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    George W. Bush in Ramallah: "Walking on Eggs"
    By Henri Guirchoun
    Le Nouvel Observateur

    Thursday 10 January 2008

    After Bill Clinton's visit to Gaza in 1998, it's the first visit of an American president to the Palestinian territories, and at the same time, George W. Bush's first visit to Israel as president. So it's not as though that great friend of Israel, George W. Bush, had decided to make a strong symbolic gesture towards the Palestinians by going to Ramallah. This trip was also, and indubitably, primarily, intended to pour balm into the hearts of Israelis. One must not forget, moreover, that the announcement of this ramble occurred quite specifically the day after publication of the American intelligence services' report on the freeze of the Iranian nuclear program, a report which had appalled the Israelis. It also worried Arab regimes friendly to the United States, notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, which are precisely the next stops George Bush will make after Jerusalem.

    Consequently, the American president is, to a certain extent, walking on eggs. So it is out of the question that he impose on Israel to make any real concessions to the Palestinians in order to accelerate peace negotiations, even though those negotiations seem already to be gasping for breath since the last summit in Annapolis. Out of the question also to upset his Palestinian interlocutors: he'll want to avoid getting a glacial reception in either Cairo or Riyadh afterwards. Consequently, to avoid the devil, he'll stick to incantatory statements of good intention, without going into the details too much.

    So of course the American president repeated that he's in favor of the birth of a Palestinian nation. But without mentioning a date. He noted that this state should enjoy territorial continuity. But without specifying exactly which continuity. Between the Allenby bridge at the Jordanian border, Jericho and Ramallah? Between Ramallah, Jenine and Bethlehem? Or also between Ramallah and Gaza? Now, it's these questions and so many others, like Jerusalem, the freeze on settlements, the dismantling of military checkpoints that are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations which we cannot say have been advancing by giant steps these last few weeks.

    In fact, during this trip, President Bush has tried simultaneously to build up the prestige of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas - weakened on his side by the dissidence of Hamas - and to restore the image of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who's trying to save his seat. That seat is threatened by the upcoming publication of the Winograd report's final conclusions about the war in Lebanon.

    But who can seriously believe in the probability of an agreement, as Bush asserts, before the end of his term in 2009? Isn't he even weaker than Bill Clinton was when he failed to impose peace in Camp David at the end of his term? Since Gaza's secession, isn't President Mahmoud Abbas seriously weaker than Yasser Arafat was then? And isn't Ehud Olmert at the mercy of an implosion of his ungovernable coalition, an ever more unlikely team, buffeted between Ehud Barak and the Labor party's ambitions on the one side, and on the other the threats of Avigdor Lieberman's extreme right, which prohibits Olmert from any constructive concession to the Palestinians? Moreover, Ehud Olmert has just reasserted that there will be no peace as long as terrorism is not stopped. So we are very far from the doctrine that prevailed during the Oslo Accords, when then-Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin asserted that it was necessary to make peace as though there were no attacks and to fight against terrorism as though there were no peace.