Assassination of Yassin End of the Road to Peace? Simon Tisdall

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LONDON, 24 March 2004 — On March 14 last year, six days before the Iraq war, Tony Blair was in ebullient mood. US President George Bush had just announced publication of the long-delayed Middle East road map to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

It was a decision Blair had long been urging on the White House. He was convinced progress toward a two-state solution was vital if the West was to demonstrate its “even-handedness” and commitment to security, democracy and human rights not only in Iraq but also in the key cockpit of the Middle East. In his attempt to justify Britain’s involvement in the looming fight against Saddam, overt American backing for the road map had become almost as important to Blair as obtaining a second UN resolution on Iraq. It was also a test of his influence with the Bush administration.

“I believe the importance of what President Bush announced earlier simply cannot be overstated,” Blair said. “The road map represents the will of the international community ... it provides the route to a permanent two-state solution (and) a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005.”

This was a prize of enormous value, Blair enthused. “And what I hope people can do is to take this commitment now and hold us to it ... it is something that we are fundamentally committed to.”

What a difference a year makes. If the road map were not already dead in the water, then Monday’s assassination by Israel of the Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, may finally have sunk it. But what is surely also true is that the grounds for optimism expressed by Blair have steadily eroded almost since the moment his press conference ended. The Yassin affair, while momentous, is but the latest blow.

On the American side, Bush’s focus on a two-state solution has gradually diminished. “America is committed, and I am personally committed, to implementing our road map toward peace,” he declared on March 14. But then came Iraq and all the unanticipated postwar problems that still plague the Americans there.

By last November, Bush was developing a far broader Middle East “vision” in which Palestine was one issue among many. In a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, he vowed to develop “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East”. In this, Palestine had but a walk-on part.

Since then, Bush’s grandiose, non-specific ideas have morphed into an even vaguer reform plan entitled the Greater Middle East Initiative. Many in Washington now believe his aim is merely to contain the Israel-Palestine conflict until the November US presidential election is out of the way.

On the ground, in the embattled occupied territories and in Jerusalem’s suicide-bombed streets, the road map has meanwhile been slowly dying. By February this year, Straw was grasping at the nongovernmental Geneva accord as a way to keep hope alive. “The peace process is at a fork in the road,” Straw warned. “There is a real risk that people on both sides become so hardened ... that they stumble down the other road toward more violence, toward unilateral efforts to redraw borders.”

Straw’s reference to unilateralism was doubtless deliberate. For in the absence of any road map momentum, and left to his own devices by US inaction, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was busy drawing his own maps.

One aspect of Sharon’s evolving, alternative path was the accelerated construction of a security fence closing off large parts of the West Bank. Another was his failure, although the Palestinians were also to blame, to launch a substantive bilateral dialogue. The latest plan for talks was canceled last week. But most importantly, Sharon proposed what is in effect his own made-to-measure, territorial deal, quite separate from (and at odds with) the road map. By suggesting that Israel may vacate Gaza entirely and close some settlements in the West Bank, he appears to have taken all the remaining steam out of US policy as stated with such apparent conviction by Bush 12 months ago.

Indeed, the Americans have almost stopped talking about a viable two-state solution. Separation and disengagement are the new names of the game — and Washington is playing along.

This as much as Sheikh Yassin’s assassination may sound the final death-knell for the road map.