Word: roadmap
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...Neither side has done much to implement the "roadmap." Instead of dismantling the militant organizations that have waged the terror war, the PA leadership brokered a truce agreement under which they would refrain from attacking Israel in exchange for prisoner releases and other concessions. Yasser Arafat remained very much in charge of the PA despite U.S. efforts to sideline him. And Israel confined itself to mostly token gestures in respect of settlement outposts, reversible military withdrawals from a couple of Palestinian areas and the release of a couple of hundred of the 6,000 Palestinian militants currently in Israeli prisons...
...perceptive commentary by Camp David veterans Robert Malley and Hussein Agha notes, none of the key participants - Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas - saw the "roadmap" as a path to a solution; they saw it instead as a tactical challenge, brought on by diplomatic pressures, in their ongoing struggle. Each had his own goals: Arafat?s and Sharon?s were mirror opposites; Abbas?s were different from both, but his negligible political standing made him a marginal figure except in the wishful thinking of President Bush. Abbas adopted the ?roadmap? and then equivocated on implementing it; Sharon artfully avoided...
...Israel?s reasons for avoiding adoption of the ?roadmap? may be based in no small part in fears over its destination. The document envisions, in Phase II, "the option of creating an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty." This delicate bit of diplo-speak is nothing if not an oxymoron - the first attribute of sovereignty is surely precisely defined borders. But even in its third phase, the "roadmap" simply envisages Israel and the Palestinians negotiating a final status agreement that would settle the borders and all outstanding conflict issues...
...roadmap speaks of a final agreement on borders that "will resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict.?But where it fails is in making specific the obvious: that the basis for the border between Israel and Palestine is the June 1967 line that separated Israel from the West Bank and Gaza...
...provide something of a precedent, with NATO troops guaranteeing security and the UN running the political administration for an interim period likely to last at least a decade. Of course such plans also have plenty of flaws, but they do point to the emerging reality that whatever succeeds the ?roadmap? is likely to be a set of proposals considerably more robust than those we have seen...