THERE ARE many reasons to be skeptical about next month's Mideast peace conference in Annapolis, Md. The political frailty of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government, the fractured condition of the Palestinian Authority, the six years President Bush wasted refusing to emulate Bill Clinton's attempts to broker an Israel-Palestinian agreement - these are only some of the most obvious grounds for doubting that anything of value will come from the conference.
Still, there is a chance to make the conference a success. The weakness of Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas could be converted into an incentive to accept the historic compromises needed for peace. And something similar is true of Bush, whose blunders in the Middle East have empowered Iran, brought Al Qaeda into the heartland of the Arab world, and identified the United States with torture, Guantanamo, and scorn for the rule of law. All three leaders need a peacemaking achievement.
Both the difficulties and the opportunities raised by the conference may be glimpsed in preliminary squabbles about who will attend, what they will do, and what the ensuing actions should be. In their six meetings to date, Abbas and Olmert have discussed their general concepts of what a peace accord should look like. They have appointed teams to draft a joint declaration on principles, a document that may serve as a framework for the November conference and also for follow-up negotiations to forge a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It should not be surprising that Abbas wants the joint declaration to address in detail the core issues of borders, Jerusalem, refugees, and water. Abbas also wants a timetable for negotiations that will lead to a Palestinian state. His are the occupied people. Nearly two-thirds of Palestinians are living below the poverty level. Per capita income of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is 60 percent of what it was in 1999 - before the failure of the Camp David summit and the renewal of armed conflict.
Olmert has been holding out for a vaguer joint declaration. But Saudi Arabia has made it clear it will only consider attending a peace conference that addresses substantive issues. Since the Saudi-sponsored Arab peace initiative offers Israel normalized relations with all 22 Arab states once there is an Israeli- Palestinian peace agreement, it is very much in Israel's national interest to have as many Arab governments at Annapolis as possible. Olmert knows that his predecessors could only dream of achieving recognition from all the Arab states. If he is wise, he will seize the opportunity to bring as many Arab states as possible - even Iran's current client, Syria - into a big peacemakers' tent in Annapolis. The alternative is more extremism, more terrorism, and eventually more wars.
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