Israel Matzav

Clarity on the 'road map'

At Powerline, John Hinderaker starts out telling us that Condoleeza Rice has finally clarified what the Bush administration is up to with the 'road map' and ends up being much clearer about what ought to be than Rice herself has ever been.

This is from the Washington Times:

The "road map" for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks.

As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the "core issues": the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the rights of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel's border and the future of Jerusalem.

"The reason that we haven't really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status," Miss Rice said.

Miss Rice said that what the U.S.-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was "break that tight sequentiality ... to say, you can do these in parallel, you can do road-map obligations and negotiation for the final status in parallel."

But John nails it beautifully:

The problem with this approach is that the "core issues" identified by Secretary Rice are not, in fact, the core issues. There is actually only one core issue: the fact that most Palestinians do not accept Israel's right to exist or the right of Jews to live in the region, and therefore support those who are constantly trying to kill them. But for the Palestinians' genocidal dreams, all other "issues" would have been resolved many years ago.

...

The original road map was founded on a recognition that the essential precondition to peace between Palestinians and Israelis is a cessation of Palestinian terrorism. But that proved impossible to achieve, and the Bush administration, like others before it, learned that it is much easier to lean on Israel to make concessions. The lesson of history, however, is that such concessions will not bring peace.

John's right that the 'concessions' won't bring peace. Unfortunately, however, they may get a whole lot more Israelis killed, God forbid.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:23 PM