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Roundtable with Traveling Press
Secretary Rice Travel to the Middle East and Europe SECRETARY RICE: … /… The other major effort was to talk to the Israelis and the Palestinians. I really didn't come out with a preconceived notion of what might be possible. I did think that it was a good opportunity to come and to listen to people as to how they saw the future. I knew that there was momentum that had been generated by the meetings between Abbas and Olmert and, in fact, even before that with the speech that Olmert had given. But it is a complicated time with all this going on in the Palestinian Authority and so I wanted to see what was possible. And it was really out of the talks with Abu Mazen and then the talks with Prime Minister Olmert that it became clear to me that something along these lines, a sort of informal opportunity to discuss these issues after six years, would be the most useful track to take. And Abu Mazen had mentioned something like this at the time of the Olmert meeting, but I wasn't really clear on what he meant. He talked about a back channel or where the contents weren't known or something like that. And so I was able to get some clarification and I think by talking to people and listening to people we moved the process forward, principally because everybody wants to stay within the context of the roadmap. The roadmap is very important because it's got sequence. