Road Map to Mecca

Robert Satloff, the Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has produced an extremely informative and perceptive analysis of the Mecca Agreement between Abbas and Hamas.  Part I is here; Part II is here.

Satloff provides the text of the gobbledy-gook paragraph of Abbas’s letter to Hamas Prime Minister Haniyeh that was supposed to address the Quartet’s three long-standing conditions:

Third, I call upon you as prime minister of the next government to abide by the interests of the Palestinian people and to preserve their rights and maintain their accomplishments and develop them and work on achieving their national goals as ratified by the resolutions of the Palestinian National Council meetings and the Basic Law articles and the national conciliation document and Arab summit resolutions and, based on all this, I call upon you to respect the Arab and international legitimacy resolutions and agreements signed by the PLO."

That paragraph, Satloff makes clear, does not even begin to address the Quartet’s three conditions, which have in any event been expressly rejected by both Hamas and Fatah:

As both Hamas and Fatah officials have made clear in recent days, nothing in the accord can be viewed as addressing the first two of the Quartet’s conditions (recognition of Israel and renunciation of violence) and only through a tortuous interpretation of the final clause can even a loose connection be made to the third condition (accepting previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements).

Neither "Israel," nor "peace process," nor "political horizon," nor even the word "peace" itself can be found. Not only is there a huge difference between "respecting" a resolution and agreeing to be bound by it, but because Abbas failed specifically to cite which Palestinian, Arab, and UN resolutions he asked Haniyeh to "respect," the Hamas leader could pick and choose from those he likes and those he dislikes.

This critical paragraph is, in other words, worse than meaningless — it is actually tantamount to a license for Hamas to interpret its political program as it sees fit, drawing on its own selective reading of the diplomatic history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Satloff concludes that the Bush administration “surely realizes that, with Mecca, the sun has set on the pursuit of a ‘political horizon.’”  He thinks U.S. policy should reconsider the original intent of President Bush’s landmark 2002 Rose Garden address, delivered with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice at his side:

"I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts. . . . And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions, and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East."

Now that the Palestinian Authority has formed a “unity government” controlled by a terrorist organization that proudly trumpets its refusal to recognize Israel, and not only refuses to renounce terrorism but gives it religious sanction, it is time for the administration to recognize that the Palestinians have neither the leaders nor the goals that President Bush envisioned five years ago.

Anwar Sadat traveled to Jerusalem. Given a road map, indulgent driving instructors, and endless pocket change for the trip, the Palestinians went in a different direction.