In the long, dispiriting history of Mideast peace talks, none as been preceded by lower expectations than this week’s conference at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The atmosphere is marked by weakness, uncertainty and pessimism.
Yet that may prove to be the Annapolis conference’s greatest strength, an unexpected prelude to breakthrough on the 60-year road to an Arab-Israeli-settlement.
It is between the lines of bleak editorials, op-ed columns and analyses in the press of the Middle East itself that this hope, however slim, can be read. From Riyadh and Beirut to Cairo and Jerusalem, pre-conference media coverage has been a strange mosaic of dark foreboding and unusual glimmers of light.
No less unusual is the fact that Annapolis will bring together all of the governments and mainstream players in this unending conflict for the first time – precisely because because all of them are reeling in crisis.
In a sense, there could be no more potent chemistry for success at the negotiating table. The closest equivalent is the “Nixon shock” of 35 years ago, when a fiercely anti-Communist U.S. president, faced with riots in the American streets and a war about to be lost in Southeast Asia, suddenly found common ground with a marxist China gravely enfeebled by cultural revolution.
WALKING WOUNDED
The list of the walking wounded at Annapolis begins with the host, George W. Bush, the lamest of lame duck-presidents in memory, set to leave office with a castastrophic foreign policy record and a Republican Party in precipitous decline.
His guests include the foreign ministers of aging King Abdullah, 83, of Saudi Arabia and President Hosni Mubarak, 79, of Egypt – both of whom are ill, obsessed with their place in history and unlikely to remain at the helm much longer. The other royal Abdullah, Jordan’s young king, has just presided over controversial parliamentary elections amidst charges of vote-tampering. Alongside his envoy at Annapolis is Lebanon’s chair, which may be empty given its seatholder’s inability to elect a new president and Friday’s declaration of emergency military rule. As for the Syrians, they are struggling with an enormous flood of Iraqi refugees, economic stagnation and tense relations not only with the West but also with the rest of the Arab bloc.
Further down the table are the talks’ ostensible leading actors, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, facing multiple corruption charges and plummetting opinion polls, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been run out of Gaza, half of his nominal domain, by Hamas gunmen.
An unprecedented 49 participants have been invited to the conference, among them the 16 member-states of the Arab League and four of the world’s five most populous Islamic nations. What links most of them, apart from political uncertainty, is violent religious extremism at home and a regional power balance transformed by the nuclear chest-thumping of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran.
The sine qua non for progress on every front, the chief prescription for what ails nearly every participant at the talks, is a meaningful Arab-Israeli peace accord. In the six decades since since hostilities broke into warfare between the Palestinians and Israel, inflexibility has never carried a higher price.
THE IRAN FACTOR
One result is that contradictory mosaic in the Middle Eastern press, in which reporters and analysts – on both sides of the divide – veer wildly between predictions of abject failure at Annapolis and recognition of positive signals leading up to it.
“It is hard to generate any real anticipation from a process in which the principal Israeli and Palestinian parties are politically weak, the American hosts are imprecise and hesitant…and the agenda is as clear as mushroom soup,” Arab political analyst Rami Khouri writes in the Beirut Daily Star
“The parties are exhausted,” agrees Israel’s hardline Jerusalem Post. Yet, Khouri adds, the “mushroom soup” is exactly why Arabs should go to Annapolis “without reservations, go with enthusiasm and confidence, and use the gathering as a stage to demonstrate the Arab will for a fair and negotiated peace.”
These are distinctly not fighting words, which alone is a novelty in Arab comments on talks with Israel. And they too have an echo in Israel’s conservative media. Despite the exhaustion, the Post continues, “the outlines of the ultimate agreement are clear; and an opportunity has arisen in the shared fear of a rising Iranian threat common to Israel, Arab states and moderate Palestinians.”
Allusions to Iran fill press analyses everywhere in the region. Like universal weakness and weariness, fear of Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions is a common element in the Annapolis build-up, a new source of mutual anxiety added to the fundamentalist jihad. A new reason, as the Post notes, to wonder if the conference might deliver something after all.
Arab leaders may not talk much about the Iranian factor, according to Egypt’s pro-government Al-Ahram Weekly, “but they do not deny it either: American officials have been promising support for some Palestinian rights in Annapolis in return for a freeze of any public Arab criticism of US plans – or even perhaps their implementation – to attack Iran.”
