By Scott MacLeod
The invitations have gone out. There will be an Amercan-sponsored Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, next Tuesday, the first such gathering in seven bloody years and four months.
The International Crisis Group’s excellent “policy briefing” issued yesterday on Annapolis makes a convincing case for why Condi Rice’s efforts are serious and significant, and how the conference can be turned into a meaningful step toward peace. The ICG is not blind to the difficulties; to the contrary, in agonizing detail it describes the political weakness of Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and their utter failure to come up with a pre-conference understanding on the contours of a peace agreement—including the “final-status” issues like borders, Jerusalem and refugees. Yet, with the help of the ICG’s analysis, it’s worth taking stock of what has been accomplished and how this progress provides an opportunity that should not be minimized or missed.
I haven’t been alone in expressing skepticism about Rice’s peace push or about her past excuses for the Bush administration’s appalling neglect of its international responsibility to uphold the peace process between 2001-2006. But it’s thanks almost entirely to Rice’s diplomacy that the administration has in fact dramatically and properly changed its basic approach to the conflict and now appears, in the ICG’s words, “committed to an intensive effort.”
Once, an administration driven by neo-conservative ideologues believed that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was fighting the authoritarian rot in the Arab world that they believe produces hatred for the U.S. and Israel in the form of the 9/11 attacks and suicide bombings against Israelis. Rice has shifted the challenge back to where it should have remained: addressing the injustice experienced by Palestinians in their expulsion from what became Israel in 1948 and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Palestinian territories since 1967. |