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Peacemaking Mythologies from Taba to Olmert

(Israel Hayom) Dore Gold - Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, interviewed last Friday by CNN's Christiana Amanpour, sought to give his audience the impression that he had been on the verge of a historic peace agreement with Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, and only because of the interference of individuals from the U.S. that brought in outside money, an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement was not reached. This was not the first time that the myth of an impending Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough, that never happened, was widely promoted. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators at the end of the Taba talks issued a joint statement on Jan. 27, 2001, saying: "The sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement." Yet when Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami repeated this to an Israel Radio reporter, Muhammad Dahlan responded, "Kharta Barta" (slang for baloney). The EU representative Miguel Moratinos even wrote in his internal report on Taba that "serious gaps remain" between the parties. The most detailed version of the Olmert proposal appeared in a cover story in the New York Times Magazine by Bernard Avishai. Olmert told Avishai: "We were very close, more than ever in the past, to complete an agreement on principles that would have led to the end of the conflict between us and the Palestinians." Yet Olmert told Avishai two years later that the exact number of refugees that would return was still subject to further negotiation. How could this gap lead Olmert to conclude that he was "very close" to completing an agreement with Abbas? In the area of security, the Olmert proposals were even more troubling. Mahmoud Abbas told Avishai in the New York Times that "the file on security is closed." But he then added, "we do not claim it was an agreement but the file was finalized." How was security "finalized" without an agreement between the parties? Abbas explained that the Israeli security concerns had been worked out with Gen. James Jones, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's security advisor, but not with Israel. Rice writes in her memoirs that Abbas "refused" to accept Olmert's offer, even after President Bush appealed to him to reconsider his position. In 2009, Abbas was interviewed by Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post and explained why he could not take Olmert's offer to the Palestinians: "The gaps were too wide." Israel is in a very different situation today than it was when these peace proposals were made in the past. Israelis have gone through a second intifada with suicide bomb attacks in the heart of their cities, the failure of the Gaza withdrawal that led to a massive escalation of rocket attacks on southern Israel, and an Arab Spring that has demonstrated the fragility of the regimes with which Israel has signed peace treaties. Under these circumstances, in future negotiations Israeli security needs must be stressed harder and not subcontracted to envoys from any country. What is required is an alternative diplomatic strategy, and a more secure path for achieving Middle East peace, rather than trying to revive a formula that has only led to diplomatic failure.
2012-05-11 00:00:00
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