all process, no peace

Pshaw, says Condi Rice. Rocket fire from Gaza and suicide bombers from the West Bank shouldn’t stop the Israelis from negotiating a peace deal with the Palestinians (and because she’s so even-handed, she says that Israeli settlements shouldn’t stop the Palestinians from negotiating a peace deal with the Israelis, either, of course) [e.a.].

Miss Rice also described, with greater clarity than either the president or National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley have so far, the Bush administration’s strategy on the peace process.

The “road map” for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks.

As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. [What a surprise! No peace, no peace process! --ed.] Neither side ever began discussing the “core issues”: the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the rights of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel’s border and the future of Jerusalem.

“The reason that we haven’t really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status,” Miss Rice said.

Miss Rice said that what the U.S.-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was “break that tight sequentiality … to say, you can do these in parallel, you can do road-map obligations and negotiation for the final status in parallel.”

“You don’t want people to get hung up on settlement activity or the fact that the Palestinians haven’t fully been able to deal with the terrorist infrastructure and prevent that from moving forward on the negotiations,” she said.

Negotiating the core issues, Miss Rice said, brings “force and power … status to help people really pay attention to their road-map obligations, and that’s what we’ve needed.”

Proving that Ms. Rice has her head up her ass and that she, like all her precedessors, is addicted to a process and not to peace (which requires that Palestinian “resistance” be extinguished and that the Palestinians accept the reality of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state), the Israelis managed to kill yet more “militants” and civilians in Gaza today.

I hope Ms. Rice and her godfather Scowcroft are very proud of themselves today for the vaunted stability (and fifty years of “peace”) they are reintroducing into the region.

The Israelis, meanwhile, are preparing for a siege. They are not going anywhere. Indeed, they are not even going to spend money to reinforce the houses under attack from across the border in Gaza [e.a.]:

Acting on behalf of the State Prosecution, attorney Dina Silber claimed that “since other parts of Israel are already, or will be in the near future, subject to rocket fire - Qassams, Katyushas, shells or mortars - the state could not afford to work under the false impression that this policy would be applicable to the Sderot area only.”

Silber also said that “the question that the government should address and focus on is that of the stamina of the residents in confrontation areas. Their endurance, and not reinforcement of houses, is the main feature of the issue at hand; reinforcement is all but one element of the protection of the home front against rocket fire.”

The state also maintains that if a decision to reinforce Sderot houses is taken it will send “shockwaves” that would “constitute a significant precedent as to homes in numerous other parts of the country, which are or soon will be subject to rocket fire.”

More about this from Jeff Jacoby and Eric Trager.

Where are Walt and Mearsheimer to trumpet realism and the death of the Bush Doctrine? Well, only a week ago, they were bemoaning America’s continued unqualified support for Israel at the hands of the Lobby.