Even the most optimistic analysts did not expect to see US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice make major headway this week in prodding the Palestinians and Israelis toward peace negotiations. Everyone knows that Rice's last-minute peace mission comes in the final stretch of the Bush administration's second term in office, when the secretary of state has just 17 months to try to do what a host of world leaders have spent decades trying to achieve. Rice's mission also coincides with a period of unprecedented Palestinian disunity, as well as uncertainty about the future of Israel's leadership, which lost popular backing after its foray into Lebanon last year. In other words, both time and circumstance are working against Rice.
Despite these odds, however, Rice did manage to come away from her tour with a notable prize: she secured a tacit agreement from Saudi Arabia that it would participate in an international peace conference alongside Israel this fall. This is no small feat, considering that Riyadh still officially upholds its diplomatic and economic boycott of Israel and that a sudden reversal of this policy risks angering some segments of the Saudi population. If Saudi Arabia does in fact attend the international conference this fall, the Saudi leadership will essentially be putting its credibility on the line. The royal family risks undermining its own standing at home and across the broader Arab world if they send their own members to attend a peace conference that turns out to be nothing more than a publicity stunt and a heyday for speech writers
Rice has already tried to offer assurances that US President George W. Bush wants the conference to be more than a "photo opportunity." However, Rice has already faced Israeli resistance to the idea of using the meeting to address the final-status issues. While the Palestinians would like to get to that stage, Israel would prefer to simply sketch a rough outline of what a Palestinian state might look like, while delaying discussions about thorny issues such as borders, the status of Jerusalem and the issue of Palestinian refugees.
But the region is in desperate need of something more substantive than just an Arab-Israeli talkfest. The strains of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are now compounded with the chaos in Iraq and these two swamps are breeding extremists at an alarming rate. Perhaps nobody understands this better than the Saudis, and that is probably why they are willing to gamble on the prospect that the conference might achieve something.
It is not just Saudi Arabia that stands to lose if the conference turns out to be just for show. Failure to make real progress toward peace will no doubt empower the region's opponents of the peace process who argue that the only way to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict is with guns and bombs.
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