Mark Matthews: The troubled search for peace in the Middle East
[Mark Matthews, former diplomatic and Middle East correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, is the author of "Lost Years: Bush, Sharon and Failure in the Middle East."]
President Bush's father liked to quote the Woody Allen line that 90 percent of life is just showing up. In fact, George H.W. Bush's signal achievement in Middle East diplomacy came from persuading leaders and representatives from Israel and much of the Arab world to show up for a peace conference in Madrid at the end of October 1991.
It wasn't easy. Then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III traveled and negotiated for months to remove obstacles blocking this face-to-face meeting of longtime enemies. Neither side wanted to confer legitimacy on the other without extracting a price. At times the competing demands from various parties resembled the haggling at a Middle East bazaar. Baker's bare-knuckled pressure on Israel left a residue of resentment among American Jews. Still, the conference achieved real progress.
Now George W. Bush seems to be taking a leaf from his father's playbook and applying the Woody Allen maxim to Tuesday's Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in Annapolis. His administration hopes a strong turnout of prominent world figures, particularly from Arab states, will bolster Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in negotiations aimed at finally creating a Palestinian state that coexists with Israel. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has set a goal of reaching a deal before Bush leaves office in January, 2009.
Yet the excitement and anticipation that surrounded the Madrid conference are all but absent in the leadup to Annapolis. This week's brief gathering on the Chesapeake is haunted by the past 14 years of disappointment, failure and violence. That merely "showing up" is once again important shows how far regional attitudes have slid backward from the progress of the early 1990s.
The 1991 conference included bitter reminders of a half-century of war, suffering and hatred.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir accused Syria of having "one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world," of being a host to terrorists and a country whose shrinking, ancient Jewish community "has been exposed to cruel oppression, torture and discrimination of the worst kind."
Syria's foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, in turn, held up an old "wanted" poster showing Shamir at 32, when the Israeli was a commander in the Stern Gang, which carried out attacks against British forces in mandatory Palestine. "He himself recognized that he was a terrorist. That he practices terrorism," Sharaa declared, accusing Shamir of aiding the 1948 assassination of a United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte.
Such outbursts notwithstanding, the Madrid meeting broke through the taboos that had kept Arab states from dealing with Israel and Israelis from negotiating with Palestinians. It marked a time when merely "showing up" meant something. Jews and Arabs met publicly; some shook hands. Palestinians got to address a global audience....
Read entire article at Baltimore Sun
President Bush's father liked to quote the Woody Allen line that 90 percent of life is just showing up. In fact, George H.W. Bush's signal achievement in Middle East diplomacy came from persuading leaders and representatives from Israel and much of the Arab world to show up for a peace conference in Madrid at the end of October 1991.
It wasn't easy. Then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III traveled and negotiated for months to remove obstacles blocking this face-to-face meeting of longtime enemies. Neither side wanted to confer legitimacy on the other without extracting a price. At times the competing demands from various parties resembled the haggling at a Middle East bazaar. Baker's bare-knuckled pressure on Israel left a residue of resentment among American Jews. Still, the conference achieved real progress.
Now George W. Bush seems to be taking a leaf from his father's playbook and applying the Woody Allen maxim to Tuesday's Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in Annapolis. His administration hopes a strong turnout of prominent world figures, particularly from Arab states, will bolster Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in negotiations aimed at finally creating a Palestinian state that coexists with Israel. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has set a goal of reaching a deal before Bush leaves office in January, 2009.
Yet the excitement and anticipation that surrounded the Madrid conference are all but absent in the leadup to Annapolis. This week's brief gathering on the Chesapeake is haunted by the past 14 years of disappointment, failure and violence. That merely "showing up" is once again important shows how far regional attitudes have slid backward from the progress of the early 1990s.
The 1991 conference included bitter reminders of a half-century of war, suffering and hatred.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir accused Syria of having "one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world," of being a host to terrorists and a country whose shrinking, ancient Jewish community "has been exposed to cruel oppression, torture and discrimination of the worst kind."
Syria's foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, in turn, held up an old "wanted" poster showing Shamir at 32, when the Israeli was a commander in the Stern Gang, which carried out attacks against British forces in mandatory Palestine. "He himself recognized that he was a terrorist. That he practices terrorism," Sharaa declared, accusing Shamir of aiding the 1948 assassination of a United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte.
Such outbursts notwithstanding, the Madrid meeting broke through the taboos that had kept Arab states from dealing with Israel and Israelis from negotiating with Palestinians. It marked a time when merely "showing up" meant something. Jews and Arabs met publicly; some shook hands. Palestinians got to address a global audience....