Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was back in the Middle East for the second time in three weeks in a bid to revive peace talks following an increase in violence and defiance on both sides.
Rice left Washington last Friday for three days of talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, leaders who have not resumed talks since suspending them on March 2. Abbas froze negotiations in protest at massive Israeli army raids on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip aimed at stopping rocket fire from the territory. The Israeli military incursions killed more than 130 Palestinians, including civilians and children.
The standoff deepened when on March 6 a lone Palestinian gunman opened fire on students at a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem, killing eight before being gunned down himself. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.
The prospects for peace dimmed further last Wednesday, when Olmert said he did not envisage anything more than the outline of an accord being sketched by 2009, and said Israel would continue to build settlements in occupied territory.
"What we are trying to achieve is to reach a very accurate outline and definition of all basic parameters of a two-state solution", he said.
"I think that the understandings about the basic parameters that will define accurately the outline of a two-state solution, such an understanding can be reached within the current presidency".
Bush has pressed for a signed peace treaty that would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state before he leaves the White House in January 2009, and launched his Administration's final appeal for such a process with a peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland in November.
But negotiations have made little progress, with both sides accusing the other of neglecting their basic obligations.
Abbas and Olmert pledged to relaunch their talks, but they never did.
Abbas and his Fateh party has instead held talks with Hamas in an effort to reconcile with the Islamist party that won a landslide in 2006 elections and which has controlled the volatile and impoverished coastal strip for months.
But Olmert insists he will never talk with Hamas and the US Administration of George W. Bush is hardly amenable to the notion of seeing the radical movement return to office.
But Middle East experts in Washington say talks with Hamas are necessary to unblock the peace process and stabilize the border between Gaza and Egypt, which is one of Israel's key demands.
"If nothing is done about Gaza, sooner or later some fatal incident will occur that will guarantee no further progress on peace talks", said Dennis Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for ex-President Bill Clinton.
"That would only validate the Hamas narrative that diplomacy never produces anything, while violence always produces something", said Ross, now an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, during a recent roundtable on the topic.
"And the last thing the Bush Administration should want as its legacy it is to leave Hamas stronger than it was eight years ago".
Hamas routed forces loyal to Abbas from Gaza in June after a week of ferocious street battles.
"We are not going to speak to Hamas, we are going to fight Hamas... there can be no compromise on this", Olmert said, hours after Gaza militants fired nine rocket against southern Israel.
"We will deal with Hamas in other ways, and those ways will be very painful", he said.
There has been a relative lull in violence in and around Gaza since Israel unleashed a wave of strikes in late February that left 130 Palestinians dead in a week. Five Israelis were killed over the same period.
The already protracted process has seen Israel and the Palestinians bicker over the internationally drafted 2003 "road map" calling on Israel to stop building settlements in the occupied West Bank and on Palestinians to improve security.
Further complicating the matter, and with the potential to kill the effort altogether, there have been deepening divisions within the Palestinians' two main parties -- the Islamist Hamas and Abbas's more moderate Fateh.
"[The] Palestinian house [is] so divided that it complicates peace efforts, perhaps fatally, and weakens the political as opposed to the militant tendency within Hamas", said Daniel Levy, who directs the Middle East Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation.
"The opportunity presented by a Palestinian government of national unity, with Hamas endorsing both a cease-fire and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, needs to be resurrected in some fashion", wrote Levy in The American Prospect.
Since Washington regards Hamas as a terrorist group, negotiations could only take place indirectly, according to Gaith al-Omari, another expert at the Washington Institute.
Omari pointed out that Egypt's ability to act as intermediary in talks between Israel and Hamas -- a role that Rice has backed -- has allowed a certain calm to return to Gaza in recent weeks.
"Therefore, although engaging Hamas politically is out of the question, engaging it in conversations about de-escalation could prove useful", Omari argued.
"Such discussion should be conducted through a third party that already has ties with Hamas; Turkey or Jordan would be good partners for this approach".
Rice's task will hardly be eased by Olmert's pledge last week that Israel would press on with settlement building on occupied Palestinian land despite international calls for a halt to the activity.
At a meeting with the foreign press in Jerusalem, Olmert also said he expected to reach only the framework of a peace deal with the Palestinians this year and warned of "painful" action against Hamas to halt militant attacks from the Gaza Strip.
Israel's settlement activity is one of the major reasons why Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have made little progress since they were renewed at Annapolis.
But Olmert said: "There will be additional building as part of reality of life, and this fact was well explained to everyone involved".
The peace talks are based on the internationally-drafted 2003 road map, which calls on Israel to freeze construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank and on the Palestinians to improve security.
Washington has repeatedly urged both sides to respect their road map commitments, and sent US Vice-President Dick Cheney to Israel and the occupied West Bank earlier this month to press home the message. During his visit Cheney spoke of the need for both sides to make "wrenching" concessions.
Israel captured and annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and considers it part of its "eternal, undivided capital", a claim not recognized by the international community, which considers all Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land to be illegal.
The Palestinians want to make the eastern part of Jerusalem the capital of their promised state.
In Ramallah, Abbas acknowledged that the talks had encountered "a number of obstacles" but pledged both sides were determined to succeed.
© Monday Morning 2008
