On April 11, 2005, Ariel Sharon met with George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas to discuss the disengagement plan under which Israel — required under Phase I of the Roadmap only to dismantle unauthorized settlement “outposts” erected since March 2001 and “freeze” settlement activity — would completely dismantle all 21 longstanding settlements in Gaza and withdraw all Israeli forces, giving the Palestinians a chance to rule themselves, demonstrate their readiness for peace, and finally commence their Phase I obligations under the plan they had accepted two years before.
Bush and Sharon had negotiated a disengagement deal the year before, in an exchange of letters agreeing that, after the disengagement, there would be: (1) no political discussions with the Palestinians before they dismantled terrorist organizations and infrastructure; (2) no eventual return to the indefensible Auschwitz borders of 1967, and (3) American-led efforts to insure that post-disengagement Gaza would not threaten Israel.
In the April 11, 2005 press conference, there was this exchange:
Q Mr. President, do you support the Prime Minister [Ariel Sharon] position as he stated now that after the disengagement, there will be no — any other political steps until a final and complete dismantling of terror organization, and only then we can proceed on the political track? . . .
PRESIDENT BUSH: . . . The Prime Minister is taking a bold step and a courageous step, and basically he’s saying that, you know, until he sees more progress, he doesn’t have confidence [in the Palestinians]. . . . And I’m convinced the place to earn — to gain that confidence is to succeed in the
Gaza. . . . I believe that it is possible to work to set up a self-governing entity in the
Gaza. And I believe a self-governing entity is one that is going to be peaceful, because most people want there to be peace. And when that happens, then all of a sudden, I think we’ll have a different frame of mind. . . . I just suspect that if there is success in the Gaza, in other words, if there’s a state that’s emerging, the Prime Minister will have a different attitude about whether or not it makes sense to continue the process. . . . And so I want to focus the world’s attention on getting it right in the
Gaza . . . .
Since then, Gaza has been turned into Hamastan (starting on Day One and well-advanced by the end of Week One), thousands of rockets have been launched into Israel, massive weaponry has been smuggled across borders un-policed by the Palestinians, not a single terrorist organization has been dismantled, the premier terrorist organization was elected to run the Palestinian government, tunnels were dug into Israel and a soldier kidnapped and held hostage and incommunicado now into the 13th month, the governing terrorist organization took over all of Gaza in a brutal armed coup, Mahmoud Abbas’s 60,000 American-trained “police” did nothing (and fled instead), Abbas himself has repeatedly rejected any provisional Phase II state, and both Abbas and Fatah have repeatedly reiterated that the “right of return” is “non-negotiable.”
In the face of all this, George W. Bush now decides the next step is to sponsor an international conference, to be chaired by Condoleezza Rice (and endorsed by the Quartet later this week), to address final status issues — without prior fulfillment even of Phase I of the plan he promised Sharon the U. S. would enforce.
What Bush has done is to swallow whole Recommendation 14 in the Report of the Iraq Study Group, which urged the “unconditional calling and holding of meetings, under the auspices of the
We all remember how well that prior process worked out — Dennis Ross wrote a whole book about it. More importantly, George W. Bush promised three years ago that there would be no unconditional initiation of that process again. His speech yesterday is the Harriet Miers of peace plans, only worse.