The November Arab-Israeli peace-making meeting that US President George W. Bush has called for replays several similar moments in the past quarter-century, when gatherings were convened but did not achieve their full promise - at Madrid, Camp David, Taba and Oslo, among others. Will this year be any different? I hope so in my heart, but I do not think so, to judge by current political realities.
If we enter a process - as we are now - based primarily on nice-sounding aspirations, but in reality defined by a terrible imbalance in power, aims, and negotiating assets, we will fail as surely as we did in the past.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pushed this tendency ahead one more notch on Monday when he spoke in lofty and sometimes stirring terms at the opening of Israel's Knesset. His comments, however, were another example of the Israeli tendency to offer vague generalities at the expense of specific commitments, and to extend to the Palestinians a hand in peace-making while conducting policies on the ground that promote perpetual conflict and active war.
He said: "The Palestinian leadership today is not a terrorist leadership. The president and prime minister are committed to all the agreements that were signed with Israel and I believe that they want to advance, with us, on a path toward changing the relations between us and them."
Inspiring words, indeed, but politically hollow also. Olmert has ignored half the Palestinians who follow the elected Hamas movement, and he spoke only of "changing relations" rather than of both sides' enjoying absolute equality and sovereign national rights.
He said: "Israel has excellent excuses to justify stagnation between us and the Palestinians (...) I would like to announce here, in the firmest terms, that I do not intend to seek excuses to avoid a political process. I am firm and steadfast in my desire to seek ways to advance the political process."
Another triumph of noncommittal emotionalism over the dictates of political realism, equal national rights, and hard-nosed diplomacy. Olmert, like all Israeli leaders before him, seems more interested in promoting a permanent peace process than in achieving a lasting peace based on Palestinian and Israeli states enjoying equal national rights and well-being.
He said: "Under no circumstances should Israel miss an opportunity that could bring an improvement in our
relations with our neighbors, the Palestinian people. [It is] my determination to take advantage of every shred of political opportunity."
"Improved relations with the neighbors" is a good idea for buyers of condo apartments and vacation homes. States and peoples at war need to aim for a much more specific and lofty aim, namely secure, sovereign statehood for both sides, mutually agreed, and guaranteed by a series of interlocking commitments by both sides.
Olmert said: "We don't have an agreement [with the Palestinians] ... But an atmosphere of personal trust was created, an atmosphere of a mutual willingness to listen to the concerns, the pains, the anxieties and worries that each side carries in its national purse ... I feel that ... talking is worthwhile."
It is very useful to have an atmosphere of trust, where each side can listen to each other's concerns and pains. But this is not a psychological therapy session, where our capacity to listen is seen as a significant achievement. An atmosphere of trust must quickly be transformed into active negotiating progress through mutual concessions and gains, or the process will collapse as it did several times in recent decades.
He said: "The peace process requires steadfastness to take bold, unavoidable decisions ..."
Actually, the peace process simply requires Israelis and Arabs to say to each other, unequivocally and openly, that they are prepared to coexist in peace, based on United Nations resolutions, ending the occupation of Arab lands, creating adjacent sovereign Israeli and Palestinian states enjoying equal rights, and achieving a permanent, negotiated resolution of both sides' historical grievances (refugees, holy sites, right to exist, and others).
The Arabs have repeatedly offered this to Israel since 2002, in the form of the Arab summit peace plan. Why have Israeli leaders never replied in similarly clear terms that commit to equal rights for two peoples living in adjacent states? Olmert instead offered the Palestinians feel-good trust-building sessions taken out of the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, while continuing Israel's colonization-settlement program, land confiscation, economic strangulation and assassination policies on the ground.
If the Annapolis meeting is to have any meaning or impact, those shaping it would do well to look at the interests of both sides with equal intensity, to avoid simply adding Annapolis to the list of failures that were Madrid, Oslo, Taba and Camp David.
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