Condoleezza Rice held a roundtable with reporters yesterday in Washington, D.C. and had this exchange:
QUESTION: Madame Secretary, the Palestinians and the Israelis didn’t reach yet — till now an agreement on the document, the joint document.
SECRETARY RICE: But the point of the document is simply to show that — show how they intend to move forward, kind of what is the work plan ahead of them. There was a time when I think there was some discussion of, would it be appropriate to write down understandings that Olmert and Abbas were coming to in their work. But it maybe isn’t so surprising that when they decided that really they should just go for the negotiations, right? — not try to get some kind of interim document, not try to get some kind of statement of principles, go for the agreement — that the weight shifted to getting themselves ready to negotiate the agreement rather than talking about principles that might either prejudice somebody’s negotiating position or force people to try and say something early that might make it harder to negotiate later.
I think that what really happened here is that what looked like it was going to be a document that was almost a holding pattern to come to Annapolis and say, look, we really do think we can move forward, in their discussions as they moved and moved and moved, they really decided what they wanted to do was launch negotiations. And that made the nature of the document very different, and I think that’s actually a healthy development because they now — my own view of this is that it’s hard with something this complex to just have principles because the devil, in a sense, is in the detail. Might as well get to the detail. And that’s what they’re going to do.
First the conference was going to address all the “core issues” to provide a “political horizon.” Then it wasn’t going to provide a political horizon, but would produce a Statement of Principles. Then it wasn’t going to produce a Statement of Principles, but there would be a Joint Statement. Then they were just going to have a “document.”
Less than a week before the conference, they don’t have a “document” and will “just go for the negotiations” after the conference ends, since talking about principles now might “prejudice somebody’s negotiating position.”
So the conference will “launch negotiations” — since the last few months of actual negotiations over a “document” have failed. Since failure is not an option, this will be called a success.