Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The American Prospect

A durable Middle East peace: Oslo didn''t achieve it, nor has the Bush "road map." So what would would satisfy both sides?

Article Excerpt
HAD THEY SURVIVED, THE OSLO ACCORDS WOULD HAVE turned 10 this year. Instead, a disheartening record of on-again, off-again negotiations has been followed by three years of deadly conflict between Israelis and Palestinians Year after year, the Oslo approach and variants thereof have been tried, always with the same dispiriting results: agreements not reached or not implemented, accompanied by a gradual erosion in mutual trust. The price of failure has risen with each effort--for the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, first and foremost, but for the United States and its national interests as well.

With each successive turn, there are renewed calls to try better, try harder but basically try more of the same: interim agreements designed to boost confidence and gradually pave the way for negotiations over a final deal. True, one can always attribute failure to the shortcomings of the various parties. In the latest iteration of the diplomatic effort, the U.S.--sponsored Israeli-Palestinian "road map," some lament that Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas did too little on the security front, that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did too much on the military one, that the United States stood on the sidelines and that Yasir Arafat stood in the way. But that this has become a 10-year-old refrain ought to tell us something about the process itself--namely that the setbacks, skirted obligations, clear-cut violations and violence are not deviations from the current process but its natural and inevitable outgrowth. And that there is no reason to believe that what has failed before will suddenly work now, that what the parties have stubbornly resisted doing in the past they can--with a little additional pressure or persuasion--be brought to do in the present.

Much time has been spent assessing who or what derailed the so-called road map, but in truth it derailed itself. III-adapted to the conflict it purports to settle, the road map may vanish, or it may survive under a different guise. But even under the best of circumstances, its success would mean managing the conflict, not resolving it, and deferring the next crisis rather than preventing it.

THREE INTERRELATED REASONS EXPLAIN WHY THE process inaugurated in Oslo and reincarnated in the road map has failed. First, it was premised on an incremental approach in which the parties lacked a well-defined vision of...