Israel and Palestine
Banking on the Saudis
Feb 22nd 2007 | JERUSALEM
From The Economist print edition
With Israeli-Palestinian talks back on ice, the Saudis offer a glimpse of hope
THIS week the United States and its partners in the “Quartet” (Russia, the European Union and the UN) reiterated that they will not deal with a new Palestinian unity government, which the rival Fatah and Hamas factions agreed earlier this month to form, any more than they dealt with the previous Hamas-run one, unless it accepts their three conditions (to recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept previous Israeli-Palestinian accords), which it almost certainly will not do. America and Israel said they would keep up their contacts with the Palestinian president, Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas. But despite talk of giving him a “political horizon”, they said nothing about what that might mean; certainly not an outline of future peace talks, as Mr Abbas had hoped.
So was the Fatah-Hamas deal in vain? And why did Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, fly all the way to Jerusalem to see Mr Abbas and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and on to Jordan to see America's other Arab allies, to tell them something she could have fitted into an SMS text message?
A Hamas-Fatah government should at least end the plague of factional violence. And it might at last knuckle down to negotiate a swap of Palestinian prisoners in Israel for Gilad Shalit, a captured Israeli soldier in Gaza.
Ms Rice, meanwhile, may simply have needed to show her face. An Israeli who met her in Jerusalem said she wanted to maintain the Quartet's unity: some European countries may want to break ranks with the boycott, which has been impoverishing Palestinians and destroying their statelet for nearly a year while barely altering Hamas's stance.
But in any case America is holding back from serious involvement while it sees what else Saudi Arabia can do. King Abdullah and his energetic security adviser, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a former long-time Washington ambassador, may try to stick another feather in their caps at next month's Arab League summit. They want to revive and perhaps refine the Arab League's 2002 proposal for all Arab states to normalise relations with Israel if Israel withdraws from all the territories it occupied in 1967, both Palestinian and Syrian.
In Jordan Ms Rice may have had a preview of what may be on offer. Perhaps the Saudis will present firmer details of what Israel could expect from normalisation—rather like the “political horizon” Mr Abbas hoped to be offered. Israel's housing minister said recently that Israel should start talks about it with the Arab world. But Mr Olmert, whose government has been rocked by scandals and is bracing itself for the results of an inquiry into last summer's war in Lebanon, will probably turn a deaf ear; his main concern is just surviving.
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