After yesterday’s meeting in Jerusalem between Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and Palestinian President Abbas, Israel’s Kol Israel Radio is reporting that the session had just been a “starting point”.
Kol Israel also said that the expected Middle East Peace Conference will probably only bring the two sides back to where they were before the outbreak of the Second Intifada at the end of September 2000 — what does that mean? Does that mean that the proposals that Israel’s then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak (now Defense Minister and Labor Party leader) put on the table in the failed Camp David peace talks in late July 2000? Does that mean that the IDF will have to withdraw from cities in the West Bank, and pull back to its prior positions?
Now, media reports say, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is expected to return to the region to prepare for her Middle East Peace Conference that may be held by Thanksgiving or by Christmas in Annapolis. Policy pundits have been urging her greater involvement prior to that meeting, though she has been clear that she will not get involved in negotiating.
And, Haaretz is reporting today that “Five former U.S. State Department and Pentagon officials are proposing Israeli and Palestinian capitals in Jerusalem and preventing Palestinian refugees from returning to Israel as part of a Middle East accord. In a six-page policy statement submitted to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, they also suggested a series of peace conferences following the one she hopes to convene next month, probably in Annapolis, Maryland, near Washington”.
According to the Haaretz story, these former officials are Robert Pelletreau, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and ex-assistant secretary of state for the region; Edward S. Walker, a former ambassador to Israel and Egypt; Thomas Pickering, an ex-undersecretary of state and ambassador to Israel and Jordan; Samuel Lewis, former ambassador to Israel; and Frederic C. Hof, Mideast official in the Pentagon.
Haaretz says that the report was written and coordinated primarily by Steven L. Spiegel, political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Diplomacy sometimes is all about splitting hairs. But diplomats very often have no profound understanding of whose toes they are stepping on in this process — and what happens afterwards is not so predictable.
In any case, these guys apparently think they have come up with a winning formula by proposing something Israel will like (ruling out any Palestinian refugee return to Israel proper), alongside something the Palestinians might like (dividing Jerusalem — but the Palestinians want the entire Old City, except maybe the Jewish Quarter, according to the Green Line that existed between Israeli forces and Jordanian forces prior to the June 1967 War).
Continue reading Rice to return to Jerusalem and Ramallah next week