At yesterday’s State Department press conference, spokesman Sean McCormack repeated his now daily response to whether the Department was prepared to announce the date of the Annapolis conference, who will attend, and what the agenda will be: “not today.”
The Palestinians repeated their daily threat not to attend unless Israel meets their lengthening laundry list of demands that they are making for their “attendance” at a conference intended to give them a state. (They also want additional “confidence-building measures” for their perennially fragile confidence).
Carl in Jersualem posted an extensive litany of all the problems facing the conference, one week before it is supposed to occur. Bret Stephens this morning in the Wall Street Journal calls the whole thing a “fiasco” that has already gone backwards:
Among the principles sharply in dispute is whether Israel is a Jewish state. "We will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state," says Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat . . .
One would have thought the question of Israel's Jewishness was settled 60 years ago by a U.N. partition plan that speaks of a "Jewish state" some 30 times. . . .
If Israel is not a Jewish state, it may as well be called Palestine. If the existential issues of 1948 cannot be resolved, there is little point in addressing the territorial issues of 1967, which are themselves almost impossible to address.
Matters are not helped by the unusual political weakness of the key participants. In the last year, Mr. Abbas has lost half his kingdom. He will swiftly lose what remains of it the moment "Palestine" comes into being and the Israeli army isn't around to suppress Hamas as an effective fighting force.
But the smart money is on the conference happening, and then being announced a success (“both sides were serious and substantive,” "the atmosphere was good," “this is only the beginning of the process,” etc. etc.). Herb Keinon writes on why the conference will occur:
[D]espite all the problems in pulling the meeting off, despite the failure up to this point to get Israel and the Palestinians to agree to a joint statement, despite a realization in Washington that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas does not have the ability to carry out an agreement and that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert may not be able to carry it off politically, the US is dead set on going ahead with the meeting.
The reason: US President George W. Bush announced in July that such a meeting will be held in the fall, and -- as a result -- such a meeting will be held in the fall, ready or not.
Bush cannot afford to be seen now as someone who cannot even succeed in bringing two parties heavily dependent on the US to a US-sponsored meeting. That would be a huge slap in the face, and another sign of US weakness in the region.
Actually, the slap in the face would be another self-administered one -- like Katrina, Harriet Miers, and amnesty for illegal aliens. It was apparent that this was the Harriet Miers of peace plans the day after it was proposed. It should have been apparent the day before.
But the meeting will occur -- the clueless Ehud Olmert has already announced he’s leaving for Annapolis next week, and asserted the mere holding of the meeting is a “success.”
To insure that "success," he will sprinkle concessions left and right before he even gets there -- prisoner releases, checkpoint reductions, settlement freezes and other concessions -- like a flower girl throwing pedals on her way toward the alter. But he will obtain no concessions in return, nor even a "confidence building measure," such as the recognition that Israel is a Jewish state.
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