Peace Process

The Roadmap insists in Phase I that “all official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel.” The current effort of Secretary of State Rice to facilitate Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a November 2007 joint declaration in Washington over the parameters of a future Palestinian state essentially circumvents the Bush administration’s own 2003 Roadmap sequence.

Once Israel dropped its past reliance on a diplomacy based on its own rights and adopted a new concession-based diplomacy instead, its spokesmen essentially acquiesced to the Palestinian historical narrative.

In taking the position of “international peace envoy” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Blair will need to change the basic political parameters in order to avoid another catastrophic failure. Most importantly, this will require abandoning the widely held images of Palestinian victimization and demonization of Israel.

Ultimately, religion defines identity among Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, and is the basic element upon which the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel is based. In parallel, the Arab political awakening and worldview also draws its own attachment to the same land from religious sources.

For the past fifteen years, Middle East peace-making has been dominated by two consecutive, illusory, political paradigms. The first paradigm, encapsulated by the Oslo Accords of 1993, belonged to a vision in which it is believed that a solution exists to every problem.

The second paradigm – unilateral withdrawal – proposed that reality could be changed by withdrawing from it, by unilaterally disengaging from it.

The U.S. military victory in Iraq did at first create a more congenial atmosphere among Palestinians for peace with Israel. However, the present situation in Iraq, as well as Iran and Muslim fundamentalism in general, have caused matters to move in the opposite direction. The Palestinians are further away from a spirit of reconciliation and compromise than ever before.

Hamas' rise is likely to set back the "peace process" for years. Why should Hamas moderate in office, when its ideology is its raison d'etre? The Taliban, Iranian, Saddam and Assad regimes did not; neither did Arafat.

The cornerstone of Hamas' program, its very raison-d'etre, is the destruction of Israel, replacing it with an Islamist, fundamentalist, intolerant state reaching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River and beyond. The dominant theme of all their statements includes no territorial compromise - no peace even if Israel were to hand over all the territories and eastern Jerusalem; at most, some sort of temporary armistice (hudna).

The government of Israel could accept the roadmap because it differed from the Oslo process in one significant respect. In Oslo, the notion was that peace would bring security. The political process was to develop certain horizons for the Palestinian people, and hopes for a better future were to reduce the incentives and motivation for terrorism. But it didn't work.

The election of Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), along with Israel's political and military pressure, has brought about a change in the Palestinian Authority's policy on continuing the "armed intifada." At the same time, the paramount interest of Hamas and Islamic Jihad is to reorganize and rebuild their capabilities after they were severely degraded by the Israel Defense Forces.