All Sides Failed to Follow 'Road Map'
By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
Washington Post
JERUSALEM, Aug. 27 -- When President Bush announced his support of an ambitious Middle East peace plan four months ago in the Oval Office, he offered an admonition to everyone concerned: "In order for peace to occur, all parties must assume their responsibilities."
Today, a new wave of violence has erupted in Israel and the Palestinian territories because none of the participants -- including the United States -- did what was expected of it or accepted responsibilities critical to advancing the peace initiative, known as the "road map," according to Israeli and Palestinian officials, diplomats and analysts.
The Palestinian Authority took no significant, permanent steps to improve the security of Israelis, a priority of the road map. Palestinian militant groups, despite proclaiming a cease-fire, did not stop their attacks against Israelis. Israel made no meaningful efforts to stop the expansion of Jewish settlements and outposts in the Palestinian territories, one of its primary mandates. And the United States failed to serve as a public, transparent monitor, an essential ingredient of the plan.
The road map raised hopes that it would succeed where other peace initiatives had failed. But now, Israelis and Palestinians are at such an impasse that officials on both sides say there is little prospect of reviving the initiative soon. "The cease-fire between the Palestinian factions overshadowed the first phase of the road map," said Yossi Beilin, who has played key roles in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations for the past decade on behalf of Israel. "The world went on vacation and left us alone. When the cease-fire broke, it exposed an unimplemented road map, and we did nothing. We are back to square one."
Beilin, like many analysts, said none of the parties met its obligations: "The Israelis did not dismantle outposts, and the Palestinians did no visible acts to fight terrorism." U.S. monitoring of the peace process, he added, was "a big failure."
Despite the high hopes that accompanied the release of the road map, many analysts believed that the plan, which was written by officials from the so-called quartet -- the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations -- had serious flaws.
Critics said the plan relied too heavily on incremental measures that avoided forcing tough decisions on the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians: the location of borders, dismantling Jewish settlements, the final status of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees to homes in Israel.
Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster and political analyst, said future negotiations may have to "recognize that the process of step-by-step diplomacy and responding to violence doesn't work, and the only way is to reach a comprehensive deal right away."
Shikaki and other analysts also questioned the utility of supplanting the Palestinians' elected leader, Yasser Arafat, with an appointed government acceptable to the United States and Israel -- a tactic that has garnered limited success because Arafat continues to hold most of the power.
Proponents argued that the road map was an innovative plan that addressed the shortcomings of previous U.S. mediation efforts with several new concepts: non-negotiable timetables leading to the creation of a Palestinian state, so Palestinians would know they were not involved in another seemingly endless round of negotiations that would not yield a sovereign, independent country; simultaneous steps on political, economic and security fronts, so the process did not hinge solely on the issue of Israeli security; and aggressive public monitoring by international observers who would hold the Palestinians and the Israelis accountable for fulfilling their obligations under the plan.
The aim of the road map was set out in its opening paragraph: to have "clear phases, timelines, target dates and benchmarks" for guaranteeing Israeli security and establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by 2005.
But from the beginning, the plan suffered from a lack of enthusiasm from the United States and Israel. Together, they delayed the release of the road map for four months, then struck a deal to implement it selectively, according to political analysts, Israeli officials and Western diplomats. When the cabinet of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon finally endorsed the plan, it added a list of 14 reservations that struck at its heart, rejecting timelines and international monitoring and making the entire plan conditional on security improvements.
"There's nothing wrong with the substance of the road map," said Saeb Erekat, formerly the senior Palestinian negotiator with Israel, "but we need to implement the road map of the quartet, not the road map of Sharon and his 14 reservations."
For the Israeli government, the road map centered on one overriding issue: ending Palestinian attacks against Israelis.
"In order for there to be a peace process, there has to be a security process first," said Dore Gold, an adviser to Sharon. "Unless you get the security squared away, everything else is not going to follow. The Palestinians dropped the ball on day one."
But neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians embraced the road map or sincerely implemented the measures it called for, a senior diplomat from one of the quartet parties said. "What prepared the ground for the collapse we're seeing now is that both sides were taking tiny little baby steps and not taking at least one big step to show the public this is real change," the diplomat said.
Palestinians
The road map mandated that the Palestinian Authority begin "sustained, targeted and effective operations" to dismantle terrorist infrastructure, including confiscating illegal weapons from such groups as the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.
