Fact: Something is moving in the diplomatic process

It's time for the shortened version of my weekend column (with Aluf Benn). You can read it in full here, or just a couple of paragraphs if you're too lazy to read it all.

Olmert

Something is moving in the diplomatic process. Fact: Close associates of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas have told friends on the Israeli left that this time they emerged satisfied from their meeting, on Sunday of this week, with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Fact: On the day after the meeting, intra-Palestinian agreement was achieved for the suspension of the shooting of Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, and by Wednesday only four mortar shell hits were registered. Fact: Olmert has for the first time agreed to discuss "the diplomatic horizon" with Abbas and to start talks on the security and economic arrangements that will prevail between Israel and the future Palestinian state. Fact: The Arab League has appointed, for the first time in its history, a delegation to advance its peace initiative with Israel. Fact: The Karni crossing point for goods, the main artery of Gaza's economic life, reopened this week in an expanded format. Fact: The U.S. army general Keith Dayton has received a budget for the training and equipping of Abbas' presidential guard.

How should these signs be read? That depends on whom you ask. At Olmert's bureau they are speaking cautiously. There is a lot that is being done, they say there, and we shall see where it leads. Olmert was hoping for a meeting with the Saudis with lots of media coverage, in the guise of a regional peace conference, and in the meantime he has encountered a refusal.

Rice

And what does Condoleezza Rice want? This coming month she will be in the region twice. Before her visit, the Americans will present Olmert and Abbas with the "tests of implementation" that they will evaluate: a Palestinian war on terror and Israeli easements for the population in the territories. Rice, insist people who work at her side on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, has the full and total support of President Bush. Attempts to depict a gap between their positions, say administration officials, indicate either one of two things: Either the press is wrong or its sources, presumably elected officials and civil servants in the Israeli government, are wrong. It would be better, said one administration official, to accept things as they are, and not to hope for cracks in the administration that would enable Israel to maneuver between Rice and her boss.

American commentators assess that Rice is aiming to achieve an agreement in principle for the establishment of a Palestinian state, as a key aim in "the Bush legacy." The implementation, apparently, will be left for the next man or woman who serves as president.

Fayad

Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayad made no effort to conceal his of satisfaction. His meeting with Secretary of State Rice was only one element in an assault of several days during which he conquered America, as though there had never been a Mecca agreement for the establishment of the Palestinian unity government. The Americans are now working on ways that will enable a more effective flow of money to the Palestinians.

Israel, at this stage, has decided to remain silent. In discreet channels, questions concerning future financial moves have been transmitted, in an attempt to make it clear that an end to the international economic boycott would render the Israeli boycott a joke.

Israel found itself this week in one position of refusal at the dialogue encounter financed by businessman S. Daniel Abraham, who is close to Olmert, that was hosted by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Official Israel boycotted the event, at the prime minister's instructions, and Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh, who was supposed to have made an appearance, stayed home. The head of the center, former U.S. ambassador Martin Indyk, did not hide his position: "It is hard to believe that Fayad constitutes a threat to Israel," he said. He also predicted that in the future Israel will have no alternative but to enter the same room as Fayad, for example at an international meeting of finance ministers of one sort or another.

Clinton

On Sunday evening, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright appeared at the opening of the annual convention of the Religious Action Center (RAC) of Reform Judaism. Albright knows a thing or two about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and can look longingly at her successor, Rice, who is making an effort to end it before she ends her term. In Albright's case and that of her president, Bill Clinton, who certainly wanted to do that, it did not work out. The former secretary said that she is not one of those who think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the center of all the problems of the Middle East. Nevertheless, she added, she is worried about the lack of progress.

Albright's was a more measured statement than that of her former boss, Clinton, who this week explained that the Israeli-Syrian conflict could be solved "in 45 minutes." This is, after all, the same conflict that Clinton tried to solve for years without success.

Clinton is now on a trajectory that could return him to the White House, and Albright to the position of a respected advisor to the president. Her positions, say people who are close to her politically, to a large extent reflect the positions of the senator from New York who is running for president, Hillary Clinton.

An administration that listens to Albright is not an administration that will retreat from the Middle East and its problems. "We are still needed in the world," she told her audience, most of them Jews, most of them very liberal. Her aim was clear: What is happening in Iraq must not lead to despair at American involvement in world affairs. And in this sense, the next Clinton administration, should there be one, will resemble the current Bush administration a lot more than some of its voters would like to believe.