ROAD MAP IS DEAD AS U.S. PUSHES PALI DEMANDS DOWN ISRAEL'S THROAT

Annapolis Syndrome (Contentions)
There is an unmistakable tinge of insanity creeping into the U.S. effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It takes form in the embarrassing desperation of Condoleeza Rice, as she countenances the increasing implausibility of the Annapolis conference with ever more florid and urgent declarations of the imperative of creating a Palestinian state. It takes form in the haphazard manner in which the U.S. has jettisoned virtually every requirement arrived upon in previous negotiations, most notably the unannounced dismissal of the 2003 Roadmap. And this creeping insanity takes form most strikingly in the refusal of U.S. strategists to deal seriously with the array of facts on the ground, facts that would undermine any print-on-paper agreements arising from Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Rice arrived in Israel yesterday—her eighth visit in the past year—to continue cajoling her interlocutors toward Annapolis. “Now we are talking about a joint document that will seriously and substantively address core issues. We have come quite a long way. We’ve got quite a long way to go,” she said. Actually, we have not come a long way. Anyone familiar with even the most basic outlines of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking knows that in all but the finest details, everything being negotiated today has been negotiated dozens of times before in summits and conferences and shuttle diplomacy and secret meetings undertaken by every U.S. administration stretching back decades: borders, refugees, Jerusalem, water, security, etc.

I feel safe predicting that the Annapolis conference, putatively only five weeks away, will not happen, or will take place in a highly attenuated form. Every event and indicator is working against it. The Arab states whose attendance the Bush administration has said will be required for the conference to be effective are either on the fence or are actively working to undermine American diplomacy. Saudi Arabia is following the exact same bait-and-switch formula it always has: express interest, wait and see what is in the offing, and then back out at the last minute.

The Saudi behavior is to be expected. But Egypt’s behavior is new and uniquely egregious, and is apparently not being met with any American resistance. While America and Israel have been pursuing an explicit policy of strengthening Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas while isolating Hamas, Egypt continues to counsel a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation. Worse, Egypt is strengthening Hamas by allowing the free flow of terrorists and weaponry across their border with Gaza, through a network of tunnels that has dramatically expanded in recent months. The weaponry includes Katyusha rockets that have twice the range of the Kassams that Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been firing at Israel. (These missiles represent nothing less than the means by which Hamas will be able to scuttle negotiations at a time of its choosing.) The Israelis have made much of the problem of the Egypt-Gaza border tunnels, but the Egyptians have done absolutely nothing to stop the smuggling. And Rice, swept up in shuttling between Washington, Jerusalem, and Ramallah, can’t be bothered to pay attention to this strategy of sabotage by an ostensible American ally that receives billions of dollars per year in U.S. aid.

Meanwhile, the larger question of what to do about Hamas and Gaza looms unmentioned over the proceedings. Rice has offered a platitudinous and contradictory position that a Palestinian state must include Gaza, but that Hamas, which controls Gaza largely by consent of the governed, has no place in a Palestinian state. Various senescent diplomatic elites have attempted to convince the Bush administration to bring Hamas into the negotiations, but it seems that even if invited, Hamas would refuse—the terror group recently announced its total rejection of the current negotiations, and its charter explicitly rejects diplomacy and conferencing in favor of jihad. The challenge posed by Hamas is so new and so significant that neither Rice nor Abbas has the wherewithal to address it.

What Rice has in fact gone a long way toward accomplishing is a demonstration of the fact that none of the U.S.’s previous diplomatic commitments will be considered of the slightest relevance when it comes to the latest round of peacemaking. Most farcical of all is that the current round of “engagement,” intended in part to restore American credibility in the Middle East by showing the world that the U.S. is willing to heavily invest itself in the conflict, is swiftly establishing the opposite—the same thing that was established in all the previous peacemaking efforts. But at least the Bush administration can come away from all of this knowing that this particular failure was not a unique one.