Word: roadmaps
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President Bush may imagine that his "roadmap" initiative has brought Israel and the Palestinians together to negotiate their way a long-term peace agreement, but people in the region know better: They're looking to Washington for the signs of what will come next. That's because discussions between the two sides have yielded little progress, and President Bush will be called upon to prescribe the next step to each when he meets Friday with Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, and then next week with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. The Israelis and Palestinians are not really negotiating with each...
...sure, there has certainly been some progress in the situation since the "roadmap" was launched in June - the past month has been the most peaceful since the armed intifada began in September 2000; Israel has withdrawn troops from part of Gaza and the Bethlehem area, and made a few symbolic gestures in respect of settlement outposts built without government permission. But in terms of many of the key requirements of the first phase of the "roadmap" - a Palestinian campaign to disarm and dismantle groups that have waged the terror campaign; Israeli easing of Palestinian living conditions, dismantling settlement outposts built...
...Moreover, most of what has been achieved has occurred outside of the "roadmap" framework. The relative calm of the past month is a product not of negotiations between Sharon and Abbas, but of the "hudna" agreement that Abbas and Arab governments, particularly Egypt, managed to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the militants of Fatah to sign. Sharon, for his part, insists that his actions on the settlements are not dictated by the "roadmap" at all, but by a separate agreement between himself and President Bush...
...hard to see that in both instances, such agreements may actually work at cross-purposes to the "roadmap" plan: The Palestinian militant groups are hardly likely to maintain a truce with the Palestinian Authority if it launches a drive to disarm and dismantle them; and if Sharon is claiming Bush's backing for his own interpretation of the settlement issue (and the White House has yet to contradict him), then the credibility of the "roadmap" itself is at stake...
...been premised on the same recognition, of course, but today it is the hard-line anti-Oslo parties in Israel and among the Palestinians that appear to be acknowledging their inability to enforce a violent solution. There may also, this time, be a third element of conceptual progress: The "roadmap," for all its limitations, appears to reflect a growing recognition in Washington that the era when Israelis and Palestinians could find their own, bilateral route to a peace agreement may have passed, and that resolving the conflict may now increasingly require that the international community be ready not only...