Stardate 20030503.1948

(On Screen): The quest for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians has been a frustrating one. Plan after plan has been floated; deals have been made and broken. The single biggest reason why is that through it all the Palestinians have never given up the ambition of wiping Israel off the map and retaking control of the territory they possessed in 1947, which is to say all of it.

There have been negotiations, pious statements, agreements, treaties, mediators, promises – but no important progress. All we have to show for it is a lot of graves, a lot of maimed people, economic ruin for the Palestinians, and Israel's economy damaged.

I think we're finally on a path which will bring about peace. But that's because there's finally a leader in the US who has been willing to stand up and tell the truth: the Palestinians are the real problem, especially their leaders. There are only three ways that peace can come to the region: if all the Israelis are dead, if all the Palestinians are dead, or if the Palestinians give up the struggle. Israelis won't accept the first, and are too decent to will the second, so that leaves only the third alternative.

Everything changed last year when Bush announced a new doctrine. There was a stunned silence in Europe and in the Arab world. It had been announced that there would be a major speech on Israel and the Palestinians, but what he said was nothing like what was expected.

He formally announced that the US supported formation of a Palestinian state. But he linked formation of that state to a series of concrete actions demanded of the Palestinians.

The most important aspect of the new doctrine was that it made clear that the Bush administration no longer trusts the Palestinian leadership at all. Bush made very clear that as far as he was concerned, the US would not negotiate with Arafat. He also made extremely clear, though without explicitly saying so, that the long and sorry history of broken promises by the Palestinians meant that from now on only performance would be accepted, and that no peace plan would involve simultaneous concessions by both sides. The Palestinians would implement their side of the deal first and only then would they be rewarded for doing so. Given their history of lies and broken promises and cheating, that was really the only possible answer. Needless to say, the Europeans were horrified.

The Europeans thought then and still think that the solution is for the US to use its influence to force Israel to make damaging concessions, but that's because they view Israel as the problem. (A lot of them wouldn't mourn if Israel, that "shitty little country", was actually eliminated.)

The most important part of the new Bush policy was to lay out a series of initial demands for concrete Palestinian reform, and to disengage forthwith until those reforms were actually in place. By so doing, he made clear that he wasn't going to let the Palestinian problem deflect him from Iraq.

For more than a year many of us who advocated war in Iraq made the claim that the road to peace in Israel ran through Baghdad. I still believe that. Saddam had been doing his best to keep things in Israel stirred up. He needed it for propaganda reasons at home (as do many of the other failed Arab states), and he needed it because he hoped to sell the idea that "the US can't attack Iraq until after the Palestinian situation has been straightened out", which indeed many tried to actually claim last year. So he was sending a lot of money and providing other kinds of support specifically to encourage various Palestinian factions to kill Jews. In his speech, Bush categorically refused to accept any idea that operations against Iraq would be conditional on the situation in Israel.

And several of the other Arab states which have been supporting the Intifada are now being told that we will no longer accept that. (Iran is, too, but that's more of a problem.) Powell just visited Damascus and made our opinion very clear about Syria's support for Hizbollah and other such groups.

The conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis has a larger context, and many of the nations in that region don't really want peace, because they benefit from the struggle at least indirectly. The Arabs overall have been described as being addicted to blaming others for their own failings, and the governments of many of those nations have been using the struggle in Israel as a way of distracting their people from their own incompetence.

It's become abundantly clear now that when Bush makes a real decision, he means it. The White House doesn't issue bold policy statements very often, but when they do it's always turned out to be significant. I do not believe that Bush has any intention of going back on the basic policy regarding the Palestinians he announced last year.

Still, there was the so-called "Quartet" negotiations, between four outside parties who came up with the so-called "Roadmap to Peace". The members of the Quartet were Russia, Europe, the UN, and the US. A plan was formulated, and supposedly would be proposed by all four members of the Quartet who would collectively use their influence to imple