Middle Eastern Maze by Itamar Rabinovich

Author:Itamar Rabinovich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2023-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

A FRESH ATTEMPT AT AN ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN SETTLEMENT

Once a cease-fire had been signed in Lebanon in August 2006, Olmert sought to renew his dialogue with Abbas. It was only on December 23 that the two agreed to meet. This was the first in a series of thirty-six meetings that ended in September 2008. While these meetings were under way, the Bush administration decided in 2007 to endorse and lead the quest for a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian settlement. The initial circumstances were not auspicious. Olmert had been weakened by the 2006 Lebanon War and by persistent allegations and investigations concerning his personal conduct. Abbas was perceived as a weak leader who was unable to reform and rejuvenate his political power base, the Fatah, and who depended on the United States and Israel to maintain his control of the West Bank in the face of the challenge presented by Hamas. Hamas, in turn, consolidated its rule over the Gaza Strip, cultivated the image of a noncorrupt, dynamic entity associated with the aggressive and apparently successful axis of resistance to Israel.

It took President Bush time to warm to the idea of sponsoring and orchestrating a new American effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he gradually did. In November 2007, he hosted an international conference in Annapolis, Maryland, and in January 2008 he declared that he intended to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the time he left office a year later.

The effectiveness of this belated drive was blunted by the weakness of the U.S. position in the region (under the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and by the fact that the president himself, unlike some of his predecessors, did not immerse himself in the effort. The task was left to the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. Rice drifted away from the unorthodox approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict that had characterized the policies of Bush’s first term (his preoccupation with the war on terror led him to offer unusual support for Israel’s policies while staying committed to the basic principles of U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict that had been formulated in 1967). Some of the policies associated with Bush’s June 2002 speech and the Road Map were retained. Two senior U.S. generals were stationed in the region. General Jim Jones (later to be Barack Obama’s first national security adviser) was dispatched as a special emissary to monitor Palestinian and Israeli compliance with the Road Map. General Keith Dayton replaced General William Ward as security coordinator between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and devoted his major effort to building an effective Palestinian security force. Building security, fighting terrorism, reforming governance, and reviving the economy were the foundations of the policy pursued by the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad. Devoid of his own political base, Fayyad adopted a bottom-up approach, laying the foundations for Palestinian statehood. The Bush administration recruited former British prime minister Tony Blair to help these efforts as the representative of the Quartet and tried to persuade the wealthy Gulf States to pour money into the West Bank’s economy.

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