http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23661578-15084,00.html

IN the heart of a grey refugee camp surrounded by dog-eared photos of dead men, on the eve of Israel’s 60th Independence Day today, a crippled old Arab warlord sits reflecting on the future of his one-time sworn enemy.

Mohammed Ghawanmeh is the type of Palestinian who Israelis hope holds the key to the next six decades and beyond.

Like others in the Jalazone refugee camp, near the West Bank administrative capital of Ramallah, Ghawanmeh accepts that another, older key – that to the coveted family home in what is now Israel – is no longer of use to him. “We are not going back and we know it,” he says. “It is time to look to the future.”

Ghawanmeh has spent most of his working life in and out of Israeli prisons and his intervening freedom in a refugee camp far from his parents’ village, on land on the other side of the border that in 1948 separated the West Bank from the state that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust.

He was a leading figure in Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group sworn to violently oppose Zionism; along with Hamas, this group was behind most of the suicide bombings since the early 1990s.

The family village of Dawayima lies in ruins behind barbed wire, a relic of a revolutionary past destined never to emerge from the rubble. Around it has risen the fusion of modern life and traditional cultures that is contemporary Israel, six decades after what Jewish leaders call the War of Independence and the Palestinians still brand the Catastrophe.

“I spent 20 years of my life in and out of Israeli jails because I was a leader of Islamic Jihad in the West Bank,” Ghawanmeh says in the lounge room of his prefabricated concrete home. “But since I was released from prison (in 2000), I have looked away from the past. There is no other option but to form peace with Israel and get on with building a state.”

Long-term prisoners such as Ghawanmeh are revered in Palestinian society and their opinions given great credence among clans, tribes and policy-makers.

The views of Ghawanmeh, who likes to be called teacher, attract even more attention because of his radical transformation. Few in Islamic Jihad change their spots, even when they are wearied by age. “It’s true I am an old man now,” Ghawanmeh says, looking considerably older than his 52 years. “And it’s also true that as a younger man I saw things through angrier eyes.”

Ghawanmeh left prison with a severe limp and no bladder control: legacies, he claims, of two beatings he suffered during his last 10-year stretch.

“I don’t hold grudges,” he says. “That happens in prison life. When I left, Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic intelligence service) said I had no Jewish blood on my hands. They said if there were 10 Palestinian leaders like me, all the Palestinian problems would be solved.”

Ghawanmeh largely shares the views advanced by the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas, the centrist Israeli Government of perennially troubled Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the sharp-beaked hawks of the Bush White House.

All three parties are clinging to the hope that a deal solidifying Israel’s future in the region and enshrining a viable Palestinian state can be sealed before the end of the year.

Decision-makers from the three sides have spent much of the past eight months inching their way, with faltering steps, towards a two-state solution that they hope will win the acceptance of the wider Arab world, much of which continues to view the region’s only non-Muslim state with deep suspicion if not outright hostility.

Within his community, Ghawanmeh has been doing his own negotiating. “If they offered anything like what (former Israeli prime minister Ehud) Barak, (former Palestinian Authority president Yasser) Arafat and (former US president Bill) Clinton talked about in 2000, we should absolutely, positively take it, no questions asked,” he says. “I talk to the people about this, and they listen.”

Jalazone is one of more than a dozen refugee camps in the West Bank that has survived on a UN meal ticket since 1948. The Israeli army still comes and goes as it chooses, although it has done so less frequently during the past year.

Many of the camp’s young men lead bored, meagre existences manning shop stalls or occasionally working as labourers outside.

In 1948, close to 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in what was then Palestine. Some old-timers, together with more than a million of their descendants, continue to cling to hopes of a homecoming from ramshackle camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Many have held on to their families’ title deeds and, like Ghawanmeh, keep their original house keys wrapped in a cloth in a safe spot.

“Not even Islamic Jihad believes that to be viable any more,” Ghawanmeh says. “Already 40,000 have come back to the West Bank and the rest can come back here, too. This is not the most difficult decision; that is the future of East Jerusalem (home to Islam’s third holiest shrine, the al-Aqsa mosque).”

Unlike other camps in the more militant West Bank strongholds of Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarem, posters of slain martyrs from the many militant factions are nowhere to be seen in Jalazone.