Instead, the newly appointed prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas -- who has been engaged in power struggles with Arafat and is viewed by many Palestinians as a puppet of Israel and the United States -- repeatedly has professed that his security forces were too weakened by nearly three years of Israeli attacks to counter the militants. More important, Abbas said he did not want to start a civil war with powerful, popular militant groups. Instead, he focused on persuading them to agree to a three-month moratorium on attacks against Israelis.
A mutual cease-fire was one of the first steps called for in the road map, and persuading the militants to unilaterally declare a truce was considered by the Abbas government to be a major achievement and goodwill gesture toward Israel. But Israel rejected the cease-fire as a ruse and never matched it.
When a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 people on a bus in Jerusalem last week, the militant groups declared the cease-fire over, though Arafat today urged them to revive it.
Some Palestinians now concede that the Abbas government could have moved more aggressively to rein in the radical groups. This week Palestinian Authority security forces began destroying cross-border tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip that have been used to smuggle weapons -- the kind of preventive measure that many Israeli officials said could have been taken two months ago.
"We could have done something constructive to engage [Hamas] by integrating them into the system, but we were slow," said Ziad Abu Amr, a member of the Palestinian Authority cabinet from the Gaza Strip. He said, however, the Abbas game plan was to showcase real improvements for Palestinians, proving that weapons were no longer necessary and forcing the militant groups to transform themselves into political organizations.
Israelis
While Palestinians were not moving on security issues, Sharon was making no serious effort to implement Israel's part of the road map, much of which was aimed at making life better for Palestinians who have lived under closures, curfews and military siege for more than two years, and convincing them that more concessions could be won at the bargaining table than on the battlefield.
The government did not "immediately" dismantle Jewish settlement outposts nor freeze "all settlement activity," as demanded by the road map. It dismantled some outposts, but just as many were built. It did not withdraw troops from areas reoccupied after the Palestinian uprising erupted in September 2000. It dismantled some roadblocks and checkpoints, but also constructed new ones.
In a goodwill effort that was tied to the cease-fire but not directly required under the road map, Israel released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Many were already close to release, or had been locked up for crimes not related to the uprising. Few of the more than 700 Palestinian prisoners being held without charges were freed.
The charade over dismantling settlement outposts was particularly galling, said Yaron Ezrahi, a Hebrew University professor and one of Israel's most prominent political scientists and philosophers.
"The principal cause of Palestinian humiliation and despair is that the settlements have not only not been removed, but are expanding constantly," he said. "This is absolutely outrageous that the U.S. can let them get away with this. . . . Sharon should be pushed very strongly to remove settlements as a key to the U.S. ability to demand from Palestinians that they dismantle terror."
Quartet
One of the greatest shortcomings of the road map, people on both sides of the conflict agree, has been the failure of the quartet members -- particularly the United States -- to serve as credible, public monitors.
According to Erekat, the former Palestinian negotiator, "We need Bush to say, 'We're watching you. Israel is supposed to stop settlement activity, period. Do it. You are supposed to go back to your positions of September 2000. Do it.' And to the Palestinians: 'Where are the reforms? Where are the security obligations? One, two, three -- do it. We are going to watch you and tell the world once and for all who is doing it and who is not doing it.' "
Instead, the United States and the rest of the quartet failed to adequately and publicly monitor implementation of the road map, except for regular complaints by the United States that the Palestinians needed to do more on security issues, Palestinians, Israelis and independent analysts said.
The United States sent a monitoring team to the region headed by special envoy John Wolf, but the group never made any public statements. The U.S. Embassy has refused repeated requests for interviews with Wolf or his associates.
The monitoring was important not just to apportion blame for any problems, observers said. More critically, public scrutiny was supposed to provide incentive for both sides to meet their obligations and not allow the process to collapse.
"You cannot monitor things in this situation with . . . such a low profile," said Beilin, the longtime Israeli peace negotiator. Wolf "has to report not only to his superiors, but also publicly."
Palestinian officials also complained that the quartet -- created at least partly to correct what is seen around the world, and particularly among Palestinians, as the strong U.S. bias toward Israel -- failed to stay involved.
"The quartet did a disappearing act," Erekat said. "The Americans pushed them aside, and they didn't want to confront the Americans."
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