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3 Condi's free ride in the Middle
East By Tony Karon
on a "right of return", was
actually adopted by the Arab League five years
ago. It was simply ignored by Israeli and American
administrations that then felt too powerful to
consider it. Their sudden willingness to embrace
it, even if on their own terms, underscores the
failure of their guiding political strategies.
Rice now treats discussions over the
contours of a Palestinian state as if everyone
were beginning with a blank slate. This is
simply a self-serving evasion
- Israelis and Palestinians are well acquainted
with the parameters of a final-status agreement,
because they've already negotiated over them at
length at Camp David and later at Taba in 2001,
where they came pretty close to concluding a final
status agreement.
Even the "roadmap"
adopted by the Bush administration in 2003 (partly
as a reward for Arab and British support for the
Iraq invasion) calls for a settlement that "will
resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict and end
the occupation that began in 1967, based on the
foundations of the Madrid Conference, the
principle of land for peace, UNSCRs [UN Security
Council Resolutions] 242, 338 and 1397, agreements
previously reached by the parties, and the
initiative of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah -
endorsed by the Beirut Arab League Summit". The
basic assumption that emerges through all of those
venues, resolutions, and initiatives is that the
1967 borders should be the basis for negotiating a
two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
It's the Bush administration
that has failed, or refused, to grasp this. "If we
all know what [a political settlement] looks
like," Condi said last week, "then why haven't we
been able to get there?" That's the right
question, of course, although Condi clearly
intended it only as a rhetorical
conversation-stopper. What she refuses to
recognize is that the question has an answer: We
haven't gotten there because there are elements on
all sides of the conflict who don't want to get
there.
Sure, the US mainstream media will
tell you all about the Palestinian rejectionists.
What American reporting seldom makes clear is that
Ariel Sharon was also elected prime minister in
February, 2001, on a rejectionist platform. He
rejected the very idea that the conflict could be
resolved through a negotiated settlement with the
Palestinians. Instead, Sharon envisaged a
unilateral withdrawal from about half of the West
Bank and Gaza, leaving the Palestinians a little
over 42% of the territories they occupied in 1967.
A "non-belligerency agreement" would then
be concluded for a "lengthy and indefinite
period". The latter, of course, sounds not
dissimilar to the "long-term truce" advocated by
Hamas, which shares Sharon's distaste for a final
political settlement - although nobody in our
world pilloried the Israeli leader as an extremist
for holding exactly that position.
Sharon's position was so important
precisely because it was so influential in
Washington. Back in 2001, when former secretary of
state Colin Powell warned against the consequences
of encouraging Sharon to seek a military solution
to the Palestinian uprising, President Bush
reportedly snapped, "Sometimes a show of force by
one side can really clarify things." That could be
an epitaph for the Age of Bush.
Indeed, to
the extent that it was to be addressed at all on
Bush's watch, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was
framed primarily as a problem of "terrorism".
Sharon was encouraged to escalate the war on the
West Bank on the basis that Israel had a right to
defend itself. Under Sharon's tutelage, the
administration put the onus for restarting any
peace process purely on the Palestinians.
They were not only tasked with preventing
any further violence against Israelis, but also
with dismantling the military infrastructure of
Hamas and Fatah. The administration did
occasionally pay lip service to the idea of Israel
freezing settlement activity, but without
conviction (or significant effect).
When
Bush courted Arab support on Iraq in 2002, he made
a symbolic declaration of support for Palestinian
statehood - but it was promptly hedged with
qualifications. Not only would the Palestinians
have to fulfill Israel's security demands before
there could be any movement toward statehood, they
would also have to thoroughly reform their
political system.
Arafat would have to
transfer control of Palestinian funds and security
forces to the democratically elected legislature
and the cabinet and prime minister it appointed.
(The irony, to anyone paying attention, was that,
after Hamas won last year's election, the Bush
administration did a 180-degree turnabout and now
insists that funds and security forces be entirely
under the control of the politically reliable
Abbas.)
As Rice's erstwhile mentor, former
national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, put it
three years ago, "Sharon just has [President Bush]
wrapped around his little finger. I think the
president is mesmerized."
In fact, far
from being orchestrated or designed by Rice,
events currently underway in the Middle East
correspond more closely to a prescription outlined
by Scowcroft in an explicit rebuke of Rice at the
height of last summer's Lebanon crisis.
As
Scowcroft warned, the grand bargain that would
stabilize the region depended, first and foremost,
on the US mustering the political will to press
the parties to make unpopular choices. For the
past six years, such political will has been
conspicuously absent in Washington.
Those,
Madame Secretary, are some of the reasons why we
haven't yet "been able to get there".
As
the Daily Star noted in an editorial, if Rice
wants to revive an Israeli-Palestinian peace
process, then her powers of persuasion would be
more productively deployed not in the Middle East,
but in the West Wing.
Tony Karon
is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes
the Middle East and other international conflicts.
At his own blog, Rootless Cosmopolitan, he offers
a more pugilistic take on the universe.
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