Nearby Ramallah is ground zero of the US-led policy to try to demonstrate to West Bank residents the concrete benefits of peace while isolating Hamas, with its policy of violent opposition to Israel, in Gaza. As a result of this policy, the aid coffers have again swung open after more than five years of the Palestinian intifada that recast dealings between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and sharply reduced interaction between the two peoples. Ramallah is a leading beneficiary of the new money: all around glaziers are putting finishing touches to multi-storey sandstone buildings and new model cars shimmer in the late spring sun.

Condoleezza Rice has chalked up 15 visits to Jerusalem in her time as US Secretary of State. Next week George W. Bush is scheduled to make his second, and last, journey as President in the hope of nailing down modern history’s most elusive detente.

Israel, too, has significant unfinished business with its Arab neighbours and its doomsayers, who have progressively transformed what in 1948 was a border conflict into an intractable religious clash, much of which, according to an increasingly popular fundamentalist interpretation of Koranic teachings, was predestined.

Nagging questions about legitimacy remain even for those who are considered ambivalent about the modern Jewish state. Then there is the mooted existential threat from Iran, which continues to call for Israel’s destruction while pursuing a nuclear program that many here remain convinced will soon lead to the production of weapons-grade plutonium, which could be used to arm long-range ballistic nuclear missiles.

Israel was established as a haven for the world’s Jews after three millenniums of persecution and pogroms, and the unmatched horror of the Holocaust. Its existence has been underpinned by a “never again” mindset that has largely shaped the blunt and forthright approach of successive regimes to any threat, real or perceived.

It was no coincidence that on the eve of Independence Day celebrations, Gabi Ashkenazi, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, chose to visit the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, an enduring reminder of Nazi barbarity.

Immigration and a relatively high birthrate during the past six decades have resulted in a strong and growing population base, approaching seven million Israelis.

The Palestinians are also breeding well, which some Israelis see as an existential threat: if Arab numbers outstripped the Jewish population, the Israeli state would seriously beundermined.

But as Israel approaches its seventh decade, there are few signs of a midlife crisis. Its economic indicators have tracked well for the past five years: property prices are up, the level of inflation is tolerable and touchstone sectors, such as hi-tech, information technology and defence are prospering.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to getting things done, particularly on parallel peace tracks with the Palestinians and the Syrians, isthe dysfunctional nature of the legislature, which more or less guarantees that all governments are multi-party coalitions, increasingly composed of special interest groups. Even a government with a strong electoral mandate is obliged to deal with anunruly coalition perpetually on the brink of rebellion.

Olmert knows this only too well, as did the strongman before him, the formidable Ariel Sharon, and a string of his predecessors: Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

A growing fear among secular Israelis, as well as those who have fruitlessly smoked the peace pipe with the Palestinians in at least six summits since Madrid in 1991, is that the balance of strength in parliament is increasingly shifting towards ideologues, many of whom are staunchly opposed to any Israeli concessions on West Bank land in return for peace. Settler groups, those who are occupying land appropriated in the West Bank, are gaining strength in Israeli political life, making them almost untouchable.

The religious Shas party, which controls a key coalition block of votes, has repeatedly threatened to walk away from the Government if the West Bank or East Jerusalem is offered to the Palestinians.

This makes for difficult times ahead for Israel and its neighbours, and another 60years potentially as fraught as the first sixdecades.

Ghawanmeh, who reckons he’s nearing the end of his days, believes the Palestinians he talks to have begun to see the conflict through a more transparent prism.

“All my life I dedicated towards opposing (Israel),” he says, thumbing through photographs of Islamic Jihad members, some of whom fell in battle while others remain in prison. On a wall in his living room is a yellowing black-and-white shot of Khaled Islambouli, the assassin of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who in 1979 became the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel.

Asked why an image if Islambouli takes pride of place in Ghawanmeh’s inner sanctum, he says: “Sadat should have asked us before doing that. But that was then, it is a different reality. We still see 1948 as the Catastrophe, but they are here to stay now.

“That is a reality. It’s time for us to build our futures.”

Martin Chulov is The Australian’s Middle East correspondent.