Gerald Herbert / AP

Talking Peace (from left): Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, U.S. President George W. Bush and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Annapolis on Tuesday

MIDDLE EAST

Reviving the Roadmap

The Annapolis meeting is resurrecting an old blueprint for the formation of a Palestinian state. What that could mean for the Mideast.

By Dan Ephron | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Nov 27, 2007 | Updated: 5:34 p.m. ET Nov 27, 2007

Email To A Friend

Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.

SPONSORED BY

Set your watches. The most significant thing to come out of the Middle East conference in Annapolis is an agreement by Israelis and Palestinians to reach a peace treaty by the end of next year—in just over 13 months. Though the contours of an agreement have been laid out in a number of previous official and unofficial initiatives (for an example of each, see the Clinton parameters and the Geneva initiative), the two sides have never been good at meeting deadlines. Their Oslo accord envisioned a final peace agreement in three to five years. That was in 1993. The Roadmap, an American-led initiative to get the two sides talking again, called for the formation of a Palestinian state by 2005. Palestinian suicide bombings and harsh Israeli crackdowns turned the Roadmap, in the words of one U.S. diplomat based in Jerusalem at the time, into road kill. Now, the Roadmap has been resuscitated. The four-page document calls on each side to improve conditions on the ground and negotiate a final agreement. The Palestinians must disarm militias and get their security agencies in order. Israel must freeze the expansion of Jewish settlements and ease day-to-day life for Palestinians. (The document does not suggest compromises on borders, refugees, the division of Jerusalem or any of the other cornerstone issues.) Norwegian diplomat Terje-Roed Larsen was among the authors of the Roadmap. He also helped negotiate the Oslo accord. Now the president of the International Peace Academy in New York, Larsen spoke to NEWSWEEK's Dan Ephron. Excerpts:

Follow your favorite NEWSWEEK columnists

Customize the Newsweek homepage to feature the latest word from your favorite columnists.

NEWSWEEK: How long does it take to draft a document like the Roadmap?
Terje-Roed Larsen: It's a very time-consuming process. We spent nearly half a year drafting it and negotiating absolutely every sentence.

Give me an example of a section that was really labored over.
We had a philosophical debate that went on throughout the drafting sessions, which we termed "sequentialism versus parallelism." I insisted that the political issues, the security issues and the economic issues have to be addressed in parallel and that doing it sequentially—saying first the security issues have to be resolved—that wouldn't work without tackling the final status issues like borders, Jerusalem and refugees at the same time. The way it came out, the Roadmap allowed the Israeli government of Prime Minister [Ariel] Sharon to interpret it very strictly as security first, followed by politics and economics. And since it became impossible to improve the security situation, the whole enterprise got stuck.

So essentially you're saying it was a mistake on the part of the drafters to leave the issue of parallel measures vague, because it let Israel hinge the whole thing on security improvement?
Yes. And there must be a realization in the government of Israel now that it was a mistake to produce a sequentialist strategy, which only led to more bloodshed on both sides. And this is the beauty of the exercise at Annapolis, which is that you now have both sides working on all the issues at the same time. But it won't necessarily work. It will require masterful diplomacy on all sides.

One of the things that strikes me in reading the Roadmap now is how optimistic the timetable was. What was the basis for that optimism?
I think when you produce a document like that you have to produce timelines or else you won't get anywhere. Timelines put pressure on the parties.

Put the Roadmap in a historical context. How does it compare, for instance, with the first Israel-Palestinian agreement, known as the Oslo accord?
Oslo did not define the end goal, because the Palestinians and the Israelis in the Oslo process were not capable of agreeing on the establishment of a Palestinian state. Many of the Israeli figures at the time opposed a Palestinian state. What the Roadmap did was kind of close that loop by stating that the goal is a Palestinian state … And this was accepted by both Sharon and [Yasir] Arafat. So in a way Sharon radicalized Oslo. Many people seem to believe that Oslo is the radical document and the Roadmap is a moderate document. It's actually the other way around.

Member Comments

- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: kass52 @ 12/04/2007 3:28:10 PM

As long as the Palestians don't show Israel on their maps, as long as they teach hate to their children, as long as we remember that Israel previously offered 1967 borders (with further terror as a result), as long as mortars and rockets are fired from Gaza (after Israel's gracious withdrawl from Gaza) - no one will believe the Palestinians will provide the security needed for a lasting peace. No one. Israel must have secure borders which is not the 1967 border.
- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: thebullss @ 12/04/2007 3:43:22 AM

because Palestinians believe, by virtue of their rights and a few UN resolutions to the idea that Palestine must have its 1967 boarders in order to say we have a just peace.

That is the essence of the problem. The Israelis has taken so much from the Palestinians that they have not left anything for negotiation. Palestinians have nothing to negotiate with, as they say no bargaining chips. Then you might ask how this could be solved? As always most difficult problems have simple solutions;

That simple, Israel must go back to 1967 boarders, and that would solve most of the problems, everything this side of the boarder will stay in the Palestine, and everything on the other side will stay in Israel. Settlers will have a choice to live in the New Palestine country and live like the Arabs living in Israel, or go back to Israel. Except the older problem of the refugees, which goes back much further? That problem also should be look at in the simplest way, some ideas have already surfaced, compensation for those people and their family, in fact it should be a very generous compensation offer that they (refugees) can not refuse.
- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: thebullss @ 12/04/2007 2:37:15 AM

Annapolis, was grate start for promising the Palestinians their long over due land. In fact to date was the 60th anniversary of such decision by the UN, Sixty years of war and peace talk and a few UN resolutions to that effect which the U.S. would not bother to enforce unlike the resolutions that would like to enforce.

Palestinians have come to conclusion that Israel and its supporters just talk for the sake of talking and do not wish to end this conflict. Notice I said Palestinians and NOT Mahmoud Abbas. They (Palestinians) have been toyed with not only by Israelis and Americans, but also by their own leaders, by other Arab countries, each for their own political reasons, and also by Islamic Republic of Iran.
If sixty years ago the UN told the Palestinians and the Israelis to go and negotiate a peace based on two state solutions, and sixty years later they are still at the exact same place that they were, what make them to do this now?
Does the Palestinian have something this time around to offer for the negotiation to go forward that they did not have for the last 60 years? Probably not.
Does the Israelis have more incentive to offer the Palestinian their statehood? Definitely yes.
The problem is that the Palestinians do not have anything to offer at the peace negotiation or anything that they could negotiate with, or any bargaining chip, except to say what they want. For instance if Israel would not give the lands before 1967, and say, we can only give you 90% of them, could the Palestinian counter offer and say okay will give you??? this??? and you give us the whole 100% of the 1967 land. No, they can not, since they do not have any chips to negotiate with. And because Palestinian believe, by virtue of their rights and a few UN resolutions to the idea that Palestine must have its 1967 boarders in order to say we have a just peace.

That is the essence of the problem. The Israelis has taken so much from the Palestinians that they have not left anything for negotiation. Then you might ask how this could be solved? As always most difficult problems have simple solutions;

That simple go back to 1967 boarders would solve most of the problems, except the older problem of the refugees, which goes back much further. That problem also should be look at in the most simple way, some ideas have already surfaced, compensation for those people and their family, in fact it should be a very generous compensation offer that they(refugees) can not refuse.