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January 28, 2005/Shevat 18 5765, Vol. 57, No. 22
Bush team to focus on peace
RON KAMPEAS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON - It's like a backward version of a boxing match.
Israel and the Palestinians are facing off - and the first one to stop throwing punches, walk back to his corner and hang up his gloves, wins.
The referee, as always, is the United States.
Each side is eager to win the contest - but is just as wary of turning his back on his opponent.
Yasser Arafat is dead, a relative moderate favored by the United States was elected in his place this month, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has cobbled together a broad coalition that supports territorial withdrawal and new U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was confirmed on Jan. 26, is poised to launch an intensive round of diplomacy to get both sides back to the negotiating table.
The State Department's top Middle East envoy, William Burns, was canvassing the major players to plot out Rice's first steps on the job. Burns met in Frankfurt on Jan. 24 with other representatives of the "Quartet" - the diplomatic ensemble of the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union that drives the Middle East peace process - and was to have visited Israel and the West Bank this week.
Sharon may meet Mahmoud Abbas next month, officials said. Aides to the two leaders met Jan. 26 in Jerusalem after the Israeli prime minister lifted a ban on diplomatic contacts with the Palestinian Authority that were imposed after a recent terrorist attack. According to political sources, the aides agreed to convene again next week with a view to setting up a summit, the first since Abbas succeeded Yasser Arafat as P.A. president. The summit, expected next month, could boost efforts to get the U.S.-led "road map" peace plan back on track.
Bush is expected to make support for a renewed peace effort a centerpiece of his talks with European leaders next month. He sees such a push as a way both to cultivate common ground and to nudge Europe to help control an increasingly restive Iraq.
One of Rice's first events as secretary will be a March conference in London to help the Palestinian Authority adjust to Israel's planned withdrawal this summer from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank. After that, Rice will visit the region.
The timetable seems to back Rice's pledge during her confirmation hearings to devote "enormous effort" to the issue.
Israelis and Palestinians are eager to please Rice and her boss - and U.S. officials have made clear they're keeping score.
"What we are looking for, first and foremost, from the Palestinians is concrete steps to get the security situation under control," State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Jan. 24. "We've seen some steps that Abu Mazen has already taken, and we find that encouraging," he said, using the nickname of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas.
"We are also pleased at the level of coordination that we're seeing between Israelis and Palestinians," Ereli said.
The Palestinian Authority has deployed a few thousand troops along the Gaza Strip border to stop rockets from being launched into Israel, and Abbas is trying to cajole terrorist groups into stopping attacks temporarily.
Israel has refrained in recent days from assassinating terrorist leaders. Palestinians say those killings were at least part of the reason for the collapse of the peace talks in 2003, the last time Abbas was in a position to negotiate, then as P.A. prime minister.
Israeli officials also are telling their U.S. and Palestinian counterparts that Sharon's planned withdrawal will be more extensive than they expect and will not leave Israel in control of ports and borders, as previous formulations have suggested. They also say a second phase of withdrawals will include the Jordan Valley, a region that previous Israeli governments were loathe to give up.
The rationale is that with Saddam Hussein behind bars and the U.S. occupation of Iraq showing no signs of abating soon, Israel no longer faces a grave threat from the east.
On the other hand, each side is making clear that it believes the other must prove good faith. Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Palestinians don't deserve any reward for preventing attacks - after all, they're obligated to do so under the "road map" peace plan - and warned Abbas that Israel is ready to act against Palestinian terrorists if he fails to control them.
"With Abbas, we may have something, and we'll know," Netanyahu told Fox News Channel last week. "And of course, if they don't do the job, we'll do the job."
Palestinians qualified their intentions.
"This is not a cease-fire; this is a Palestinian tactic to avoid giving the enemy any pretext to escalate the situation during the dialogue that would foil it," Abu Qusai, a spokesman for the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group in Abbas' Fatah party, told Reuters Jan. 23. "If there is any Israeli escalation, there will be a Palestinian response."
The scars of four years of terrorism and of Israeli counter-incursions make it hard for either side to fully accommodate the other, said Naomi Chazan, a former Israeli legislator from the dovish Meretz Party who now is a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's a factor the Bush administration cannot ignore, she warned an audience last week at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"A lack of trust is part of the conflict, emotion-driven policy is part of the conflict, the absence of the word 'reconciliation' is part of the conflict," Chazan said.
It wouldn't take a lot to precipitate a breach of trust. Palestinians are chafing at Israel's acknowledgment this week that it is considering plans to confiscate land in eastern Jerusalem owned by "absentee" Palestinians, some of whom live just miles away in the West Bank.
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