Rice looks to history for peace effort

Rice is really trying to figure a new way the US and Israel can "screw" the Palestinians. She's checking the historical records to make sure previous unsuccessful attempts to force Israel biased "peace" deals down the Palestinian's throats are not duplicated. Clearly, Rice, the intellectual, has figured out by now that Israel really doesn't want peace and knows that the US can't/won't force peace on them.

by MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press - Oct 27, 2007

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is looking to the past for lessons on how to make next month's Mideast peace conference a success.

As she prepares to host the international meeting in Annapolis, Md., Rice has delved into the history of U.S. attempts to mediate peace in the region, plunging into the diplomatic annals and seeking out the major players responsible for both successes and failures.

"She's trying to draw on the historical record and the experiences of others to see what she can glean and how that may be applicable to the current day," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday, ahead of Rice's Nov. 4-6 trip to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, her second in three weeks to organize the Annapolis gathering.

Most recently, she met this week with Jimmy Carter, sitting down in her office on Wednesday for a talk with the former president who brokered the 1978 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, the first between the Jewish state and an Arab nation.

Carter has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration's Middle East polices and wrote a recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," that some believe is anti-Israeli. McCormack said the differences in approach were not a subject of her conversation.

Rice has also spoken by phone with former President Clinton about his work on the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace deal. She discussed with both Clinton and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright the unsuccessful 2000 attempt in Shepherdstown, W.Va., to mediate an Israeli-Syrian agreement and their bid later that year at Camp David to forge an Israeli-Palestinian pact.

Others she has reached out to include former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker, and to one-time U.S. peace negotiators like Dennis Ross, who played a key role in the Clinton administration and the administration of former President George H.W. Bush.

In addition, Rice, whose background is in Soviet studies, asked the State Department historian's office to prepare a voluminous, and classified, compendium of its records on the U.S. role in Middle East peacemaking.

McCormack declined to offer details of her private readings and conversations or discuss any conclusions she may have drawn from them. But he noted that Rice, especially given her background as an academic, has intense interest in studying past diplomacy for clues about what might work as the Annapolis meeting approaches.

"We view the situation as qualitatively different than it has been, the history moves on, people change roles, situations," McCormack said.

"That said, you can take the lessons of history and apply them," he said. "She is a student of history and has a keen appreciation for how we can apply the lessons of history, what we can learn from those who have gone before us."

Rice faces serious obstacles in organizing Annapolis, with both Israel and the Palestinians far apart on a joint statement to be presented to the meeting that she and President Bush hope will launch the start of formal peace talks.

The two sides have fundamental differences over how detailed the document must be and whether it should contain a timeline for progress in the eventual negotiations.

The Israelis want the statement to be as vague as possible while the Palestinians are pushing for deadlines and specific references to the key issues in the conflict, among them the borders of a Palestinian state, the status of disputed Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees.

Rice's last trip to the region, a furious four-day shuttle diplomacy mission earlier this month, produced little apparent progress on bringing the two sides together.

However, she did win at least public support for the Annapolis conference from Egypt and Jordan, two critical Arab allies of the United States that had both expressed skepticism about the utility of the meeting.

Compelling Israel to accept peace

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas meets with US Secretary of State Condozeela Rice yesterday in Ramallah. (Omar Rashidi, Maan Images)

by John V. Whitbeck, The Jordan Times - August 3, 2007

In his eloquent speech before the US Congress in early March, King Abdullah emphasised the urgent need to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace this year. Sadly, there was little sense of urgency evident on July 25, almost five months later, when the Jordanian and Egyptian foreign ministers visited Jerusalem. The impression conveyed during that rather awkward visit was, rather, one of resignation to further years of drift.

King Abdullah’s sense of urgency remains justified; acquiescence with further years of drift is not. The Arab world is not impotent. It has it within its power to achieve Middle East peace with some measure of justice — not in some distant future but soon, and not through enhanced violence but through the intelligent and responsible application of restrained but sustained economic pressure.

A concerted, concrete and effective plan of action could take the form of a simple, easily understood and ethically unimpeachable "carrot-and-stick" approach.

The "carrot" has already been on offer, and left dangling, for more than five years. It is the Arab Peace Initiative. First launched at an Arab League summit in Beirut in March 2002 and reaffirmed with great publicity at the latest summit in Riyadh, in March 2007, it offers full peace and normal diplomatic and economic relations between Israel and all Arab states in return for a total end to the occupation of all Arab lands Israel occupied in 1967.

Unfortunately, since this offer, the most generous that Israel can ever hope to receive from the Arab world, has never had a deadline for acceptance attached to it. Israel has been free to ignore it with impunity — and has done so.

If Israel is now showing any interest in the Arab Peace Initiative, it is only because the latest in the long line of "peace plans" exploited to kill time, the American-initiated "roadmap", is transparently shopworn. The clear, principled, unambiguous and inherently non-negotiable — but open-ended — Arab Peace Initiative is therefore timely as a potentially useful replacement which could be co-opted, manipulated and deformed, and around which Israel (with full American support) could pick, nibble and dance for the next few years, in a "resumption" of the perpetual "peace process" which is the antithesis of peace, while continuing to build more settlements, more bypass roads and more walls and, generally, continuing to make the occupation permanent and irreversible.

To prevent such a manipulation and deformation of the Arab Peace Initiative, the "carrot" must be complemented with a credible and effective "stick". The Arab League should make clear that if Israel does not accept the Arab Peace Initiative without reservations, by a specific near-term date, it would lapse and be "off the table".

At the same time, the major Arab and Muslim oil producers should state that if Israel rejects the Arab Peace Initiative, then, until Israel complies fully with international law and UN resolutions by withdrawing from all occupied Arab land to its internationally recognised borders, they will reduce their petroleum exports by increments of five per cent each month — month after month after month.

It would, of course, be preferable if the United States, whose unconditional support for Israel has made possible its continuing occupation of Arab lands, were to undergo a moral and ethical transformation and if Americans were suddenly to realise both that Palestinians are human beings entitled to basic human rights and that international law should be complied with by all, not only by the poor, the weak and the Arab.

Realistically, after so many years of antithetical attitudes, such a transformation is most unlikely to occur.

Source: The Jordan Times