For Bush and Rice, every Qassam pushes back the clock

December 29, 2006
It's this time of the week again, and here's the shortened version of my print weekend column (with Aluf Benn in Tel Aviv, as usual). The full version can be read here.

Olmert and Peretz

Defense Minister Amir Peretz spoke openly this week about his disconnect from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and in the Prime Minister's Office they are saying that their relationship is "irreparable." The breaking point was the phone conversation between Peretz and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) about a month and a half ago. Olmert had the impression that Peretz had lied to him in his report of the conversation, when Peretz claimed that Abbas had contacted him. Since then Olmert has lost his confidence in the defense minister, whom he held in disdain even before that. Around him they snicker at every declaration by Peretz, and those participating in the security consultations two days ago sensed the hostility and alienation between them. When Peretz spoke Olmert made a show of not listening, instead writing notes to Cabinet Secretary Israel Maimon. The gaps between their positions were small, but each of them behaved as though the other was trying to undermine him.

Security consultations with large number of participants are not a forum for formulating policy, but rather for creating a consensus surrounding the decision already taken. That was also the case during the terms of Olmert's predecessors. But they made sure to tie up the ends ahead of time, in preparatory talks. Olmert behaves differently. He consults very little, and then the quarrels erupt in the broader discussions. That is his style: determined, with a short fuse. He does not have the patience to hear the same story from several people and to exhaust them with long conversations, as Ariel Sharon used to do. Before meeting with Abbas on Saturday night, Olmert updated Peretz, Chief of Staff Dan Halutz and several other ministers about the upcoming meeting. He did not ask them what he should say to Abbas. Olmert also decided alone and quickly about the cease fire in Gaza about five weeks ago. Such decisions end either with a citation or a demotion.

Ford and Bush

The Americans have not changed their minds: Negotiations with Syria, under the present circumstances, would damage their Middle East policy. If Israel asks to turn to such a channel - and Olmert insists that that is not his intention - they will probably refuse. They understand the public relations distress of the prime minister, but that does not change their assessment that Syrian President Bashar Assad is not interested in peace, but only in negotiations.

Under these circumstances, the question of public pressure on the Israeli prime minister, as oppressive as it may be, stands opposite questions that are central to the American interest: Iraq, Lebanon, terror, radicalism. "We have to remember," remarked a senior Israeli official this week, "that the situation today is not what it was in the 1990s. Then the Middle East was a small piece of the American puzzle, and we could ask the Americans to give in when there was a place where they did not have a vital interest and Israel did. Today Olmert and Bush are looking at the same map."

Bush, like many presidents before him, has not yet accepted the possibility that he won't bring peace between Israel and its neighbors. He really wants to do so, as does his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but time is not on their side, and every Qassam pushes back the clock. Anyone reading the history of Ford's presidency this week could have found an echo of the present situation, as well as quite a number of promises of the type that Bush too has scattered more than once, and which have yet to be fulfilled.

In one of his first speeches to Congress, Ford promised to free America from dependence on Arab oil. At the time there was a motive - the boycott that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Today there is also a motive. But meanwhile the Arabs are the same Arabs, the sea of oil is the same sea, and the dependence is the same dependence. The president, who is not the same president, will share with his predecessor the lesson learned by almost all his predecessors, from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton: The situation in the Middle East is determined on the ground and not in the White House.

Abbas and Rice

There are no more magic solutions for the disintegrating PA, such as "disengagement" and "convergence." Nor are there military wonder drugs that will destroy Hamas and Islamic Jihad and stop the shower of Qassams. They can only wait for the Palestinians to end their power struggles and give rise to a new and centralized leadership, and to hope that their internal wars will not be translated into a new wave of terror in Israel.

The U.S. State Department understands this situation, and nevertheless, the officials are doing everything possible in an attempt to produce a shred of new hope that will help to move a diplomatic process forward. In the middle of next month Rice will be coming to visit the region, and those involved are already busy lowering expectations. Real preparatory talks for the visit have yet to begin, and the schedule is very crowded. It is hard to find time to think about the Israeli-Palestinian arena with the proper seriousness.

In the absence of a clear plan, once again we are hearing half stories and fragmentary truths that signal confusion rather than a breakthrough. The latest of them deal with the possibility that the U.S. will ask to skip over the first stage of the "road map" (eradicating terror) straight to the second stage (a Palestinian state within temporary borders). An Israeli official who was asked about it this week said that he doesn't lose sleep when he hears these stories. He doesn't think that the Americans are planning a maneuver for Israel. In any case, it's an unrealistic idea.

The real dilemma for both the Israelis and the Americans relates to more complex questions: one, is it possible to begin the discussion but not the implementation of the second stage of the map even before the first stage has been completed. The second, whether it is a good idea to skip a stage in the road map - but the second stage rather than the first. In other words, to move straight from the implementation of the first stage to negotiations over the final status agreement. Livni is tending in that direction in the diplomatic initiative she announced this week in an interview with Haaretz. But even she does not have an answer for the most important question: Let's say she achieves an agreement with Abbas and his people, who will implement it? Who will guarantee that the Qassams won't fall on Tel Aviv after the IDF comes down from the hills to the line of the separation fence?