In the six weeks since Israeli and Palestinian leaders left Annapolis, Md., pledging to end "bloodshed, suffering and decades of conflict between our peoples," violence has escalated over long-standing territorial disputes and security concerns, leaving little optimism here on the eve of President Bush's visit that the fledgling dialogue will bring peace.
In the first visit to Israel of his presidency, Bush arrives Wednesday hoping to breathe new life into talks aimed at achieving a final accord by the end of this year. But the president is already scaling back those ambitions, saying now it may be possible to set only the "definition" of a Palestinian state by the time he leaves office.
Although Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have met since the Annapolis talks, the challenges facing their long-divided peoples have only deepened during that time.
In December, the number of rockets fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip -- controlled by the armed Hamas movement, which is not involved in the talks -- surged to 303, the second most of any month last year. January's tally, which includes a Katyusha rocket attack that Israeli officials said was the deepest strike ever from Gaza, is on pace to exceed that total.
Meanwhile, Israel has unveiled plans to expand Jewish settlements and conducted its most extensive military operations in months across the bifurcated Palestinian territories. Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank have killed at least 94 Palestinians since Annapolis -- 15 of them civilians, according to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, including three on Monday. Two Israelis have been killed during that period, a pair of settlers attacked by gunmen while hiking near Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The developments demonstrate the enormous challenge facing a late-term president seeking a peace deal that has proved elusive for decades. A poll published Monday by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 59 percent of Palestinians consider the Annapolis process a failure. A poll conducted in Israel at the end of December by the same organization and the Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University found that 75 percent of Israelis believe the same thing.
"There have been major setbacks since Annapolis, just as historically when we have had these summits there has always been a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality on the ground," said Diana Buttu, a former Abbas adviser. "There could soon come a time when people no longer believe in negotiations as a means to end the conflict."
While observers have long been calling for bolder U.S. involvement in peace negotiations, Bush has moved to tamp down expectations in recent days.
Asked last week whether he believes his vision of a Palestinian state could be realized by the time he leaves office, Bush sounded a cautious note. "The definition of a state can be achieved," Bush told Alhurra television. "The implementation of a state will be subject to a road map. In other words, there's a lot of work that has to be done."
In embarking on a push for peace here near the close of his presidency, Bush is following the path of several White House predecessors, including Bill Clinton, who made an ill-fated attempt at an agreement at Camp David in 2000, months before he left office.
Bush -- considered among the most pro-Israeli of U.S. presidents while at the same time the first to call for the creation of a Palestinian state -- has been seen as less engaged than Clinton on Israeli-Palestinian issues. The White House disputes that assessment. But Bush's first entry into peacemaking here, a phased process known as the "road map," was suspended soon after it was presented in 2003 amid a wave of violence.
The president will meet with senior Israeli officials in Jerusalem, including Olmert, who, though beholden to a coalition government that includes hard-liners, has indicated a willingness to discuss handing over territory in the West Bank and East Jerusalem if Palestinian leaders can stifle the armed groups at war with Israel. While Bush has indicated he will push the Israelis to halt settlement construction, his aides said they did not expect him to propose solutions to such difficult issues as the division of Jerusalem or the final borders of a future Palestinian state.
"It's almost a tradition that lame-duck presidents make a swing to the Middle East, including Israel," said Michael B. Oren, a prominent historian of the Middle East at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. "It is traditionally a victory lap. This is a victory lap without a victory."
Bush administration officials sought to play down the difficulty in getting negotiations on track since Annapolis, citing the interests of groups on both sides to undermine the negotiations.
"The extremists have made clear that they view democracy and those people who try to build it as enemy number one," U.S. national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley told reporters last week. And you see it in the shelling that you see coming from Gaza into Israel, as an effort to undermine this process that got started in Annapolis."
In addition to the increased violence, a fresh dispute emerged last month over Har Homa, a Jewish settlement built in the late 1990s on a hilltop on the outskirts of Jerusalem that Israel annexed after the 1967 Middle East war.
Olmert pledged before the Annapolis conference to halt new settlement construction, although he did not say whether Israel would stop building in existing settlements. The Israeli government unveiled plans in late December for 307 new housing units in Har Homa, infuriating Palestinian leaders, who consider it a violation of the road map's demand that Israel "freeze all settlement activity."
"This settlement's very existence is already provocative, so talking about expanding it is obviously provocative, particularly at this sensitive time," said Elias Rishmawi, a city council member in Beit Sahour, a neighboring Palestinian settlement. "The implications of more building are the end of the peace process."
In a round of interviews last week, Bush made clear he intends to push the Israelis to halt so-called outposts, or unauthorized settlements the Israeli government has pledged repeatedly to remove. Olmert acknowledged in an interview with Israeli reporters last week "a certain contradiction in this between what we're actually seeing and what we ourselves promised."
The dearth of cooperation was evident last week during a four-day Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Nablus. A bolstered Palestinian Authority police force over recent months had made it "the most stable and quiet city in the West Bank," according to an article last Tuesday in a prominent Israeli daily newspaper.
Dozens of Israeli armored jeeps arrived the same day to sweep up weapons caches and wanted suspects.
In Gaza, talk of peace contrasts starkly with recent clashes between Israeli forces, using aircraft and armored vehicles, and Palestinians fighters launching rockets and moving openly in crowded streets. Olmert said Sunday that his government had ordered a new offensive partly in response to the firing of the Katyusha, a rocket with a longer range and larger payload than the homemade version usually fired from Gaza.
An Israeli military spokesman said the rocket had been made in Iran, and local news reports said it was smuggled into Gaza from Egypt.
"The talks have allowed Israel to commit all types of crimes and atrocities in Gaza, while the world stays silent," Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said in an interview in Gaza City.
The Israeli town of Sderot, less than five miles east of the volatile boundary with Gaza, has been targeted in recent weeks by daily rocket and mortar fire, with warning sirens sounding frequently to give residents a few seconds to take cover.
"They are talking about peace and compromise, but the mistake we made was pulling out of Gaza in the first place," said resident Nomi Zolberg, referring to Israel's decision to dismantle its army bases and evacuate its Jewish settlements there in 2005. "If we keep making deals, it will never stop."
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