelis and Palestinians and have a negative effect on current international efforts to renew the political process.”

Over the years, Palestinians and Islamists have called for violence to protect, as they put it, the Old City from alleged Israeli plots to undermine it and bring the Aqsa Mosque, considered the third holiest shrine in Islam, tumbling down. Such conspiracies always seemed somewhat far-fetched, though nonetheless effective for all that.

This time, Jerusalem’s city government seems set on mirroring some aspects of the most vivid Palestinian paranoia.

There are seven gates in the walls constructed around Jerusalem (it was all the city there was when they were built, though now it’s called the Old City) by Turkish Sultan Suleiman in 1538. (Eleven, if you count four that were long ago sealed up.) In 1898, the fickle Ottoman government smashed a massive breach in the wall beside the Jaffa Gate so that Kaiser Wilhelm II could be driven through without having to leave his carriage.

That’s usually thought of as an outrage by most tourists and anyone else who treasures great works of civilization. The third-of-a-square mile that is Jerusalem’s Old City is, after all, recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

But Jerusalem’s municipality is now considering a plan for 600 new parking spaces in a lot to be built under the Jewish Quarter. (The other quarters are the Muslim, Christian and Armenian.) The aim is to provide space for visitors to the Western Wall plaza, the open area where Jews pray at the foot of the retaining wall of Herod’s 2,000-year-old temple. (The Romans destroyed the rest of the Temple in the year 70.)

Presently Jews coming to pray at the Kotel, as Israelis call it, must vie for parking in a relatively small lot on the edge of the Jewish Quarter or take a bus.

The plan, which hasn’t yet been approved by the city committee, would create a new gate in Suleiman’s wall, between the Zion Gate on the mount of the same name and the Dung Gate, which is the main entry for visitors to the Western Wall.

The gate would provide access to a tunnel through the rock of Mount Zion. At the end of the tunnel, drivers would find a four-story parking lot.

The city’s plan would include another element that might raise the ire of Palestinian leaders. City officials intend to close the existing surface parking lot. They’ll use the space to build new housing for the largely ultra-Orthodox Israelis who inhabit the Jewish Quarter.

“With Jerusalem, you always have the problem of balancing conservation and development,” said Ruth Lapidoth, an emeritus professor of international law at Hebrew University who has written extensively on Jerusalem. “There has already been a lot of building in the Jewish Quarter anyway, but it seems the breaching of the actual walls would have to be considered very seriously.”

When I first came to Jerusalem in the summer of 1996, a city development association opened an exit to a tunnel in the Muslim Quarter. It was intended to allow tourists to pass along the wall of Herod’s Temple underneath the quarter’s houses.

Palestinian leaders used the opportunity to spark fears that Israel was undermining the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque. Fighting resulted throughout the West Bank, leaving 96 Palestinians and 16 Israeli soldiers dead.

Even if six years of intifada in the last decade have reduced the capacity of either side to get up the will for such violence, the Old City of Jerusalem remains — to use diplomatic speech — sensitive.

“This plan is provocative,” said the Palestinian Authority’s Khatib, “and it would be sure to cause protests. Nobody can say how far those protests might go.”

Kaiser Wilhelm’s breach wasn’t the last time the configuration of the Old City gates was altered; the Dung Gate was expanded during the post-war Jordanian rule. But the last entirely new gate to be cut through the wall was, obviously, the New Gate, which was built in 1887 to provide better access to the Christian Quarter.

An additional thorny question might be what the gate would be called, as the Old City’s gates have names which are often different in Hebrew, Arabic and English. For the prospective gate, Parking Lot Gate lacks the necessary historic ring. One wonders also would the name of the 123-year-old New Gate have to be changed.

(For more stories on the Middle East, see my files on Global Post.)

In a banquet hall of the King David Hotel, an Israeli leader and a Palestinian leader came to the podium together Sunday evening. They embraced, spoke of each other as good friends and talked of the breakthroughs they made in the peace talks they shared. The audience applauded warmly and a benign smile made its way to the faces of almost everyone in the room.

Why is this a tragedy? Because former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Qurei, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee, failed to make a peace deal.

The two were prime negotiators at regular meetings in the King David Hotel during 2007 and 2008 in what became known as the Annapolis Process — for a conference held in late 2007 at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The talks got even closer to a resolution of the conflict than the Camp David summit of 2000. In the end, Livni’s boss, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that he made a wide-ranging offer to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, never heard back and subsequently had to resign because of corruption investigations.

Since then talks have been at an impasse.

As Livni and Qurei reminisced affably about their near miss, I had two impressions. The first was that they had done a pretty good job of hiding how they really felt back when the negotiations were going on. Things in the region looked quite bad then. Israel fought a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 and launched an attack on Hamas in Gaza at the end of 2008. Palestinians complained about building in Israeli settlements and, of course, fought a low-grade civil war between Hamas and Fatah.

The second important impression was that these two had really made a kind of personal peace. To differing degrees, they had gotten past the victimhood mentality that prevents either side from progressing. Yet they still hadn’t been able to hash out a deal, face to face across a table in a hotel (a very nice hotel, incidentally, where a basic room is $400 a night.)

What chance, then, do peace talks now have? For one thing, they aren’t face to face. They’re “proximity talks.” The Palestinians talk to the Americans, who drive down the road and talk to the Israelis, who send them back to the Palestinians with responses and questions.

Qurei pointed out exactly how silly that is. “I’m here in West Jerusalem in the King David Hotel,” he said. “I’m not a Syrian who has no relations with Israel. I can see why a Syrian would need indirect talks. But I’m right here.”

Livni, who’s now the leader of the Israeli parliamentary opposition, said that current Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman resigned from Olmert’s government because he opposed the Annapolis Process. So if the Annapolis deal wasn’t good enough for the Palestinians, one can assume Lieberman isn’t going to give out any new freebies.

“The idea of two nation states represents the interests of Israel,” Livni said. “It’s not a gift to the Palestinians.”

That interest doesn’t seem to be foremost in the mind of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his acceptance last year of the idea of a Palestinian state. Rather he seems concerned with holding his coalition together and playing for time – though it isn’t clear exactly what he wants to do with the time he gains.

Palestinian negotiators appear to lack a sense of urgency too. Chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Turkish television this week that there could be no direct negotiations between the two sides if there were any building in Israel’s West Bank settlements.

“Our position is that the key to direct negotiations is in the hand of Mr. Netanyahu,” he said. “The Israelis have a choice, settlements or peace. They can’t have both.”

At the King David Hotel, leading Palestinian pollster Dr. Khalil Shikaki was on hand to point out that his own people want to have things both ways too. Shikaki’s polls show that 51 percent of Palestinians would like to turn to non-violent protest, if negotiations fail, though only a quarter of those thought it would have any positive effect.

Support for a violent, new intifada, he said, was only 44 percent, but much firmer. In other words, everyone who was in favor thought it’d have a positive effect. “So,” said Shikaki, who’s based in the West Bank town of Ramallah, “almost half of all Palestinians believe violence pays.”

See, I told you it was tragic.

(I posted this yesterday on the Global Post news site.)