Six long years of failed Middle East policies have finally brought US President George W. Bush to recognize that the alliance of moderates in the region that he covets can only be forged through an Arab-Israeli peace. Indeed, only by effectively addressing the Israeli-Arab dispute can he possibly salvage the standing of the US in the region.
But the round of peacemaking that the US has recently embarked upon not only comes too late in the political life of a lame-duck president who has been defeated at home and abroad; it is also ill-conceived and unconvincing.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's adamant resistance to engage the Syrians is not exactly wise policy. The stakes for a peaceful regional order are too high for Israel and the US to persist in refusing to put Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's current peace offensive to the test. The bones of contention that wrecked previous attempts to reach an Israeli-Syrian peace have realistic solutions, as was shown by the back-channel peace talks recently held between an Israeli ex-official and a Syrian with close connections to the regime.
Nor is Rice's insistence on sticking to the failed "road map" for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement promising. Susceptible to procrastination and evasion by both sides, the road map was stillborn. Almost four years after it was first launched, neither of the parties has managed to muster the political will necessary to implement its primary provisions. Not even the bizarre idea, reserved for the second stage, of a Palestinian state with "temporary borders" is enticing for the Palestinians.
This Gordian knot needs to be cut, not untied. The concept of interim agreements has now become utterly obsolete, if only because the parties are incapable of paying the political price inherent in an open-ended, piecemeal process.
Instead, what is called for is a sweeping solution to all the core issues. We now stand at the end of the peace process as we have known it. From now on, our options will be a violent and unilateral disengagement, such as the one that ushered in the current war in Gaza, and a comprehensive peace plan that will have to be annexed to the road map and validated by an international peace conference. Only such "reverse engineering," starting at the end and working backward -- and legitimized and monitored by strict international mechanisms -- might yet save the prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace from ruin.
As the launch of the peace process at the 1991 Madrid International Peace Conference demonstrated, the prospects for peace in the Middle East always needed a concerted international push to exploit windows of opportunity. Wars in the Middle East, especially those such as Israel's recent war against Hezbollah, which ended inconclusively, have almost invariably created the conditions for major political breakthroughs, because they taught the warring parties the limits of power. Trapped in a momentous struggle between the forces of peaceful change and those committed to Doomsday, the Middle East is once again calling for a major international effort at peacemaking.
The initiators of the 2002 Arab peace initiative likewise understood that a strictly bilateral approach might be inadequate, and instead called to regionalize the solution to the conflict. Loss of mutual trust between the parties, and their total incapacity to take even the smallest step towards each other, let alone to observe their commitments without prodding by third parties, made (and still makes) an international framework for peace the only way out of the dangerous impasse.
The end of bilateralism stems also from the dysfunctional political systems of both Palestine and Israel. Today, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is gasping for political air under the smothering control of Hamas. On her recent trip to Israel, Rice had to listen to four different peace plans from the prime minister, the foreign minister, the minister for strategic threats and the defense minister. For both Israelis and Palestinians, achieving internal peace might prove as formidable a challenge as establishing peace with each other.
Any reformed peace process is doomed if it is guided by a road map within which, on the core issues, the parties have diametrically opposed views. But there is no need to reinvent the wheel, because the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is embodied in the main peace plans that are already on the table -- the Clinton peace parameters and the all-Arab peace initiative.
Fifteen years after the Madrid Conference began a formal peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, the parties are wiser as to what is inevitable if this tortuous process is to lead to a permanent settlement. In 1991, they convened on a platform of "land for peace." But the Israelis never believed they would have to give back all the land, while the Arabs did not think they might have to offer "all the peace." Today, at long last, everyone knows what is meant by "land," and everyone knows what is meant by "peace."
Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former foreign minister of Israel, was the chief negotiator of the Camp David and Taba peace talks in 2000 and 2001 respectively. He now serves as the vice-president of the Toledo International Center for Peace.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Apart from the first arms sales approval for Taiwan since US President Donald Trump took office, last month also witnessed another milestone for Taiwan-US relations. Trump signed the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act into law on Tuesday. Its passing without objection in the US Senate underscores how bipartisan US support for Taiwan has evolved. The new law would further help normalize exchanges between Taiwanese and US government officials. We have already seen a flurry of visits to Washington earlier this summer, not only with Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), but also delegations led by National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu
When the towers of Wang Fuk Court turned into a seven-building inferno on Wednesday last week, killing 128 people, including a firefighter, Hong Kong officials promised investigations, pledged to review regulations and within hours issued a plan to replace bamboo scaffolding with steel. It sounded decisive. It was not. The gestures are about political optics, not accountability. The tragedy was not caused by bamboo or by outdated laws. Flame-retardant netting is already required. Under Hong Kong’s Mandatory Building Inspection Scheme — which requires buildings more than 30 years old to undergo inspection every decade and compulsory repairs — the framework for
President William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced a plan to invest an additional NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.8 billion) in military spending to procure advanced defense systems over the next eight years, and outlined two major plans and concrete steps to defend democratic Taiwan in the face of China’s intensifying threat. While Lai’s plans for boosting the country’s national security have been praised by many US lawmakers, former defense officials, academics and the American Institute in Taiwan, the US’ de facto embassy in Taiwan, they were not equally welcomed by all Taiwanese, particularly among the opposition parties. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman
President William Lai’s (賴清德) historic announcement on Wednesday, Nov. 26, of a supplemental defense budget valued in excess of US$40 billion is a testament to the seriousness with which Taiwan is responding to the relentless expansionist ambitions of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the Chinese Communist Party and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Lai is responding to the threat posed to Taiwan sovereignty along with US President Donald Trump’s insistence that American partners in good standing must take on more responsibility for their own defense. The supplemental defense budget will be broken into three main parts. The first and largest piece
RSS