Word: oslo
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...Suffice to say that while the Israeli government of Ehud Barak offered less, even Barak's offer was vehemently rejected by Ariel Sharon. So, Abbas is keen to resume negotiations with Israel on the basis of President Bush's "roadmap," which leads inexorably to the completion of the Oslo peace process. Sharon prides himself on having buried Oslo...
...there has certainly never been any reason to believe that Abbas sees Gaza, the 40 percent of the West Bank currently controlled by the Palestinians plus the four settlements Sharon plans to evacuate as a sufficient basis for Palestinian statehood. On the contrary, he reiterates his commitment to Oslo and the Roadmap, both of which are guided by the UN Resolution 242, which requires Israeli withdrawal from the territories it seized in 1967. (Post-script: The English text of the resolution doesn't actually use a definite article, and Israel has long insisted that this is precisely because 242 does...
...Abbas wants to be the President of all the Palestinians, and bring them along behind his strategy for achieving statehood. But completing the Oslo process is, to put it mildly, not exactly what Ariel Sharon has in mind. Indeed, the Israeli prime minister resurrected his political career and eventually won the prime minister's job - an outcome unthinkable even in his own party until it became inevitable following the onset of the September 2000 intifada - by leading an aggressive campaign against the Oslo process. Yasser Arafat was widely pilloried in the U.S. for rejecting what was offered at Camp David...
...either side over the past couple of years. To be sure, Sharon is talking about leaving Gaza and four West Bank settlements, but despite the best hopes of his Labor Party allies in his new government that this would simply be the start of the fulfillment of the Oslo vision, Sharon and those close to him have left no doubt that they see such a move as a tactic to avoid being pressed back onto the roadmap and the completion of Oslo...
...that while Abbas will almost certainly be more democratic than Arafat, that won't necessarily hasten the peace process. In fact, it could even do the opposite: Arafat had used his longstanding executive authority as unchallenged head of a national liberation movement to force through compromises in the Oslo agreement that would not likely have been accepted by his electorate, and later to order crackdowns on Hamas when their actions jeopardized his own plans...