To Palestine via the side road - Haaretz

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Thu., November 29, 2007 Kislev 19, 5768

Israel Time: 02:25 (EST+7)

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To Palestine via the side road

By Shmuel Rosner

Tags: Israel, Mahmoud Abbas

ANNAPOLIS - "Events are subject to change without notice," the U.S. State Department warned the guests at the Annapolis meeting a few hours before it was due to convene. That announcement was to the point at this confused and confusing conference, where many of the participants wondered before their arrival what the reason for calling it was and remained confused as they left for Annapolis about its aims.

On the face of it, everyone understands what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wants, but there are still arguments about what President Bush wants. "Mr. Palestine" was the headline given to his picture on the cover of The Economist. If the editors intended this as light-hearted provocation, one can smile and go on one's way. If they wanted to cause Yasser Arafat to turn in his grave, they must have succeeded. But if they meant to hint that Bush was the man who by his own deeds will set up the Palestinian state, it seems they chose the wrong person.

Bush was compared to Bill Clinton many times in recent days. Here we have a president who is about to complete his eight years in office and who is trying with his last drop of strength to establish peace in the Middle East. The facts are correct, the analysis is forced. Bush is not Clinton, and despite the temptation, he also does not want to be him. He never was interested in the minute details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he never pretended to be a magician who would pull a trick out of his hat to solve it.

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Rice will be involved in the continuation of the discussions and she has been given a fairly long rope - as long as the Olmert government's willingness to make progress in the talks. Bush and his team were taken by surprise by the enthusiasm Ehud Olmert displayed for renewing the contacts; his motives are not necessarily clear to them. But a source who knows both Bush and Rice described the difference between them this week: Rice understands nothing at all about politics while Bush understands mainly politics.

His intention was actually to give the president a compliment, to say that his senses lead him to go along with Olmert, but when the time comes, in the same way, they will direct him apparently to stop with him.

The peace process will go back and forth between two parallel paths next year - one boring and decisive, and the other exciting and fictitious. The media and analysts will run after whatever causes interest: summit meetings, trips to mediate, arguments about Jerusalem's status, formulas for solving the refugee problem, the definition of Israel as a Jewish state. Those who seek headlines will make political meat of these issues. Some will do so to hit at Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and some to undermine Olmert's coalition, and some simply to get a headline.

Meanwhile, off the main road, the fate of the Palestinian state will be decided - at a conference of the donor states - by nurturing orderly institutions and by quietly deploying the Palestinian Authority's security forces street by street. The accusation constantly hurled at Arafat - that he did nothing during his term of office to improve the sewage system or transportation or life in the territories - is a charge that Abbas and even more so his prime minister Salam Fayyad have to avoid. The kind of talks Fayyad is holding with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in the company of babysitter Tony Blair, are the key to genuine progress toward a Palestinian state. The commotion caused by the other subjects is a smoke screen that makes it possible for them to work, for the time being, in relative quiet.

Bush has another year in office and his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, this week met with Jewish and Christian leaders from the concerned opposition and even succeeded in calming their fears. He sounded to them sober and without illusions. Annapolis is not a move but rather an attempt to start a process, he said. He is quite cautious and he too, like Abbas and perhaps also like Olmert, has the label of a dull technocrat. He never starred like Rice on the covers of magazines, he never enjoyed the kind of public relations that she is used to getting. But Hadley is a much more effective national security adviser than Rice was. Whoever heard him talk this week about the long and arduous and boring road to building a Palestinian state understood that Bush will not be "Mr. Palestine."

If Abbas can, let him be.

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