Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, in an interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer Sunday regarding the “peace process:”
[T]he United States has to be very careful here that it does not get pulled into a process where, because of the election, which is good news, because of Arafat’s departure, which is terrifically good news, we suddenly start putting unilateral pressure on Israel before we see what the new Palestinian leadership and its moderate Arab supporters and the Saudis are ready to do.
So we all agree, everyone, this is a tremendous, historic opportunity. But let’s not start writing this peace agreement or thinking about new handshakes on the south lawn until we see what really is going to go on on the Palestinian side.
Update:
Martin Peretz writes on the parameters of any renewed “peace process:”
The 1967 borders (which were not borders at all, but the flimsy, happenstance 1949 cease-fire lines where the exhausted armies stopped fighting) are bygones; there will never be a mass "return" of Palestinian "refugees" to within the agreed territories of Israel; the barrier separating what will ultimately be Palestine and Israel will not be taken down in our time, if ever; and the real territorial arrangements between Israel and its Arab neighbors have not yet been truly put on the table.
This last subject is where true hope resides. The grand details, as envisioned by Israel, are imaginative and generous: swaps of land to and from Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and the new Palestine.
True hopes lies in requiring that the new Palestine be a “practicing democracy,” with civil institutions and freedoms, so that an armed recidivist state (of whatever borders) doesn’t simply prepare for the next war.