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January 30, 2004/Shevat 7 5764, Vol. 56, No. 19
U.S. folds up the road map
RON KAMPEAS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON - Now that the "road map" peace plan has failed him, President Bush may be ready to ask for directions.
The Bush administration is quietly folding up the Israeli-Palestinian road map, the U.S.-led peace plan that was never enthusiastically em-braced by either Israel or the Palestinians.
In recent statements, top Bush officials have made it clear that the plan is moribund and that, for the most part, the Palestinians are to blame.
And after leading with tough talk for two years, the Bush administration is uncharacteristically asking for help and advice from the Israelis, some Arab nations and Europe.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is due to visit Washington in March, and topping the agenda is his contingency plan for uni-lateral disengagement from the Palestinians - an unimaginable scenario just months ago. Additionally, the administration has overcome hesitations it had about weighing in on Israel's side on the issue of the West Bank security barrier at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney is discussing al-ternatives with European allies during his tour of Europe this week, and the administration has watched with interest news of a Saudi proposal that addresses Israeli anxieties about the prospect of a mass influx of Palestinian refugees. The new tone first was adopted by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell at a news conference two weeks ago announcing his outlook for the new year.
Powell repeated his allegiance to the road map but he made it clear he was waiting for the Palestinians to take action first.
"What we need right now is for the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority to get control of the security forces and to use those forces and use other tools available to him to put down terror and to put down violence," Powell said.
U.S. officials say Powell got his answer the day after his talk, when a suicide bomber killed four Israelis at the Erez crossing at the Gaza-Israel boundary.
"The attack in Erez made people less sympathetic to the Palestinians, more sym-pathetic to Israeli security," said one U.S. administration official. Especially aggra-vating, the official said, was the Palestinian Authority's refusal to condemn the attack.
The most stunning evolution was in John Wolf, the assistant secretary of state who was appointed Bush's envoy to the region last year. He started out believing more in the optimistic outlook re-presented by then-P.A. Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas than in Sharon's skepticism.
But that changed on Aug. 19, when a suicide bomb attack on a Jerusalem bus killed 21 Israelis, many of them children.
Wolf said he had persuaded Israel to allow the Palestinians a few days to crack down on terrorists after the attack.
"I have to say on the Palestinian side it was all talk and no action," Wolf said at a forum here last week hosted by Princeton Uni-versity's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and In-ternational Affairs.
The frustration was exacerbated by Abbas' resignation in September - viewed by the Bush ad-ministration and by Israel as a triumph for P.A. President Yasser Arafat.
The final straw was the Palestinians' failure to uncover who was behind an Oct. 15 bombing in Gaza that killed three people traveling in a convoy with Wolf. U.S. officials were appalled that the Palestinians did not even make an effort to find the killers.
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