Israel is ready to put "all basic questions, all the substantive problems, all the historical questions" about Palestinian statehood on the table in a U.S.-hosted peace conference later this month in Annapolis, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday.
"It is time," Olmert said in an impassioned speech. "All questions are on the agenda. We won't run away from any of them."
His remarks provided a significant boost for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's uphill efforts to convene a conference that would move the languishing peace process forward. In a speech immediately following Olmert's, Rice insisted, "We can succeed. Failure is simply not an option."
The aims of the Annapolis conference, tentatively scheduled for the last week of November, have diminished since Rice proposed it in September as a venue for the Israelis and Palestinians to set out their positions on core issues including borders, the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees.
But in her second visit here in three weeks, Rice indicated that she was pursuing less ambitious goals. Rather than a joint declaration of parameters for a final settlement, sources said the document now envisioned for the conference would declare the implementation of the multistep "road map" first drawn up by the United States, Europe and the United Nations in 2003.
The first phase of the road map called for confidence-building security measures, including Palestinian action against armed groups, Israeli dismantlement of settlement outposts and the easing of restrictions on Palestinian movements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Annapolis document, in its new format, would state that negotiations were proceeding toward the "final status" core issues.
Rice plans to travel to the West Bank city of Ramallah on Monday to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas has resisted any suggestion that the Annapolis meeting would center on anything less than a detailed plan to resolve the key elements of the conflict.
In the three weeks before the conference, Rice and other administration officials will be working against time, pressing both Israel and the Palestinians to establish facts on the ground that will enable the meeting -- which is also to include unspecified Arab governments -- to move forward.
For the Palestinians, U.S. officials said, it will require enhancing their police presence in West Bank cities. For Israel, the officials said, it means easing restrictions at checkpoints that limit Palestinian movement in the West Bank and at least the symbolic dismantling of some small Israeli settlement outposts.
Progress on both sides remains uncertain. After meeting with Rice this morning, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that "there are differences over the road map. We must reach a basic understanding that the creation of a Palestinian state should occur only after Israel's security is established."
In a briefing for reporters, Rice described the glass as half full. "They are negotiating," she said. "The atmosphere is good. Of course when you negotiate, you run into differences. That's why you negotiate. And they're working their way through those differences. . . . What you're starting to see here is that people are starting to see Annapolis as the beginning of a process, not a single point in time."
It was important that both sides begin looking toward "the day after Annapolis," she said, when they had "broken through" the problems of phase one and "they are, indeed, talking about what's in phase three, which is the establishment of a Palestinian state."
In her speech to a forum held here by the Saban Center, based in Washington at the Brookings Institution, Rice took pains to assure Israel of an unwavering U.S. commitment to its security. She also warned that both sides "need to show that they can deliver."
Despite whatever commitments they make to Rice, both Olmert and Abbas are operating from positions of political weakness. A unity government between Abbas's Fatah movement and Hamas collapsed this year. Hamas, a radical Islamic movement, then forcibly took over the Gaza Strip, leaving the Fatah-led government in charge of the West Bank.
Since then, the Bush administration and European governments have tried to prop up Abbas. In revisions to his supplemental budget proposal last month, President Bush asked for more than $500 million in aid to the Palestinians, including $150 million in cash transfers.
Olmert's minority government is also under threat. In his speech to the Saban Forum preceding Rice's, he wrapped himself in the mantle of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the 12th anniversary of Rabin's assassination by a Jewish extremist. Recalling Rabin's peace efforts, Olmert said he would act in honor of his legacy "before the meeting in Annapolis, during it and most importantly, after it."
If both Israel and the Palestinians lived up to their obligations, he said, it was possible that a "Jewish state for the Jewish people and a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people" could be established before Bush leaves office in January 2009.
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