Indicating that the second Bush administration is getting serious about the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the newly-appointed Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, paid a visit, soon after her confirmation, to the turbulent region, where she held discussions with both the Palestinian President, Mehmud Abbas, and the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. Of course it was no coincident that these consultations were immediately followed by a meeting between the two leaders in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, which led to the announcement on Tuesday of a cease-fire.
Abbas later told journalists, "We have agreed with the Prime Minister to cease all acts of violence against the Israelis and against Palestinians wherever they are." Sharon too finally said what he has been unwilling to say all through the four- year long fighting that has claimed at least 4,700 lives, more than 3000 of them Palestinians, that he was ordering a compete cessation to military activities against Palestinians.
After he succeeded his charismatic predecessor, Yasser Arafat, as the Palestinian President, Abbas had been trying to convince Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Martyr's Brigades - a radical faction within his own organisation, PLO - to agree to a cease-fire. They gave him the needed nod, with the condition that the other side did the same.
It was on the basis of their support that Abbas was able to make the optimistic prediction at Sharm el-Sheikh that "the calm that is currently prevailing in our territories signals the start of a new era, the start of a hopeful peace." However, even though Hamas has been complying with the undertaking it is believed to have given the Palestinian President, it has declared that it is not bound by the cease-fire announcement.
But that does not mean that it is ready to sabotage the present agreement. Apparently, the declaration is meant to serve as a reminder to all concerned that the cease-fire in itself is not the objective of Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations; and that it must lead to the resolution of the real issue, which is occupation. Hence if the two peoples have to live in peace, the occupation must come to an end.
Even though George Bush had presented the last plan for Middle East peace, better known as the road-map, under which a new Palestinian state had to emerge in 2005, he later arbitrarily shifted that timeframe to some indefinite point in future. He has been saying, presumably due to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's exhortations, that he is committed to a two-state solution with the Palestinians and the Israelis living side by side.
But he has purposefully kept from giving a new date by which a Palestinian state is to be established. Also, Hamas and other radical organisations have a genuine reason to worry about his intentions with regard to the final status issues, given that not long ago he had made the provocative statement that Israel could keep some parts of the West Bank.
As it is, the Jewish state comprises 78 percent of the historic Palestine, leaving the Palestinians to claim only 22 percent of their original homeland. If Bush insists on handing some parts of their extremely shrunken and truncated homeland to Israel, he cannot expect Hamas and other radical organizations to accept that as an act of fate. It may be recalled that the much talked about near-agreement between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak, brokered by Bill Clinton at Camp David, fell through only because the Palestinian leader would not give up his people's claim to all of East Jerusalem.
If Arafat, the father of Palestinian revolution, could not do that, it would be even more difficult for Abbas to make a compromise on the final status issue on which there exists a strong Palestinian consensus. Much of the future of Palestinian-Israeli peace, therefore, will depend on how even-handed the US chooses to be in pushing the process forward.
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