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Is Rice Pushing Too Hard on Israel?

[Ha'aretz] Aluf Benn and Shmuel Rosner - The Prime Minister's Office is anxious about U.S. Secretary of State Rice's tendency to push ahead too quickly. After the conference of donor countries to the Palestinians that took place in Paris last week, Rice wanted to proceed on to Jerusalem. But David Welch, her aide on Middle East affairs who had visited Israel a few days before that, felt she wouldn't be able to achieve much with a lightning visit so soon after Annapolis. The Americans say they don't want Rice's visits to become routine. In private conversations - and as she said in Annapolis - Rice tends to compare the Israeli occupation in the territories to the racial segregation that used to be the norm in the American South. Checkpoints remind her of buses she rode as a child in Alabama with separate seats for blacks and whites. This is an uncomfortable comparison, of course, for Israelis, who view it as "over-identification" on her part with Palestinian suffering. Rice hoped that in Annapolis principles would be set down for a final-status accord, but Israel told her that wasn't going to happen. She thinks that the PA is making satisfactory progress with the reform of its security forces, while officials in Israel say she's exaggerating and that the reform is still very far from accomplishing anything. She wanted Israel to make more good-will gestures, but the Israelis remind her that this will be hard to do as long as Palestinian rockets continue to fall on Sderot.
2007-12-28 01:00:00
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