The Roadmap to Peace

Monday, May 5th, 2003

In The Roadmap to Peace, Steven Den Beste gives an engineer’s take on the Palestinian peace process:

There are only three ways that peace can come to the region: if all the Israelis are dead, if all the Palestinians are dead, or if the Palestinians give up the struggle. Israelis won’t accept the first, and are too decent to will the second, so that leaves only the third alternative.

Everything changed last year when Bush announced a new doctrine. There was a stunned silence in Europe and in the Arab world. It had been announced that there would be a major speech on Israel and the Palestinians, but what he said was nothing like what was expected.

He formally announced that the US supported formation of a Palestinian state. But he linked formation of that state to a series of concrete actions demanded of the Palestinians

The most important aspect of the new doctrine was that it made clear that the Bush administration no longer trusts the Palestinian leadership at all. Bush made very clear that as far as he was concerned, the US would not negotiate with Arafat. He also made extremely clear, though without explicitly saying so, that the long and sorry history of broken promises by the Palestinians meant that from now on only performance would be accepted, and that no peace plan would involve simultaneous concessions by both sides. The Palestinians would implement their side of the deal first and only then would they be rewarded for doing so. Given their history of lies and broken promises and cheating, that was really the only possible answer. Needless to say, the Europeans were horrified.

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