Nobody in the Middle East was surprised when the US president George W Bush's initiatives in the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians failed to bear fruit. The Bush administration scarcely bothered to disguise that its paltry efforts were motivated less by a desire to achieve a just and durable peace in the Holy Land, than by its need to secure Arab support for its interventions elsewhere in the region.
President Bush's “road map” first emerged as the US began preparing to invade Iraq. Key Arab regimes had long made clear to Washington that the price of even tacit support for the war was American willingness to address a conflict that generated immense hostility towards the US on the Arab street. The “road map” read like a crack of the whip, outlining a timetable that promised a provisional Palestinian state by the end of 2003 and a resolution of all final status issues by the beginning of 2005. But the Bush administration gave the Israelis and Palestinians no reason to take it seriously; its purely symbolic purpose was plain to see.
The Bush administration made a second high-profile stab at the peace process in the form of the Annapolis Conference held in November 2007, which drew in not only the Israelis and Palestinians, but also a range of Arab states – in what it portrayed as a symbolic affirmation of the administration's policy of building an alliance of Arab moderates with the US and Israel against the region's radicals, namely Hamas, Hizbollah, Syria and Iran. Again, there was little reason for the Israelis or Palestinians to take the process seriously. Annapolis simply invited them to talk among themselves about what a peace agreement could look like. The conversation went nowhere, of course, but the fact that it was happening at all was the point for the Bush administration, whose new priority had become rallying Arab support against Iran and its allies.
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So what does any of this have to with the US president Barack Obama's own efforts to jump start the peace process? After all, Mr Obama made it a priority from the get-go of his presidency and can hardly be accused of going through the motions in order to mollify the Arabs to win their support on other issues. Or can he?While the details are being finessed, the talk in Washington is that Mr Obama will soon unveil a grand new peace process despite the fact that in six months of trying, Mr Obama appears to have extracted only a partial Israeli agreement to a settlement freeze. When the Israelis announced last week that they would authorise hundreds of construction projects in the West Bank before any freeze began, the White House responded sternly that it “does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion”. These extensive plans for new settlement construction lent a legitimacy of its own to the rejection of Arab “normalisation” gestures that Mr Obama was trying to achieve as a prerequisite for talks to begin.
Nevertheless, Mr Obama plans to announce a resumption of final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians with a two-year deadline. The new negotiation process will begin with a high-profile summit between Mr Obama, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the UN General Assembly session in New York later this month, perhaps with some high profile Arab participation. It is to be followed by a structured series of talks addressing the full slate of final status issues, with US participation throughout.
As jaded as this may seem, it's hard not to label the new process “roadmapolis”. While it would mimic the high-profile launch of Annapolis, it will avoid the mistakes of leaving them to talk among themselves by putting US officials in the room. And like the road map, it will provide a strict timeline and a detailed set of benchmarks. The US is unlikely at this stage to outline proposals of its own for resolving fin
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document.write(''); The path to peace is hard to find on Obama’s ‘roadmapolis’
Tony Karon
Last Updated: September 05. 2009 7:22PM UAE / September 5. 2009 3:22PM GMT
Nobody in the Middle East was surprised when the US president George W Bush's initiatives in the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians failed to bear fruit. The Bush administration scarcely bothered to disguise that its paltry efforts were motivated less by a desire to achieve a just and durable peace in the Holy Land, than by its need to secure Arab support for its interventions elsewhere in the region.
President Bush's “road map” first emerged as the US began preparing to invade Iraq. Key Arab regimes had long made clear to Washington that the price of even tacit support for the war was American willingness to address a conflict that generated immense hostility towards the US on the Arab street. The “road map” read like a crack of the whip, outlining a timetable that promised a provisional Palestinian state by the end of 2003 and a resolution of all final status issues by the beginning of 2005. But the Bush administration gave the Israelis and Palestinians no reason to take it seriously; its purely symbolic purpose was plain to see.
The Bush administration made a second high-profile stab at the peace process in the form of the Annapolis Conference held in November 2007, which drew in not only the Israelis and Palestinians, but also a range of Arab states – in what it portrayed as a symbolic affirmation of the administration's policy of building an alliance of Arab moderates with the US and Israel against the region's radicals, namely Hamas, Hizbollah, Syria and Iran. Again, there was little reason for the Israelis or Palestinians to take the process seriously. Annapolis simply invited them to talk among themselves about what a peace agreement could look like. The conversation went nowhere, of course, but the fact that it was happening at all was the point for the Bush administration, whose new priority had become rallying Arab support against Iran and its allies.
document.write('');
So what does any of this have to with the US president Barack Obama's own efforts to jump start the peace process? After all, Mr Obama made it a priority from the get-go of his presidency and can hardly be accused of going through the motions in order to mollify the Arabs to win their support on other issues. Or can he?While the details are being finessed, the talk in Washington is that Mr Obama will soon unveil a grand new peace process despite the fact that in six months of trying, Mr Obama appears to have extracted only a partial Israeli agreement to a settlement freeze. When the Israelis announced last week that they would authorise hundreds of construction projects in the West Bank before any freeze began, the White House responded sternly that it “does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion”. These extensive plans for new settlement construction lent a legitimacy of its own to the rejection of Arab “normalisation” gestures that Mr Obama was trying to achieve as a prerequisite for talks to begin.
Nevertheless, Mr Obama plans to announce a resumption of final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians with a two-year deadline. The new negotiation process will begin with a high-profile summit between Mr Obama, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the UN General Assembly session in New York later this month, perhaps with some high profile Arab participation. It is to be followed by a structured series of talks addressing the full slate of final status issues, with US participation throughout.
As jaded as this may seem, it's hard not to label the new process “roadmapolis”. While it would mimic the high-profile launch of Annapolis, it will avoid the mistakes of leaving them to talk among themselves by putting US officials in the room. And like the road map, it will provide a strict timeline and a detailed set of benchmarks. The US is unlikely at this stage to outline proposals of its own for resolving final status issues.
Longtime watchers of the Middle East will struggle to entertain expectations for progress. While the Netanyahu government's idea of peace with the Palestinians is to ignore final status issues and focus on economic development to turn Jenin, Ramallah, Bethlehem and other enclaves controlled by the PA into little Singapores, the PA leadership speaks for only a fraction of the Palestinian polity. It's hard to see the process that Mr Obama is expected to outline as more than going through the motions until the US is ready to put proposals of its own on the table. Now it could be argued that the Obama administration is trying to demonstrate over the next two years that the parties are incapable of achieving a solution on their own and that one will have to be imposed. Perhaps.
But there is an additional factor involved in the administration's timing. US officials are making clear to reporters that the Obama administration's new push on the Israeli-Palestinian front, like its efforts to revive Israel-Syria peace efforts, is tied to its drive to escalate pressure on Iran. The planned resumption of talks, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, “would help the US in its effort to build international consensus on isolating Iran over its nuclear programme”. The Israelis see their own participation in the same way: “We share with the Obama administration the appreciation of the need to resume negotiations with the Palestinians so that we can intensify our focus on the main threat facing the Middle East and the world, which is the threat of Iran,” Israel's ambassador to the US Michael Oren said in an interview last week.
Attempts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that are motivated by extraneous agendas such as invading Iraq or isolating Iran are bound to fail. While they offer the Israelis an incentive to play ball, they create no need on Israel's part to reach a conclusion it has strenuously avoided for so long: redrawing its borders along narrower lines. A peace agreement will only be reached when the alternatives to reaching a deal, for both sides, become unpalatable. And it will take more than summits, timelines and benchmarks to get them there.
Tony Karon is a New York based analyst who blogs at www.rootlesscosmopolitan.com
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