by Nguyen Thu Hang
George W Bush has made it plain that he wants a nego-tiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians that includes the realisation of a Palestinian State before he retires as president next January.
So what are the chances of this happening?
The portents are not good.
A flurry of diplomacy resulted in signs of significant progress when Israel’s prime minister and the Palestinian president formally re-launched the peace process dormant for seven years with a commitment to a comprehensive agreement by the end of this year when they met at Annapolis, Maryland.
The conference, sponsored by President Bush, had the support of the international community.
But two rounds of talks later, little or no progress has been made.
The Israeli and Palestinians remain deeply divided about the hitherto intractable issues of borders, settlements, the fate of the displaced and the status of Jerusalem.
The road map agreed four years ago has yet to be travelled.
The Israelis have not frozen the expansion of settlements into Palestinian territory and the latter have not curbed their armed militants.
President Bush’s seven-country tour of the Middle East earlier this month reinforced how distant is the prospect of peace.
“I come with high hopes and the role of the United States will be to foster a vision of peace,” he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying.
“The role of the Israeli leadership and the Palestinian leadership is going to do the hard work necessary to define the vision.”
In response, the protagonists have returned to their most intractable.
The Israeli government says it will talk peace but only when the Palestinians stop their violence against the Jewish State.
The Palestinians demand that Israel halt all expansion of settlements and continue to protest the construction of Jewish estates near Jerusalem.
Tensions rise
Israeli action against militants in Hamas-ruled Gaza and the West Bank have heightened tension.
Israel has imposed controlled supplies to the territory since the Islamists, who held a parliamentary majority, assumed power last June.
It closed its crossings into Gaza last Friday in response to Palestinian rocket attacks and allowed the resumption of fuel supplies to the territory only when a humanitarian crisis threatened.
Now Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas maintains he will not abandon the peace talks.
“Stopping the talks with the Israeli side will not help… the talks should be instead intensified to ease the suffering of our people… to convince the other side that the hardship should be ended,” he said.
“We don’t want our people to be punished for their endurance while they do nothing… it is not the people who fire the rockets.”
But the militants of Gaza might have pre-empted his options.
They have blown a hole in the wall that separates them from their Arab ally, Egypt, and thousands of the territory’s 1.5 million residents have poured through to buy the necessities of life.
The US, Israeli and Egyptian response to this initiative is yet to be seen, although President Mubarak has said he will allow the crossing as long as the people coming and going are unharmed.
Last week, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qorei met in Jerusalem.
But even as the two senior negotiators met for the first time since reviving their negotiations in late November, Israel’s Prime Minister Edouard Olmert warned they may not reach an agreement.
The truth is that both Olmert and Abbas are negotiating from weakness.
Olmert because of the ill-fated incursion into Lebanon and Abbas because he has not been able control or seduce Hamas and is under pressure to halt talks while Israel expands its settlement.
It means that neither man can be seen as conceding to the other.
It means too, that a negotiated peace in the Middle East is very unlikely to follow the time table set by George W Bush. — VNS
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