Many hope that when President Bush meets the Palestinian and Israeli prime ministers in the White House this week, either separately or as part of a three-way summit, he will provide fresh impetus for the road map. Bush will probably want to sustain his personal involvement.
There is another obvious reason for a possible Bush initiative: To counter Israel’s many attempts to gut some of the road map’s most important provisions. Israel refuses to address, much less meet, most Palestinian demands, including the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, an issue where a settlement has become imperative if the present three-month truce called by Hamas and Islamic Jihad is to hold. Then there is Israel’s insistence on erecting the so-called “security fence” down the West Bank border. Ariel Sharon argues that the fence is purely defensive and will have no political significance once the final border comes to be drawn. But the fence appears to be unilaterally determining the future border, and it bites into Palestinian territory, often in order to encompass Jewish settlements, and in effect annexes substantial areas to Israel. Some of the dismantling of outposts has been pure theater. US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice recently said that the net change in outposts was precisely one — as Israel often permitted the replacement of an outpost on the same day it was removed.
Sharon’s endorsement of a Palestinian state during the Aqaba summit last month broke new ground. He has always maintained that Palestinians must be confined to approximately 40 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. In its second phase, the road map envisages a transitional state in roughly 40 percent there. Of course, a transitional entity is not the end goal of the road map; a “viable and sovereign” Palestinian state is.
Sharon has diluted his statement about how bad the occupation is by explaining that he intended it to apply to Israel’s control of people, not territory. It can be no coincidence that just a week before Sharon’s departure for Washington, the Knesset should issue a resolution declaring the West Bank and Gaza as territories not under occupation and urging the Israeli government to continue developing settlements.
The Knesset is, of course, not the source of truth. The UN considers the Palestinian territories that were occupied in 1967 as occupied Palestinian territories and the settlements illegal. Still, the very idea of the Knesset coming out with such a resolution is staggering.
Bush now has a personal commitment to seeing the peace process through. Sharon does not have the same ambitions, and it is for this very reason that Bush will have to step in once again.
