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A road map for diplomacy or duplicity,
The Daily Star, 5/24/03
The “road map” for
Israeli-Palestinian peace and mutual statehood that was midwived by the
US and formally launched by the “Quartet” a few weeks ago has been
passing through its first shaky moments; it continues to shake, albeit
less violently. The news Friday that the US would “fully and
seriously” address Israel’s concerns about the road map, while also
not accepting any changes to it, reminds us of the good guy, bad guy
routine, except that the US here is playing both parts at once. One has
the right to be seriously concerned when the US says it is considering
Israel’s concerns. For Israel has a long and lively history of
stretching out procedural dimensions of Israeli-Palestinian peace
negotiations so severely that they end up obliterating the substantive
dimensions. Israel has mastered the art of stalling, and also of
demanding security guarantees so strict that they become impossible to
implement, thereby killing any ongoing peace talks.
The road map aimed in large part to prevent this from happening again.
The Quartet did this by offering the road map as an integrated whole
that could not be dissected and renegotiated. It sought to test the
willingness of both sides to take those tough decisions that are
required to break out of the occupation/resistance cycle and resume the
approach to peaceful coexistence through negotiated agreements. Israel
already succeeded in postponing the road map’s official launch for
some months, and now it threatens to dampen the road map’s prospects
of implementation by coyly saying it accepts the plan but also has
reservations and concerns that must be addressed before any talks can
start.
The fundamental dilemma here both obvious and diplomatically fatal
is that a plan that is designed to address the rights and concerns of
both sides threatens to fall flat on its face because of pressures to
pay more attention to Israeli concerns than to Palestinian rights. While
this is neither new nor unexpected, it does come at a delicate moment
that was supposed to transcend precisely this sort of partiality and
discrimination in favor of Israel, and at the expense of Palestinian and
Arab rights and the integrity of international law and UN resolutions.
So the world must watch closely to see how the US actually pulls off the
difficult task of simultaneously responding fully to Israel’s concerns
while not allowing the component elements of the road map to be changed
by either side. Ariel Sharon will meet privately with George W. Bush in
the coming week or so; that meeting may well determine not only the
immediate prospects of implementing the road map, but also the capacity
of the United States to act with credibility in the corridors of Middle
Eastern politics and negotiations. All the parties are being tested to
some extent, but the United States especially will be watched by the
world and its partners in the Quartet to discern if it plans to
move ahead with an exercise in serious diplomacy, or only diplomatic
duplicity and smoke-and-mirror tricks of illusion. We hope diplomacy
triumphs, and we’ll soon find out.
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| Earth, a
planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli
apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers
(Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli
apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers
in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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