Mideast leaders promise talks

Israeli and Palestinian
leaders promised to resolve ‘all core issues.’

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Israeli and Palestinian leaders announced Tuesday that they’ll immediately resume negotiations on Middle East peace and a Palestinian state after a seven-year hiatus, with a goal of reaching a treaty before the end of 2008.

The pledge was the main achievement of a one-day international conference in this historic city that seemed long on symbolism and short on substance, despite promises of all-out support from President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas glossed over their deep differences and promised to resolve “all core issues, without exception” in a peace treaty.

The divisive issues include the status of Jerusalem, the borders of a Palestinian state, the future of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the fate of Palestinian refugees, which have frustrated previous attempts to end the conflict.

What made the conference noteworthy was the presence of high-level delegations from nearly 50 countries and international bodies. They included top envoys from more than a dozen Arab states, most of which don’t have diplomatic relations with Israel, as well as Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany.

Bush promised full U.S. support for the negotiations. At one point he stood between Olmert and Abbas in the U.S. Naval Academy’s ornate Memorial Hall clasping their hands.

“I give you my personal commitment to support your work with the resources and resolve of the American government,” Bush said. But the president gave no hint of a plan for personal intervention if the talks falter, and he left for Washington after spending little more than three hours in Annapolis.

Rice declared the conference to be “the beginning, not the end, of a new serious and substantive effort to achieve peace in the Middle East.” She added: “No one believes failure is an option. We must succeed.”

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will conduct the peace talks directly, while Olmert and Abbas will continue to meet every other week. The United States’ role will be to referee the implementation of a 2003 peace plan known as the “road map.”

Despite the lofty-sounding pledges, it would require nothing short of a diplomatic miracle to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the next 13 months.

Deadlines have come and gone, ruined by violence, fear and the fundamental issues that divide the two peoples. Indeed, the road map promised a final settlement of the conflict by 2005.

Most of the conference took place behind closed doors, where delegates read mostly brief, five-minute statements.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, who came to Annapolis reluctantly, said the negotiations should be expanded immediately to include Israel’s conflicts with Lebanon and Syria.

Saud called on Israel to freeze Jewish settlements in the West Bank, release Palestinian prisoners, halt construction of a barrier between Israel and the Palestinians and remove checkpoints in “occupied Palestinian territories.”