The roadblocks to another Mideast summit

US Secretary of State Rice spent four days in the region trying to iron out differences between Israeli and Palestinian leaders ahead of November peace talks.

By Joshua Mitnick | Correspondent
and Dan Murphy | Staff Writer

from the October 19, 2007 edition

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Jerusalem and Cairo - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spent four days in the Middle East this week to drum up support for an international summit that the US hopes will push the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward.

While there were positive signs from her shuttle diplomacy throughout the visit – Israeli and Palestinian officials described the conference, expected for late November or early December, as an important opportunity, and Egypt and Jordan lent some support to the idea – obstacles to getting all sides to the table remain, as has long been the case with the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

But the Bush administration has not yet exhausted all efforts to lay the groundwork ahead of the Annapolis, Md., gathering. It is banking on this conference to kick off formal talks to create a Palestinian state, and to help salvage a Middle East policy battered by the Iraq war and muddled by the Iran nuclear dilemma.

Ms. Rice is expected to return to the region for more premeeting talks at the end of this month or in early November. President Bush is also sending security adviser Stephen Hadley to meet with Israeli and Palestinian counterparts next week.

"There's a clear change; the administration is now more willing to devote intensive amounts of diplomacy and capital and address the core issues," says Scott Lasensky, a senior analyst at the US Institute of Peace. "Right now failure is not an option. Condoleezza Rice is fully invested in this."

But Rice's seventh visit to the region this year yielded plenty of evidence of the odds against this high-profile gambit into Middle East peacemaking. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he still wants Israel to agree to negotiations on specific issues such as final borders of a Palestinian state. Israel is seeking to keep the agenda vague.

US allies Egypt and Jordan did throw their weight behind the idea, but cautioned that meetings that fail to yield specific timetables on the three core issues – ownership of Jerusalem, permanent Palestinian borders, and the return of Palestinian refugees – could discredit the process.

Almost 15 years after the US-sponsored Oslo accords that are now generally viewed as a failure by both Israelis and Palestinians and after seven years of almost daily violence between the two sides, little goodwill exists.

Arabs and Israelis generally subscribe to precisely opposite reasons for the failure of Oslo – the "other" side didn't keep its word – but their beliefs have left everyone in the same place with less trust and less patience.

Israeli skeptics, who include Defense Minister Ehud Barak, worry that any concessions Israel makes will simply become the new preconditions for later negotiations, essentially getting nothing for something. That's in part because while Mr. Abbas wants to move forward quickly, politically he remains weak. His rivals in the militant Islamist Hamas movement, who control the Gaza Strip, aren't necessarily eager to see Palestinians rushing to the table.

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