No Progress in Middle East Talks
JERUSALEM, Feb. 19 — The first peace talks in six years between the leaders of Israel and the Palestinians ended without any apparent concrete progress beyond an agreement to meet again. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who convened the meeting, said she intended to keep pursuing the process for the rest of her time in office.
After two hours of talks with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Ms. Rice read a vaguely worded joint statement saying the two men “discussed their views of the diplomatic and political horizon” and had agreed to meet again “soon.”
Ms. Rice and her aides made clear that Mr. Abbas’s decision to bring his Fatah faction into a joint “unity” government with Hamas, which Western governments consider to be a terrorist organization, had complicated her efforts at peacemaking.
She suggested that if this meeting had not already been scheduled before the unity-government agreement was reached, Mr. Olmert might not have agreed to meet with Mr. Abbas.
Still, she praised Mr. Abbas for supporting international requirements that the Palestinians recognize the right of Israel to exist, that they forswear violence and that they accept previously negotiated agreements with Israel. Hamas has resisted all three steps.
Neither Mr. Olmert nor Mr. Abbas appeared by Ms. Rice’s side as she read the official statement, reflecting the tenuous nature of the talks, which apparently are so fragile that no side has even been willing to label them as “negotiations.” One American official called them “an informal dialogue”; the official statement read by Ms. Rice referred to them simply as “efforts.”
“The president and the prime minister agreed that they would meet together again soon,” Ms. Rice said. “In that vein, I expect to return soon.” But she expects that the two men will meet again “within weeks, not months,” even if it is without her.
The commitment from Mr. Olmert to meet again with Mr. Abbas is a minor victory for Mr. Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, since it signals that Israel will continue to deal with him despite the unity-government agreement, reached earlier this month in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
Later in the day, Mr. Olmert said: “There will be a dialogue, and we will continue the communication channel with Abu Mazen. We will not accept a situation in which we have no channels of communication with the Palestinian public, as I think this will be a dire mistake — all this without compromising over the principle we have established: not to conduct ties or acknowledge institutions that fail to endorse the basic principles which are the foundation to any future dealings.”
But according to a senior Israeli official, Mr. Olmert told a group of visiting American congressmen today that he is “very frustrated and disappointed with the Palestinians.” The official continued: “He wasn’t frustrated with the meeting itself, but with the feeling that Abu Mazen is going toward Hamas, not the other way around. The prime minister feels that the bottom line is moving toward the extremists, not the pragmatists.”
The Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that Mr. Abbas had agreed to the Mecca deal to end the fighting between Hamas and Fatah, and said that Mr. Abbas, as the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, “recognizes Israel, and that’s what really matters.”
Ms. Rice made it clear that she felt it wise to continue to talk to Palestinians like Mr. Abbas who accept Israel and nonviolence, which she said represented the majority of Palestinian people.
But a new Palestinian unity government that doesn’t explicitly recognize Israel or renounce violence — and thus far, the Mecca agreement does not oblige it to — will make these talks on a “political and diplomatic horizon” for a settlement even more complicated.
It is one thing for Israel to begin talks with Mr. Abbas while it continues to boycott a government including Hamas that Mr. Abbas helped to create. But it is quite another for Israel to actually make meaningful progress toward a substantial peace settlement with a government that refuses to recognize it or renounce violence against it.
Ms. Rice defended the decision to hold the talks right now.
“Sure, we could have said, ‘We’ll just wait until it all sorts out,’ ” she said today. But the Mecca agreement has strained relations between Mr. Abbas and Mr. Olmert to the point, Mr. Rice said, that the two needed to clear the air between them: “It’s really valuable that they sat face to face.”
Still, Middle East analysts who have been critical of the Bush administration’s hands-off stance on Arab-Israeli peace negotiations for the last six years lauded Ms. Rice for getting back into the game.
“In this environment, given the odds against even launching a process, what she’s done is an achievement,” said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center who was a senior adviser for Arab-Israeli relations at the State Department under the last three presidents.
Even so, he cautioned that the odds for success will remain long until the Palestinians acquire a government that is willing to recognize Israel. “Oddly enough, we’re now dressed up for the party — the possibility of serious Israeli-Palestinian talks — but we’ve got nowhere to go,” Mr. Miller said.
The Israeli government also remains deeply skeptical of Mr. Abbas’s ability to deliver calm in the Palestinian territories, let alone a peace agreement with Israel.
Mr. Olmert and his aides view Mr. Abbas as having been weakened by the Mecca agreement, because the hosts of the talks, the Saudis, treated him not so much as the Palestinian president, but as a leader of the Fatah faction, and an equal to the exiled Hamas political leader, Khaled Meshal.
The Israelis also believe that Mr. Abbas arrived at Mecca weakened by the fighting in Gaza, in which forces loyal to Hamas took over northern Gaza and large parts of Gaza City. Fatah forces did not collapse, but they did not defeat Hamas, and were perceived as weaker.
Mr. Abbas argued to Ms. Rice that the top priority for the Palestinians, and for him as their president, was to stop the infighting; thus, his willingness to abandon his call for early elections and instead pursue creation of a unity government led by Hamas and including Fatah.
Ms. Rice and the Americans were against the idea of a Fatah unity deal with Hamas; one senior official said today that Washington was “surprised” by the deal and none too happy about it. But Mr. Abbas told her that he felt there was no other choice.
In Gaza, the Hamas spokesman, Ismail Radwan, said that Ms. Rice “did not succeed in pressuring President Abbas to withdraw from the unity government.” Mr. Radwan said that Hamas “calls on the U.S. administration to respect the Palestinian people’s will, and recognize the government, and open a dialogue with the government.”
The meeting today, beginning with a stilted three-way handshake among Ms. Rice, Mr. Olmert and Mr. Abbas, took place at Ms. Rice’s hotel in Jerusalem. According to a senior Bush administration official, after about an hour of discussions about the Mecca accord and the proposed unity government, Ms. Rice turned to the two men and said: “Let’s go upstairs and talk about your future.”
The three then went to Ms. Rice’s suite on the 10th floor, overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City, where they talked for more than an hour about what Ms. Rice has termed the “political horizon”: diplomatic-speak for the contours of an eventual Palestinian state.
American officials said that Mr. Olmert and Mr. Abbas have agreed to meet again in the next few weeks. But a senior Israeli official said that while contacts between the two men would continue, including phone calls, the next face-to-face meeting may not come so quickly. “Soon is the future, and not necessarily the near future,” the official said.
Standing in the way of that next meeting are the still-to-be-determined specifics of the national unity government. In particular, the United States and Israel want to see what formal goals the government sets out on paper. Such a document would not commit the Hamas movement, but it could go further than the vague Mecca agreement toward meeting the three requirements of Western donor nations concerning relations with Israel.
Ms. Rice will probably make her next visit after the new government is formed, perhaps in mid- to late March.
If no new government is ultimately formed, or if one is formed that does not meet the three conditions, then very little will have changed. The Americans will continue to talk to Mr. Abbas as the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the legally established leadership of the Palestinians, and as the Palestinian president. They will continue to shun the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority and allow no direct financing of it.
But at the least, Ms. Rice appears set to use the power of her office to drag Mr. Olmert into holding regular conversations with Mr. Abbas.
As Ms. Rice and her aides now seem to understand, one senior American official said, “the status quo here means deterioration.”
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