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Obstacles for Mideast peace
17/12/2007 14:22 - (SA)
Jerusalem - Israel and the Palestinians head into 2008 on a pledge to seal an ever-elusive peace deal by the end of the year but their path is littered with obstacles as great as ever.
"Prospects are uneven at best," the International Crisis Group think tank concluded recently. "But the decision to jettison the incremental approach and deal with the endgame gives some, however fragile, reasons for hope."
The latest stab at ending the intractable, decades-old Middle East conflict was paradoxically energised six months ago by the most powerful Palestinian group firmly opposed to the revived peace process - Hamas.
The Islamist movement's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in June gave impetus to efforts that saw Israel and the Palestinians revive negotiations at a November conference in the United States after a seven-year freeze.
The Gaza takeover prompted Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to sack a Hamas-led government boycotted by Israel and the West, and appoint a new administration in the West Bank headed by internationally respected economist Salam Fayyad.
At the conference in Annapolis, Maryland five months later, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Abbas formally relaunched talks and pledged to work toward a comprehensive agreement by the end of 2008.
US President George W Bush is expected to make his first visit as president to Israel and the Palestinian territories in January.
The road to peace will still be difficult.
Fundamentalist parties on both sides
Hamas rule in Gaza has effectively split the Palestinians, Israel's right-wing is opposed to concessions, and gulfs in positions on core issues could derail the peace process.
"The most important challenge in the negotiations is the fundamentalist parties on both sides," a member of the Palestinian negotiating team, Yasser Abed Rabbo, told AFP.
Abbas and Olmert have hailed the revived peace push as a historic chance to end the nearly six decades of violence.
"My heart is filled with hope by this new chance," Abbas told a rally in Tunis on his way home from the United States.
Olmert said establishing an independent Palestinian state was crucial to Israel's survival as a democratic state.
"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished," Olmert said.
Palestinians living under Israeli occupation do not vote in Israeli elections and Israeli authorities fear that ultimately the faster growing Arab population could swamp a Jewish majority.
But both leaders, who are perceived as weak domestically, have also sought to keep hopes from soaring too high, aware that when the last US-sponsored talks collapsed at Camp David in 2000 the region erupted into new violence.
No commitment to a specific timetable
"We are beginning an extremely difficult and complex political battle before arriving at a creation of our independent state," Abbas said.
"There will be an effort to hold accelerated negotiations with the hope of concluding them in 2008. However, there is no commitment to a specific timetable regarding these negotiations," Olmert told his cabinet.
The two sides have not made any progress on the thorniest issues that have sunk previous peace efforts - the borders of two states living side by side, Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem and Jewish West Bank settlements.
Both leaders face firm opposition to any major concessions and peace efforts from their respective extremists.
The Palestinians want Israel to withdraw from all Palestinian land occupied in the 1967 Middle East war, recognise the right of return for refugees and allow Palestinians to make east Jerusalem the capital of their future state.
Israel wants to keep its major settlements in the occupied West Bank, has ruled out recognising the right of return and has said it may cede sovereignty over only a few neighbourhoods in east Jerusalem.
Gaza is another crisis everyone is aware of but no one talks about.
Hamas is vigorously opposed to negotiations with Israel - whose right to exist the Islamist movement does not even recognise - and has railed against Abbas for reviving the talks.
"All options are open to answer any crime, especially after the Annapolis conference, which gave the Zionists a green light to commit more and more crimes against our people," said Hamas's armed Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades.
The fact that Abbas does not control the territory sandwiched between Israel and Egypt raises concerns about how he will be able to implement any agreements that he may reach with Israelis in the walled-off coastal strip.
Olmert has insisted that until the Palestinian leadership stops militants in Gaza from firing rockets and mortars - attacks which doubled in 2007 compared to the previous year - a final peace deal will not be implemented.
"Don't hold your breath, peace isn't going to be the result of this story," Israel's tabloid Maariv warned recently. "The conditions haven't ripened and are still a long way from ripening, so all we're left with is a facade."
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