Madison Rafah Journal

Agence France-Presse, February 19, 2007
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shuttled between Palestinian and Israeli leaders over the weekend to prepare for a three-way peace summit that has been overtaken by battles over a Palestinian unity government.

Rice said her talks Sunday with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister had been extensive, cordial and candid.

But she declined to go into detail of what would be discussed at Monday's meeting and sought to lower expectations of any breakthrough in reviving an Israeli-Palestinian peace process that has been frozen for years.

"This is not something that I expect to move along very quickly," she said.

"If you ask people to run at this point, I think somebody's going to fall down, and that's probably not a good thing."

In announcing plans last month for her first joint meeting with Abbas and Olmert, Rice billed it as the kick-off of a new US initiative to breathe life into negotiations on an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal and the creation of a Palestinian state.

But the long-awaited US drive has been eclipsed by a power-sharing pact reached earlier this month between the US-backed Abbas' Fatah party and the ruling Islamist movement Hamas.

The United States and Israel consider Hamas a terrorist group and, along with the European Union, have withheld critical financing and diplomatic dealings from the Palestinians since Hamas took control of the government last year.

The West and Israel have insisted the new government meet three conditions in exchange for ending their boycott: recognise Israel's right to exist, renounce violence and honour past peace pacts with the Jewish state.

While Abbas and his secular Fatah party say the new unity government will honour existing agreements with Israel, implicitly recognising the Jewish state's existence, Israel has rejected the deal outright and Washington has remained publicly noncommittal.

"I haven't seen anything to date to suggest this is a government that meets the Quartet principles," she said, referring to the four major-power mediators who laid down the principles a year ago — the US, UN, European Union and Russia.

"This is a complicated time, a time of some uncertainty," Rice said.

In a sign of the difficulties facing her initiative, only Rice will address the press following Monday's meeting, rather than holding a joint media conference with Olmert and Abbas.

Rice indicated there had been doubts about even managing to bring Olmert and Abbas together given Israeli anger over his power-sharing deal with Hamas.

"We could have decided not to meet during this time, but I actually think when people have questions and want to explore issues that arise like the agreement to form a national unity government that it's better that they be able to do it face-to-face," she said.

She also indicated there would be a virtual news blackout around the talks.

"Not only am I not going to talk about what we're going to talk about before going in, I'm probably not going to talk about it coming out," she said, arguing that quiet diplomacy is needed.

Rice would only say Monday's discussions would touch on security issues and easing Israeli restrictions on Palestinians' movement as issues related to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Rice's plan was initially designed to bolster Abbas in his power struggle with Hamas by pushing Israeli-Palestinian talks beyond security issues that have bogged down peacemaking for six years.

Raising final status issues like the borders of a Palestinian state, the future of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees, the new US logic went, would help convince Palestinians that Abbas is better-suited to advancing their cause than Hamas.

Abbas told Rice the unity government arrangement, reached after the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah erupted into deadly violence that left some 100 dead, includes a pledge to comply with international agreements and that this amounts to implicit recognition of Israel.

Rice said she was not convinced this was the case or that Hamas had given up its goal of seeking Israel's destruction.

"You can't have one foot in the elected bodies and one in violence when you try to destroy another state," she said.