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Neither Hamas’s brutal suicide bombing in Jerusalem on Aug. 20, nor Israel’s retaliatory assassination of Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader, ended the peace process begun by the so-called Middle East road map. The road map, like the many initiatives that preceded it, never even got off the ground.
Instead of starting an Israeli-Palestinian negotiation, the road map started a contest between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, for George W. Bush’s heart and mind, as each sought to convince the American president that the other’s noncompliance was blocking the plan’s implementation.
Prospects for the road map’s success were dim from the outset. Sharon, who has the capacity to implement the road map’s obligations, does not have the desire to do so, and Abbas, who does have the desire, unfortunately lacks the capacity.
Whether Sharon’s formal endorsement of the road map is real or a sham was always going to be tested by a single criterion: whether he abided by its demand that Israel end unconditionally all further settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza. Just as a peace process cannot proceed while Israeli civilians are being blown up on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, it is absurd to expect that such a process - whose avowed purpose is to end the occupation and allow the emergence of a viable Palestinian state - can proceed while land is forcefully removed by Israel from under the Palestinian negotiators’ feet.
Abbas is also at fault for not abiding by the road map’s provisions: He failed to disarm Hamas and to shut down its terrorist operations.
Washington - and even many Israelis - understood that Abbas needed time to rebuild his security forces if the Palestinian Authority was to prevail in a confrontation with the Islamists. Sharon and his government, however, insisted on an immediate assault by Abbas’s security forces against Hamas’s “infrastructure.”
Sharon did so even as the Israelis intensified settlement construction and confiscations of Palestinian territory, including some of the most productive Palestinian agricultural land, destroyed for the wall Israel is erecting. These activities undermined Abbas’s credibility and public support, and clearly violated the road map’s demand for the immediate and unconditional cessation by Israel of all further land confiscations and settlement expansion.
Two fundamental and unchanging realities have defined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the outset. The first is that no Israeli government will, or should, make concessions to Palestinian terror. Terror must be seriously opposed and fought by the Palestinian Authority before a peace process can begin.
The second reality is that no Palestinian government can “dismantle” Hamas and other terrorist organizations without popular Palestinian support. That support will never be forthcoming without a credible commitment from Israel or the United States that such a costly confrontation with extremists would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
Sharon has not only refused to give Abbas this necessary assurance, but has done the opposite. In repeated public statements, Sharon has told his supporters that the road map’s goal of a “viable and sovereign Palestinian state” alongside Israel’s pre-1967 borders would never be granted by Israel to the Palestinians, even if all violence were to end.
Indeed, Sharon’s vague promise of “painful concessions” for a peace agreement, it has become clear, was not intended to assure territorial continuity even within the walled-in Palestinian bantustan he envisions.
That is why the road map was doomed from the outset. While Bush repeatedly praised Abbas and occasionally even criticized Sharon for failing to give Abbas the support he needs to survive, his statements fell far short of the forceful presidential intervention that was needed to put an end to the continued theft of Palestinian land that made a mockery of the road map.
What hope there may be for Israelis and Palestinians for something other than a worsening cycle of bloodshed and destruction rests on forceful American-led intervention to shut down Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah-affiliated terrorist gangs, as a prelude to imposing a genuine two-state solution on both Israel and the Palestinians.
Given Bush’s disinclination to address the issue of continued Israeli settlement activity, despite his declared intention of “riding herd” on the parties, prospects for such American leadership are unfortunately nil.
If Palestinians must understand that they will not achieve statehood unless they renounce violence and forgo the refugees’ right of return to Israel, Israel must understand that Palestinians cannot - and should not - accept these conditions unless Israel commits itself to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Efforts to breathe life into the road map, or to propose yet another peace initiative, before Israel is ready to make such a commitment, are cruel deceptions, for they serve only to deepen despair on both sides.
The writer is a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations. These views are his own.
