going through the motions

Bret Stephens in the WSJ (longer than usual exceprts below, because of $$)on the realities that will greet Condi Rice when she makes her trip to the Middle East next week:

In Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Ms. Rice confronts a leader who, as the Israeli political analyst Anshel Pfeffer puts it, has “all the practical authority of the Chicago chief of police circa 1925.” Never mind the internecine killing sprees, now approaching outright civil war, between Hamas and Mr. Abbas’s ostensible partisans in Fatah. The real problem is that Mr. Abbas no longer controls Fatah, where effective authority has devolved to local chieftains and power-brokers like the suave Gaza security chief Mohammed Dahlan.

On the Israeli side, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is probably the weakest in the country’s history. In a recent poll, Israelis disapproved of Mr. Olmert’s job performance by a three-to-one margin; 60% doubt his personal integrity because of questions surrounding a shady real-estate deal. The rest of his government is also marinating in scandal; it does not have the political capital to spare on bold diplomatic moves. …

The upshot is that even if America’s predicaments in Iraq really could be eased by the appearance of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front, such progress is exceedingly unlikely to happen. …

Ms. Rice surely has better things to do than to chase after this fool’s gold of international diplomacy. Contrary to the views of much of her bureaucracy, the U.S. cannot, as former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft advised in a recent op-ed, merely butt Israeli and Arab heads together and arrive, through an act of American leadership, at a negotiated compromise that has already eluded American diplomats going back to the Eisenhower administration.

When Ms. Rice arrives in Jerusalem, she will no doubt mouth the pieties that have now defined American policy in the Middle East for a generation — an Israeli and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security — along with some of the Bush administration’s coinage: democracy, respect for human rights, an absolute cessation to terrorism. These are the right pieties, and the Israelis will surely mouth them as well.

But perhaps her case, and Israel’s, would be better served by a bit of mutual frankness. As with the Palestinians, Israel’s problems today are largely of its own making, and no amount of U.S. diplomacy is going to save the respective sides from themselves. On the other hand, nothing Israel can give by way of concessions to the Palestinians is going to make much of a difference in terms of America’s credibility in Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Kabul or anywhere else on the proverbial Arab street. Maybe once that is mutually understood, r-e-s-p-e-c-t will actually spell respect for Ms. Rice.

That’s reality. However, the BBC has already written its 2007 Israel-vs.-Palestine script, and guess who’s to blame for the “disintegration” of Palestinian society? Certainly not the Palestinians! (via Stephen Pollard)

—–Original Message—–
From: Jeremy Bowen
To: Editorial Board; Newsg World-Bureaux-Eds; Newsg World Asseds; News Leadership Group; Mark Byford & PA; Simon Wilson-NEWS; Jerusalem Bureau;
Newsg World-Affairs-Unit
Sent: Fri Jan 05 15:16:16 2007
Subject: FW: Mini briefing on the Israeli and Palestinians

 

2007 has started as unpromisingly as 2006 ended. The outlook is bleak because of fundamental instabilities and weaknesses on both sides.

Israel’s major military incursion into Ramallah on Thursday, killing four Palestinians after a botched arrest operation, was a reminder of the non stop pressures of the Israeli occupation.

What is new in the last year, and will be one of the big stories in the coming twelve months, is the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting.

The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel’s military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government which are destroying Palestinian institutions that were anyway flawed and fragile. [emphasis added]

The result is that internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah is getting worse. The death of a major figure on either side would spark something much more serious.

Do I have any volunteers to monitor the BBC and report back on how many times they use “the death of hope” angle to report their endless-loop fable?