The emperor's new peace plan

Barring a miracle, Bush's Annapolis charade will make matters in the Middle East much worse.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: George W. Bush, Palestine, Israel, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War

Dec. 4, 2007 | I'd like to find reasons for optimism about the Annapolis peace conference. It feels mean-spirited and cynical to abandon all hope when the diplomats have barely hung up their dark suits. Talking, in theory, is better than not talking. After seven agonizing years of neglect, at least President Bush has put the Israeli-Palestinian issue on the table. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seems to be sincere in his belief that a two-state solution is necessary. And if a miracle happens, maybe peace really will come to pass.

But miracles are not posted on the betting board at Las Vegas. And the reality is that the Annapolis conference and what follows it will almost certainly do more harm than good.

Annapolis will fail to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians because it was not intended to succeed. It was a charade. And in the Middle East, charades don't just leave things the way they are -- they make them much worse. The tragedy is that Olmert seems to realize the urgency of cutting a two-state deal. But there is a giant gap between seeing the goal and achieving it, and only the United States can fill it. Olmert can take the politically explosive yet necessary steps only if the United States clearly states in advance what needs to be done and then forces both sides to do it. Bush completely failed to do that. He called for the conference almost in passing. He never set an agenda. He refused to outline what the U.S. vision of peace is. Going forward, the only thing he offered the two beleaguered leaders, Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, was a promise to monitor the process -- which in these circumstances is like promising a dying man that if he calls you on your cellphone, you'll be sure to check the message.

The sad thing about this mess is that there's no mystery about what needs to happen. Both Israel and the Palestinians must give up some of their most cherished dreams. The 40-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands must end. East Jerusalem must become the capital of a contiguous Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. Those will be bitter concessions for Israel, but the Palestinians must give up even more. They must accept a state that comprises only 22 percent of the historic Palestine. They probably must allow the largest settlements on the West Bank to become part of Israel. And most painfully of all, they must accept a compromise on Palestinian refugees that will resettle most of them outside their ancestral homes in what is now Israel.

But neither Bush nor Condoleezza Rice have ever been interested in brokering a fair and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. After all, this is the president who announced at his first National Security Council meeting that he was going to let Ariel Sharon have a free hand to smash the Palestinians because "sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." This is the Secretary of State who prevented the U.N. from imposing a cease-fire on Israel in the last weeks of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war and infamously defended the carnage as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East."

Bush's open bias favoring Israel, which he sees as a noble comrade in the fight against terrorism, along with his shameful lack of understanding of Palestinian grievances, explains why he's shown no interest in brokering a peace deal. But the god-awful mess he has made of the Middle East forced his hand. Annapolis was a desperation gambit that Bush reluctantly agreed to because he wanted to line up the "good guys," Israel and America's autocratic Sunni allies, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf states, against the "bad guys" -- Hamas, Hezbollah and above all Iran. He's pumping up Abbas because he wants to destroy Hamas.

In short, Bush doesn't want peace -- he wants victory. For Bush, the forces of good are locked in apocalyptic struggle with the forces of evil: As he notoriously said in his nationally televised address after 9/11, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Both the true-believer Bush and the lightweight Rice continue to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, indeed the entire region, as a struggle between "moderates" and "extremists" and refuse to negotiate with any state or group tainted by "extremism."

As the Middle East goes up in flames, the ideological smugness of this administration verges on the clinically delusional. One of the reasons Bush invaded Iraq was his belief that the road to Jerusalem went through Baghdad -- that toppling Saddam would force the Palestinians to make peace on U.S.-Israeli terms. Incredibly, he and his team still seem to believe this. In a speech at Johns Hopkins after Annapolis, Bush's national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, claimed that "the policies that President Bush has pursued over the last six years," in particular his identifying of "terrorism as the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East," were largely responsible for creating an opportunity for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Annapolis reveals that Bush is still clinging to the same fallacy -- except now, he believes that the road to Jerusalem goes through Tehran.

Annapolis is almost certainly doomed because it repeats the same failed incrementalist approach taken by previous peace initiatives, from Oslo to the defunct, now-revived "road map"; because its success depends on the destruction of Hamas; and because it utterly lacks U.S. engagement.

Previous attempts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace failed because they did not go immediately to final-status issues, instead insisting on incremental "trust-building" steps. The incrementalist approach, as countless analysts have pointed out, is fatally flawed because it gives rejectionists on both sides veto power over the entire process. When the incremental steps faltered, as they were bound to, the process collapsed.

Annapolis takes the same flawed approach and adds a new wrinkle: The content-free "joint understanding" read by Bush declares that final-status talks should proceed at the same time as the incrementalist road map. Daniel Levy, the former lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative and one of the sharpest analysts of the conflict, finds reason for guarded optimism in this fact. "This change is unequivocally positive," Levy said in a phone interview. "We've locked in a reversal of road map logic. You can do permanent-status negotiations even if the road map is not met. Part of an equation that was guaranteed not to deliver has been flipped." Another insightful analyst, M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, finds grounds for hope in the fact that the United States, not Israel or the Palestinians, will be the judge of whether the involved parties have lived up to their road map obligations.

But Levy also pointed out that "another part of the equation which also guarantees failure has not been flipped -- the idea that an occupied people can provide security for the occupier. That logic is still there." Any attempt to broker peace is a nonstarter, Levy argues, if it proclaims that Palestinian violence justifies breaking off negotiations while ignoring the 40-year-old occupation and the new settlements being continuously built on Palestinian land.

Next page: Will Bush turn out to be Israel's worse enemy?