Word: roadmap
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...failure of President Bush?s Middle East peace "roadmap" will likely be blamed on the actors: Mahmoud Abbas lacked the strength and the political will to stamp out Hamas; Yasser Arafat remained effectively in charge, undermining the efforts of Abbas so as to ensure his own continued relevance; Ariel Sharon didn?t take seriously the need for Israel to bolster Abbas and made only token gestures toward the "roadmap," and so on. But the fatal flaw in the "roadmap" lies not with the actors, but in the script itself. A look at how we go here, and what it will...
...objective of the "roadmap," and the related peace initiatives upon which it is based, is to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by obliging the two sides to share the Holy Land - re-dividing the former British colony of Palestine into a State of Israel living peacefully alongside a Palestinian state. There are two key obstacles to achieving that outcome: One is the ongoing violence that has seen almost 800 Israelis killed in terror attacks and three times as many Palestinians killed in Israeli military actions over the past two-and-a-half years. The other is the fact that...
...Addressing those two dimensions - security and occupation - has been the basis of the peace efforts of the past decade, based on the recognition that occupation fuels terrorism, which in turn hardens the occupation regime, breeding more recruits for terrorism, and so on. The "roadmap" is, first and foremost, a restatement of previous cease-fire plans. It adds a ?political horizon,? suggesting that compliance will bring the Palestinians a state. Its most important original contribution is its very premise: the recognition that left to their own devices, Israelis and Palestinians are incapable of finding their own way out of the bloodbath...
...where the roadmap goes into extensive detail on the steps necessary to restore Israeli security, it grows distinctly fuzzy when addressing issues of occupation. The first phase requires that the Palestinians renounce armed struggle, dismantle all organizations wielding arms outside of the formal security services of the PA, and reform Palestinian institutions (code, in U.S. and Israeli parlance, for sidelining Yasser Arafat). The requirements of Israel in the same first phase are limited to easing the humanitarian plight of the Palestinians, withdrawing from towns reoccupied by the Israeli Defense Force and dismantling settlements built in the course of the current...
...land at Abbas's door - the Bush Administration and Sharon will chide him for failing to find the political will to act against terrorism; the Palestinians will chide him for being duped by them. But the problem may lie not only with the actor, but with the script: The "roadmap" has not changed the salient reality for the Israelis, which is that terrorists with no interest in a peace process can, at will, exercise the option of killing Israeli children on the streets of Israeli cities. Nor has it changed the salient reality for the Palestinians, which is a life...