The Bilateral Efforts of Olmert and Abbas in Our Time

Condoleezza Rice in her Keynote Address last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Our confidence that there are no permanent enemies also gives us hope that two states, Israel and Palestine, will one day live side by side in peace and security.  The Annapolis process will support the bilateral efforts of Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas to end the conflict between their peoples.  But we must not lose sight of what that peace will really mean.

Peace will mean that Palestinians will never again suffer the humiliations of occupation and wasted hours spent in checkpoints — and will instead be free to work and prosper in a state of their own.  Peace will mean that Israelis who have so justly and proudly defended the Jewish state for the past 60 years will finally see their right to exist affirmed and accepted by their neighbors.  And peace will mean that the hatreds borne of this now 60 year-old conflict will pass away with this current generation, not be passed on to infect new ones.

Yes, that is what “peace” would mean, but what Rice has in mind is not peace but a “peace agreement.”  It is as if she were speaking hopefully about the Kellogg-Briand Pact — a project of an earlier U.S. Secretary of State — and waxing eloquently about what the end of war will mean. 

At least Secretary of State Kellogg did not propose turning over land to Germany, Italy and Japan to get them to sign their 1928 renunciation of war.