The Bush administration’s Annapolis, Md., conference on Middle East peace will tackle the entrenched core issues that have bedeviled negotiators since 1979, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday, pushing back against critics who say the conference may be just a photo opportunity.
She said that she would try to broker a deal by the end of the Bush administration that would lead to a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. She cautioned that there was no guarantee that she would be successful, but maintained that she knew what she was doing.
“I’m plenty steeped in the past history of negotiations, and I’m plenty steeped in some of the things that have worked and some of the things that haven’t,” she told reporters at a briefing. “Let’s not talk about what level of preparation was there for other efforts, including efforts that didn’t succeed.”
Bush administration officials said they were optimistic that high-level envoys from Arab countries would attend the Annapolis conference, including Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, whose presence is seen as critical to assuring Arab support for the new peace initiative.
But Ms. Rice has encountered a lot of hectoring from critics at home and abroad who say that the administration is engaging too little and too late, or in ways that are ultimately insubstantial.
“We don’t want a conference that only repeats what’s already been said, or a conference where only pictures are taken,” said Muhammad Zolfa, a member of Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council, an advisory body to King Abdullah.
Although dozens of Arab governments and international groups are invited to the conference, scheduled to start Tuesday, the two main parties — the Palestinian Authority and the government of Israel — have not yet agreed on a draft agenda as a starting point for negotiations.
“If the two concerned parties are going to the meeting without a statement they agree on, why are we and 40 other countries going?” Mr. Zolfa said in a telephone interview from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Brackets marked large sections of a Nov. 17 draft of the proposals between the negotiating parties obtained by The New York Times, meaning that those sections were still in dispute. Agreement had been reached on only the first two paragraphs, including a line about the fact that the meeting was being convened in Annapolis.
The Israelis and the Palestinians were even arguing about what to call the draft. Palestinians wanted to call it a “document”; Israelis wanted to call it a “statement.”
The Palestinians objected to the use of the word “terrorism” in the draft, and Israel wanted to cut any reference to a timeline. Israeli negotiators also wanted the draft to say that Israel would be the homeland for the Jewish people, while Palestine would be the homeland of the Palestinian people, living side by side in peace and security.
Palestinian negotiators objected to that line, arguing that such a sentence would predetermine the issue of right of return of Palestinian refugees and their families to their pre-1948 homes.
At the end of the draft, the Israelis inserted a note, which read, “Outstanding question for consideration: How to address the situation in Gaza in the document?”
The note refers to the takeover of Gaza by the militant Islamist organization Hamas. Many foreign policy experts question how Israel will reach a peace deal with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, when he no longer controls Gaza, home to more than a million Palestinians.
Ms. Rice, when asked about Gaza, said she believed that Hamas was “pretty isolated.” Nonetheless, she added, “Even Hamas agrees that Abbas is the negotiating authority for the P.L.O.,” referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In the Arab world, pundits and analysts were quick to express skepticism about Ms. Rice’s chances for success. Some Arabs expressed concern that the United States would push Arab governments to improve relations with Israel without requiring Israel to make any meaningful concessions in exchange.
Israelis “are trying to exploit this U.S. conference to wrest Arab recognition of the state of Israel as a state for the Jewish people to the exclusion of all others,” wrote Umaima Ahmad al-Jalahma in the Saudi newspaper Al Watan. She said the conference could lead Arab governments to permanently accept the millions of Palestinian refugees displaced throughout the region.
Another columnist, Talal Salman, writing in the pro-Syrian newspaper As Safir, which is published in Beirut, dismissed the prospect for real negotiations at Annapolis, arguing that the Palestinians are too fractured and weak to approach Israelis on an equal footing.
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