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U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who spoke at the Aspen Institute on 2 August, attempted to assure the public that there has been significant movement behind the scenes in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations process.

You may not have noticed if you were busy watching the Olympics, but the U.S. Secretary of State is still trying to push Israelis and Palestinians towards reaching a peace agreement. Condoleezza Rice plans to visit the region today, reportedly timed to coincide with Israel releasing 199 Palestinian prisoners—none affiliated with Hamas—as a “good will” gesture towards Mahmoud Abbas. Visits by Secretary Rice have become so routine, and the prospects for a final status agreement seemingly so slim since Ehud Olmert announced his intention to resign, that most observers have given up on the Annapolis process launched last fall. Where is the negotiations process going? 

From the beginning, President Bush and Secretary Rice acknowledged that time would be short for reaching an agreement before Bush leaves office. That time seems to have gotten even shorter. Olmert could be out of office as soon as Kadima holds party elections to replace him on 17 September. Yet, according to Rice’s official position, the Olmert resignation is an “internal Israeli matter” and Israeli-Palestinian talks continue to be “very fruitful.” She reportedly wants the two sides to produce a progress report, listing areas of agreement, before the UN General Assembly begins its 2008 session, also in late September. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are resisting pressure to create such a document and have started issuing threats and leaks to the press.

Rice assured the Aspen Institute earlier this month that “the absence of public movement is not necessarily evidence of the absence of movement.” She now has to deal with private negotiations spilling into the public. Last week, the Israeli government apparently leaked a final status proposal presented by Olmert to Abbas that focused on borders, the issue on which the two sides are said to be closest to agreement. Under the plan, the Palestinians would receive Gaza and 93 percent of the West Bank, with the border of a future Palestinian state roughly coinciding with the current route of the Israeli Separation Wall. In exchange for the seven percent of the West Bank that Israel would take, Palestinians would receive a portion of the Negev desert adjacent to Gaza, equal to 5.5 percent of the area of the West Bank.

The proposed agreement would be implemented sequentially. Israel would get major settlements such as Ma’ale Adumim, the Gush Etzion bloc and the settlements around Jerusalem immediately, while the Palestinian Authority would receive the compensatory Negev territory and a passageway to Gaza only after it could retake control of Gaza from Hamas. Israel would also make full evacuation of the settlements inside the new Palestinian state contingent upon the Palestinian Authority. meeting certain other commitments. The future Palestinian state would be “demilitarized” and there would be no “right of return,” except for a small number of family reunifications. The two sides would postpone the issue of sovereignty over Jerusalem.

Rice cannot have been happy with the release of the proposal, as it put the negotiations into the glare of the media and showed how far apart the two sides are to reaching an agreement. Abbas spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh immediately rejected the Olmert proposal as demonstrating a “lack of seriousness,” saying, "The Israeli proposal is unacceptable, it is a waste of time. The Palestinian people will agree to a state with territorial contiguity only in a way that includes Jerusalem as its capital." Earlier, chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qurei  even raised the possibility that his side would turn away from the “two states” formula if settlement construction continued and Israel refused to even discuss the issue of Jerusalem: “If Israel continues to reject our propositions regarding the borders [of a future Palestinian state], we might demand Israeli citizenship.”

Even before the latest round of negotiation-by-press-release, veteran British journalist and author Patrick Seale was ready to declare the Annapolis process officially dead and unlikely to return. “Bush, and his hapless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,” he said in a recent column, “must bear the prime responsibility for the failure. They have been unwilling—or unable—to put the slightest pressure on Israel, even to insist that it honor its verbal commitments to freeze settlements and evacuate illegal outposts. […] No U.S. Secretary of State has devoted so much time and effort to the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio to so little effect.”

As an example of Rice’s timidity, Seale could point to her response to the Aspen audience query concerning getting the parties to fulfill their minimal Road Map obligations: “The Palestinians said that they would dismantle the infrastructure of terror. The Israelis made some representations about dismantling outposts. It's a slog, to be quite frank. […] And we keep working and working on that track.” Rice, it seems, cannot even get Israel to meet its obligations when she significantly lowers the bar for compliance from a settlement freeze and dismantling all outposts constructed since March 2001, as called for in the Road Map, to just dismantling unspecified outposts.

With Olmert stepping down, the next Israeli prime minister may be less enthusiastic, or even hostile, towards the peace process. As Seale notes, Tzipi Livni, the chief Israeli negotiator for Olmert, is the only Kadima candidate to replace Olmert that might keep the Israeli coalition of Kadima, Labor, and Shas together and thus continue support for the present negotiations process. Shaul Mofaz, according to the Jerusalem Post, would “likely pull the party to the right, making it virtually indistinguishable from the Likud.” If the new Kadima leader is unable to form a coalition within 48 days, new elections will be held in early 2009, which polls suggest could result in a revival of Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu’s premiership. Netanyahu is known to favor a step-by-step process, with Israel’s implementation contingent upon the Palestinians meeting certain commitments, over one that settles all issues at once.

The upcoming U.S. presidential election adds more uncertainty to the mix. The two presumptive presidential candidates have not outright opposed the Annapolis process, but they seem to disagree on how important resolving the conflict is relative to other Middle East priorities.

Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. Senator Barack Obama, seems to favor making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a higher priority than did the Bush administration. He told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic earlier this year that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a “constant wound” or a “constant sore” that “does infect all of our foreign policy.” While he repeatedly emphasized “Israel’s right to defend itself,” Obama said that “the status quo is unsustainable” for Israel and that the United States has “a national-security interest in solving” the problem. Obama even quipped during his recent visit to Israel that he would not "wait a few years into my term or my second term, if I'm elected," to push for a peace agreement.

At an America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference in Washington, DC, where both presidential candidates spoke earlier this year, Obama seems to have made a gaffe when he said, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” His campaign later backtracked on this embrace of the right-wing Israeli claim over Palestinian East Jerusalem by saying that sovereignty over Jerusalem is a “final status issue that has to be resolved between the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

Republican John McCain sees dangers hiding behind every rock in Israel’s neighborhood. In a press release that his campaign sent during the AIPAC conference, the McCain campaign devoted the first half to the threat posed by Iran and “radical Islamic extremists.” The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations merited one, incoherent bullet point: “While encouraging this process, we must also ensure that Israelis can live in safety until there is a Palestinian leadership willing and able to deliver peace. A peace process that places faith in terrorists can never end in peace.”

It is hard to imagine a Palestinian leadership more willing to sign an agreement than the Abbas/Fayyad government, which may be why Condoleezza Rice continues to push the Annapolis process forward—the alternatives seem so much worse. Excluding Hamas from the bargaining table, however, hinders the government’s ability to deliver an agreement. Further, the successful ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza suggests that there are times when “negotiating with terrorists” can actually improve Israel’s security, at least in the short term.

When asked by Goldberg what he thought of Obama’s characterization of the conflict as a “constant sore,” McCain said, “I don't think the conflict is a sore. I think it's a national security challenge. I think it's important to achieve peace in the Middle East on a broad variety of fronts and I think that if the Israeli-Palestinian issue were decided tomorrow, we would still face the enormous threat of radical Islamic extremism.”