White House Now Ignoring Palestine

Catherine Cook (1/04)

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In a bid to gain support for the Iraq war, George W. Bush argued that the end of Saddam Hussein's rule would enhance prospects for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But nine months after the fall of Baghdad, it is clear that toppling Hussein's regime did not bring Middle East peace closer. It is equally obvious that, as it gears up for the 2004 elections, the Bush administration has stopped trying to broker peace entirely.

2003 witnessed a flurry of US diplomatic activity with regard to Israel-Palestine. In late April, the US released an initiative called the “road map,” formulated with its partners in the Quartet -- the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. The road map was formally launched in June when Bush met with Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian leaders in the Jordanian port of Aqaba. A series of high-level missions followed, some under the auspices of Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. In July, then Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas paid the first visit of a Palestinian leader to the White House since Bush entered office.

The invigorated activity was intended, in part, to bail out Bush's primary war partner, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, from a domestic crisis stemming from Britain's involvement in a wildly unpopular war among the British public. But the summer of intense involvement failed to bring about concrete achievements. Since the resignation of Abbas in early September, the administration has done little more than glance toward Israel-Palestine. Ambassador John Wolf, assigned to follow up on the road map, has been absent from the region for months.

What went wrong? If the Bush administration really intended to play a positive role in resolving the conflict, it should have paid attention to facts on the ground. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government continued to expand Jewish settlements and build a wall in the West Bank, and to confiscate Palestinian property, casting doubt on its intention to relinquish control over Palestinian lands. In the absence of an end to occupation, Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians are unlikely to end. At a minimum, the Bush administration should have pressed Israel to end its occupation policies with the same vigor with which it pressed the Palestinian Authority to reform and crack down on militants. It did not.

As the 2004 elections loom, the Bush administration has adopted Israel's insistence that there can be no movement in negotiations until the Palestinian Authority dismantles militant groups. But this gives Sharon relatively free rein to continue his policy of territorial expansion. While this approach has undoubtedly found favor among some segments of Bush's constituency of voters, it contradicts the call for “reciprocal steps” outlined in the road map. It is also the same approach that has failed since Sharon entered office three years ago.

At the new year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on, and it seems that the much publicized road map may be destined for the dustbin of history. The low priority accorded to Middle East peace is reflected in Colin Powell's January 1 essay in the New York Times , “What We Will Do in 2004,” in which the road map merited the briefest of mentions.

The Bush administration's lack of action on the road map has irritated its Quartet partners, who point out that if the US has no plans to pursue its plan, it should step aside and allow others to do the job. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they argue, simply cannot wait until after the November elections.

Maybe the Bush administration approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with naiveté unbecoming to a superpower. Or maybe the administration was committed only as long as it could take credit for progress without expending political capital. Either way, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nowhere closer to being resolved and the Bush administration's mishandling of the road map has further eroded US credibility in the region.

(Catherine Cook is senior analyst at the Middle East Research and Information Project, publisher of Middle East Report , in Washington, DC.)