This is not to say that regionwide antipathy for Teheran, whether it comes to war or not, is enough to break the Arab-Israeli status quo.
The Palestinians must also find a way to suppress terrorism based in Gaza, and reconfirm their acceptance of an Israeli state. For Israel, the tough but essential concessions involve land, specifically the land now inhabited by thousands of Jewish settlers whose presence on the West Bank is condemned by the International community and in some instances regarded as illegal by Israel’s own courts.
The noteworthy subtext of Middle Eastern commentary today is a fragile consensus that movement is possible, at long last, on these core issues – not yet to a comprehensive solution, but toward recognition that there may be no choice, and a grudging acceptance of what a solution must entail.
In a recent television interview, Abbas said he favored the establishment of an independent Palestine in the 6,205 square kilometers (2,400 square miles) of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “We want it as it is,” he confirmed.
Never before has a Palestinian leader publicly acknowledged that all land currently within the pre-1967 borders of Israel is likely to remain Israeli, and not be returned eventually to displaced Palestinians.
Olmert, on his part, has spoken repeatedly in recent weeks of a freeze on Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the necessary starting point to a fuller negotiated withdrawal. “This is a major move which Israel has always refused to take,” points out the Jordan Times.
Jordanian sources, cited in the Amman-based Star, report that Abbas has offered Israel permanent control over 2 percent of West Bank territory that now surrounds major Jewish settlements. Olmert’s goal is not dramatically larger – 6 to 8 percent. The exact amount, he says, can be decided in future negotiations. “In exchange for the West Bank land,” the Star maintains, “Israel is reportedly considering transferring to the Palestinians a strip of area between the Gaza Strip and West Bank to allow for a connection between them.”
PEACE IN A YEAR?
Much of this is new, and newer yet is the measured reaction it elicits, a reaction that speaks directly to an overwhelming need to break the impasse.
“Suspending construction in the settlements is not a prize for the Palestinians ahead of one agreement or another, but a life-saving medicine for Israel,” in the words of an editorial in Ha&r
squo;aretz, a widely read liberal Israeli daily.
One of the most obvious outcomes of Annapolis “would be some sort of Saudi-Israeli direct engagement,” Al-Ahram observes. “Most Arab capitals,” it adds, quoting an Egyptian diplomat, “are seeking a relationship with Israel, irrespective of whatever is happening on the Palestinian front.
” Other signs of convergence are proliferating as the clock ticks toward Tuesday. Abbas has called for renewed challenge to the rule of Hamas in Gaza. Olmert’s governing coalition has authorized the shipment of armored cars and ammunition to Palestinian security forces, and released 441 Palestinian prisoners from its prisons. More telling, residency permits have been issued in the past month to thousands of undocumented Palestinians living clandestine lives in Jerusalem, implying movement on the city’s possible status as a jointly governed capital in a comprehensive peace accord.
Beyond the boundaries of Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, frantic behind-the-scenes bartering has been underway. Most remarkable is the hyper-kinetic travel schedule of Saudi Arabia’s frail King Abdullah, who has been on the road all over the region. Egyptian president Mubarak was just as busy, meeting in turn with Abdullah, Abbas, Jordan’s Abdullah and Olmert.
The Israeli prime minister startled reporters at Sharm el-Sheikh, where their meeting was held, by speaking of a peace deal within one year. Mubarak responded with a surprise of his own, saying he was ready to pay a state visit to Israel, his first since taking office 26 years ago.
If it remains difficult to see the future with absolute clarity in the diplomatic mushroom soup, these signals make it just as difficult to believe that nothing new is bubbling in the Middle Eastern cauldron.
Not because America demands progress – after seven years of utterly neglecting the conflict, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have very little influence on its outcome – but because momentum forward is building among Arabs and Israelis themselves. There are implicit dangers in an agreement that is too hasty, too dismissive of the profound tensions that have haunted Arab-Israeli relations for four generations and will continue to do so. “But a failure to agree is no less dangerous,” warns Ghassan Khatib, vice-president of Birzeit University and former Palestinian Authority minister of planning.
That danger, against a backdrop of weakness and fear, may be Annapolis’s saving grace.
– Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5
The spirit in which my father, USNA 1948, tossed his cap at graduation in the post war accelerated class, with the hope of re-newed and lasting peace, at Annapolis in 1947.
Not sure what’s stranger — being described as “optimistic” for the first time in four decades as a journalist, or finding my words compared to those of the sinister John Bolton.