As Palestinian and Israeli leaders were meeting at the Annapolis Naval Base last week for yet another attempt at peacemaking, I remembered how my journalistic career led me to cover the Madrid peace conference in 1991. I vividly remember how then-US Secretary of State James Baker had kept everyone in the dark about the location of the international meeting. Once he declared the site, many of us Palestinians felt a sense of jubilation at the looming discussions, even though the exact nature of the Palestinian delegation was still unknown until the last minute.
While there are some differences with Annapolis, the issues are still the same, and we ve seen that conferences alone cannot bring peace.
Both conferences took place against the backdrop of a violent Gulf War, and as it did more than a decade ago, the United States knows it has to offer something to its Arab allies.
Like Madrid, the key Annapolis organizer was the US Secretary of State. And just as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had to muster all her diplomatic skills to get the meeting off the ground, Baker had an even harder position with the hawkish Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, his right-wing spokesman Benjamin Netanyahu and with the Palestinian leadership that Israelis considered to be terrorists.
While Mahmoud Abbas was introduced at Annapolis as the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, during the conference in Madrid, the PLO was not even allowed to attend. It did, however, choose the Palestinian delegation, which was headed by one of its founders, respected Gazan doctor Haidar Abdel Shafi (who passed away at the age of 88 this past September). While the PLO was the most obvious absentee in Madrid, the Hamas leaders, who won the parliamentary elections in Palestine, and the Iranians were the most talked about absentees in Annapolis.
The potential for peace looks better now than it did in 1991, on paper at least. Not only is the PLO present, but the idea of a two-state solution has become acceptable to all. Rice said that a Palestinian state is in the national interest of the United States. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was quoted as saying that without a Palestinian state, Israel s future will be in jeopardy.
Yet many Palestinians are much more skeptical now, simply because of so many past failures. Attending the Madrid conference felt essential, but the importance of summits has diminished as such forums have failed to produce results.
In the absence of a solid agreement and an effective plan (with teeth), dissent has been on the rise among Palestinians, who want independence from Israeli occupation and the ability to govern a sovereign, contiguous state. Some, seeing so many Jewish settlements dotting the West Bank, want to scrap the two-state solution and focus on a single, binational state.
Forty years after the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, Palestinians have yet to find the formula for liberation. They have attempted cross-border violence (late 1960s), Arab and international diplomacy (1970s and 80s), the first Intifada (1987), secret talks in Oslo (1993), suicide attacks (throughout the 1990s that culminated in the second Intifada), cross-border rocket attacks (2006 and this year), regional Arab initiatives (2000 and this year), international initiatives and peace envoys (since 1967), but nothing succeeded.
The transcripts of conferences, peace initiatives, lofty speeches and UN agreements aimed at resolving the conflict could fill rooms. The reality is that Palestinian territories are still under foreign military occupation, in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which states that it is inadmissible to occupy land by force.
Skeptics of US motives have good reason for concern. To overcome mistrust based on past failures, Bush will need to spend substantial political capital. In the early days of the Bush administration, the idea of using the cachet of the presidency was anathema because of former president Bill Clinton s failed attempts to broker a peace agreement. But such high-level influence is critical today.
Palestinians can no longer afford a step-by-step approach, like the process that began in Madrid. In the past, plans employing incremental improvements were targets of extremists seeking dates and locations to use to derail the peace process. Consider what a radical Israeli citizen did to Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Palestinian extremists have carried out suicide bombings and other horrific acts on the eve of Israeli elections and important redeployments, virtually guaranteeing the abandonment of Israeli withdrawal plans.
What is needed, as suggested in the Arab Peace Initiative and a number of Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives, is an agreed-upon final status – something like the 1967 borders – and a process to implement terms that will be agreed to by all parties. Otherwise, this and future summits will continue to fail.
Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning Palestinian columnist, is currently the Ferris professor of journalism at Princeton University. He can be reached at [email protected]. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service, and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.
