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Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said after peace talks in Washington that failure to negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinians could threaten Israel's long-term survival.
A day after Israel and the Palestinians formally relaunched negotiations, Olmert's comments appeared in Thursday's Haaretz newspaper on the 60th anniversary of the passing of a U.N. resolution to partition British-run Palestine between Jews and Arabs -- a two-state solution that still eludes them.
A day after their leaders announced a new push for peace, Israelis and Palestinians returned Wednesday to a familiar and deadly routine, deeply skeptical over the timetable set for the talks and whether an end to the conflict is achievable at all in the current political climate.
In cafes and blogs in the Arab world, the Annapolis conference prompted little more than wisecracks. Commentators made much of a linguistic coincidence: In Arabic, "ana polis" means "I am the police."
This week's Middle East conference in Annapolis, Md., has highlighted Arab unease over the ability and will of a weak U.S. president to deliver peace. At the same time, it has stoked fears that Israel has scored a public relations coup while refusing to concede on such core issues as Palestinian refugees and the fate of Jerusalem.
After President Bush's high-profile speech Tuesday at the Annapolis meeting on Middle East peace and Wednesday's scheduled Rose Garden appearance with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, there are still questions about just how involved the United States will be in the relaunched negotiations.
How intense a role will Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has logged more than 100,000 miles this year addressing the conflict, now play?
Will the administration name a special envoy to monitor progress in specific areas?
Even the most hardened of Middle East cynics could be excused for momentarily feeling a fluttering of hope after witnessing the scenes at this week’s peace conference in Annapolis, Md.
Serious negotiations do not normally take place at international conferences. They happen before or after them. If negotiations beforehand have been fruitful, a conference is a venue to publicise and formalise what has been agreed, or sometimes to settle one or two very difficult matters beyond the competence of the advance teams. On that test, Annapolis has not been a success. Palestinians and Israelis could not agree on a detailed joint document to put before the meeting.
Haven't we been here before? Isn't Annapolis just a repeat of the White House lawn and the Oslo agreement, a series of pious claims and promises in which two weak men, Messrs Abbas and Olmert, even use the same words of Oslo.
"It is time for the cycle of blood, violence and occupation to end," the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday. But don't I remember Yitzhak Rabin saying on the White House lawn that, "it is time for the cycle of blood... to end"?
The presence of a senior Syrian official at the Annapolis meeting that launched a new round of Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations has had a positive effect on the desperate search in Lebanon for a leader to assume the presidency after it was unceremoniously vacated last Friday.
The attraction was not in the focus of the conclave but in at least one participant.
The Annapolis conference on Tuesday was full of lofty rhetoric, intriguing new promises, a few bold commitments, and a tantalizing cast of characters - alongside plenty of rehashed rhetoric, rigid positions, and regurgitated, failed diplomatic mechanisms. It left us with as many questions as answers about whether this was a serious Arab-Israeli peace-making endeavor, or a hoax garnished with Chesapeake Bay clam cakes.
"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008.
The only certainty at the outset of the Annapolis conference on Tuesday was that few predicted positive results.
A U.S.-backed push for a future Palestinian state hinges on President Mahmoud Abbas doing what may seem impossible -- getting Hamas Islamists to give up the Gaza Strip and disarm.
Abbas has done little to explain how he expects to achieve such a feat, either through new elections or militarily.
He and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert launched their peoples' first formal peace talks in seven years this week with the goal of forging a deal next year to create a state in Gaza and the West Bank, together home to 4 million Palestinians.
Hamas warned on Thursday that all options were open for the Islamists against Israel after a US conference that revived peace talks and five days in which troops had killed 12 militants in Gaza.
"All options are open to answer any crime, expecially after the Annapolis conference, which gave the Zionists a green light to commit more and more crimes against our people," said a statement from the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas's armed wing.
BETTER than nothing. For now, that is the most that can be said of the new Arab-Israeli “peace process” George Bush inaugurated in Annapolis on November 27th. After weeks of negotiation, the Israeli and Palestinian delegations did at the last minute approve 437 words for the American president to read out, but this was the sort of declaration that makes the phrase “lowest common denominator” sound generous.
Rest assured that Bush, more than any other American President, means what he says. This has been his problem with most countries of the world, including us Arabs. Despite the problems his frankness has caused him, it has been a good trait on occasion.
THEY almost didn't make it, but in the last hour Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, agreed on a joint statement. Four months of preliminary talks had failed to produce what Mr Abbas and Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, had hoped to brandish at this week's peace summit in Annapolis: an agreement to predetermine some aspects of the final-status deal that would ultimately create a Palestinian state next to Israel. In the end, Ms Rice had to settle for less, but the Palestinians and Israelis did agree two things.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/5842
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/5842
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/5842
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
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[6] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/29/AR2007112900500.html
[7] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/28/AR2007112801383_pf.html
[8] http://serv01.siteground202.com/~atfp/db/index.php?e=1&s=4&f=1
[9] http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1129/p12s01-usfp.htm
[10] http://www.forward.com/articles/12134/
[11] http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2218698,00.html
[12] http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3204054.ece
[13] http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/region/10170959.html
[14] http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=87090
[15] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/929439.html
[16] http://www.ipforum.org/Printer.cfm?Rid=2539
[17] http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N29223825.htm
[18] http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071129/wl_mideast_afp/mideastdiplomacypalestinianhamas
[19] http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10215026
[20] http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=2&id=11028
[21] http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10214963