November 26, 2007
Mideast Summit: Can They Do It?
No doubt that helping forge an independent Palestinian state at peace with Israel would be the jewel in President Bush's pretty beat-up crown come 2009, hence his commitment to the Herculean task of getting the two parties to strike an accord before he leaves office. Analysts of the region are largely of two minds on whether Bush and his go-to on the issue, Condoleezza Rice, can get it done.
Some have come to believe that the Bush administration, so heavily mired in Iraq, completely gave up on Mideast negotiations after the road map fell apart in 2003. "The Bush administration has hung a 'Closed for the Season' sign on serious Arab-Israeli diplomacy," Aaron David Miller declared in April. "The Rice initiative is almost certainly way too little, way too late."
As the Boston Globe reported today, that skepticism persists. But Miller, for one, hasn't written tomorrow's Annapolis summit off.
Both sides badly want an end to the bloody and costly conflict, and for the first time maybe ever, the Palestinians are being represented by a man the West views as an honest broker, President Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinians and Israelis are still about as far apart as they ever were on their demands, yet the ground seems especially fertile for compromise -- the essential and long-missing component for these negotiations.
How to force compromise? By force. If Bush gets tougher on the parties than any American president before him has by demanding a return to something close to the pre-1967 borders, as The Economist suggests, both Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would have the political cover they require to make concessions. Both men have already risked and lost credibility at home because of the ongoing negotiations. There is an expectation of tough love in the speech Bush is to deliver at the conference tomorrow. Whether the president goes far enough remains to be seen.
Unfortunately, for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world, frankly, there is probably good reason the Bush administration is setting expectations so low. So long as the Palestinians remain physically divided, the two-state solution becomes a virtual pipe dream.
"Gaza is a big problem for us," Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian negotiator, acknowledged to the Jerusalem Post today. "We know that a Palestinian state cannot be created [with] Gaza being separate from the West Bank, east Jerusalem." Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by much of the world, joins Iran in not being party to the pan-Arab meeting tomorrow. Negotiating with Hamas, which doesn't recognize Israel, is a nonstarter, and so long as an independent state is off the table, so are any concessions the Palestinians might be willing to give.
Worryingly, after five months of economic and political isolation, Hamas is still very much in control of Gaza. "The road map must be applied to all the territories," Olmert told reporters today. In other words, two Palestines equals no deal.
Even among Bush's base of conservatives, there is deep skepticism he and Rice can help the parties hammer out a deal by January '09. This is mainly based on near-total mistrust in the Palestinians' ability or will to meet Israel halfway, as well as anger that the country hit by so many suicide bombings seems to be the only party actually making compromises.
"Though Secretary Rice has publicly stated her belief that the Palestinian people hold the same fundamental values and worldview as Americans, and are equally desirous of peaceful, prosperous lives, a brief look at Palestinian state television clearly demonstrates just how different the Palestinians' view of 'quality of life' is from Americans' and Israelis'," argues Red State's Jeff Emanuel.
Concurs former Clinton administration official Jeff Robbins, "When Israel withdrew from all of Gaza in 2005, the Arab world had the opportunity for a fresh start there -- to create a measure of hope for a population whose suffering long predated any Israeli presence. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity, the Hamas-dominated Palestinian leadership opted to begin and then intensify an aggressive missile-launching campaign against Israeli civilian centers."
Indeed, there is great doubt that even Bush or Rice believe the U.S. can help broker a peace agreement. But if what Rice herself told Elisabeth Bumiller can be trusted, Rice and Bush have come to believe that Mideast peace is an imperative. It's easy to read this as just another stage of Legacy Time -- the period at the end of a presidency where the focus turns to big-picture stuff. Plenty of TV pundits have been doing it all day.
Then again: "Although Ms. Rice said in an interview that she had set no conditions when she took the job, her aides said that she had known that her relationship with the president would give her far greater influence to push an agenda, including peacemaking in the Middle East, than" her predecessor, Colin Powell, Bumiller reports in an article adapted from her new book.
According to Bumiller, Rice believes it is essential to strengthen Abbas' hand as much as possible. That Abbas is viewed as such a great improvement on Yasser Arafat and that he seems to be hanging onto power by a thread may be reason enough for the Bush White House to put all its chips in right now, Legacy Time or not. After tomorrow, Mideast observers will go on for weeks debating whether Annapolis was worth the security costs and airplane fuel. What they all do agree on, one might think, is that it really had better be.
Posted at 7:35 PM
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Bush Administration, Condoleezza Rice, Hamas, Israel, Middle East, Palestinians, President Bush
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