The victory of the road map

WASHINGTON - "A great and hopeful change is coming to the Middle East," said U.S. President George W. Bush. The date: June 4, 2003. The place: Aqaba, Jordan. The occasion: a festive signing ceremony for a document, yet another document, whose pretensions were great and whose effect was limited - the road map. "As the road map accepted by the parties makes clear, both must make tangible, immediate steps toward this two-state vision," Bush said. Four and a half years have passed, and next week the U.S. president will be able to make another, similar speech. If there is something his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has proved with the burst of activity that has characterized the past few months, it is this: "If all sides fulfill their obligations, I know that peace can finally come." But not a minute before that.

Annapolis was born of the frustration that is an integral part of the road map: In the absence of implementation, the peace process will remain stuck in the first stage. In the time that has elapsed since the document was signed, along with the plethora of reservations that accompany it, the Palestinian Authority has yet to prove that it is capable of uprooting the "terrorist infrastructure," and the Israeli government has refrained from the unpleasantness involved in "freezing settlement activity." Important lessons have indeed been learned: Israel discovered that the evacuation of thousands of settlers is not a recipe for quiet; the PA discovered that it is not yet ready to withstand a confrontation with Hamas.

Annapolis was thought up as a subversive attempt to bypass this wearisome track. But at the end of the bypass, the drivers find themselves holding the same map, traveling forward along the same road. It is possible to call this a failure: The pretension that was at the heart of Rice's initiative has been discovered to be baseless. There will be no arrangement and no final status, no end to the conflict and no two states living side by side. Meanwhile, it is only Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas who are managing to live side by side - and even that only with difficulty. It is impossible to deceive reality with acrobatic wording.

Therefore, it is certainly possible to term the Annapolis summit an unnecessary failure. Nevertheless, on the eve of its occurrence, it is also worth identifying the new chance of success it offers, whose main component is the victory of the battered and yellowing road map. This is a victory of healthy logic over the shortsightedness of those who wish to cut corners, the knights of the bypass, who put on airs and then fly off. Annapolis will be a festive ceremony in honor of our having landed on the ground of reality.

When it was thought up almost five years ago, then prime minister Ariel Sharon considered the road map to be nothing more than a clever European stratagem against Israel. He doubted the purity of the initiators' intentions. One might equally doubt the purity of his own intentions when, at the end of the day, he agreed to accept it. Bush was surely suspicious when he heard Sharon's rhetorical question at Aqaba, in response to the demand for a settlement freeze: "What do you expect me to do - to ask the settlers' wives to have abortions?" Sharon repeated the same witticism to former secretary of state Colin Powell.

In time, Sharon learned that the map was not a catalyst for the diplomatic process, but an obstacle, and he used it accordingly. Later, he also tried a tricky shortcut of his own - the "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip - which was also unsuccessful.

Since the map served Israel as an "excuse," those who were suspicious had difficulty understanding that it also correctly diagnosed the "cause." For all its shortcomings, it is a reasonable document that conditions diplomatic progress on implementation on the ground. There is a certain amount of annoyance entailed in the insistence on completing its components, but in the dizziness of dashed hopes that characterizes the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, it nevertheless provides a realistic anchor. The fact that both sides failed to implement it is not a reason to skip to a new document, but rather proof that they have to try again.

There is no point in denying that the mission with which the Palestinians have been tasked is more demanding - investing time and energy in building institutions that will prevent the collapse of the next agreement. That, however, is not a reason to search for another shortcut. It is at most an excuse.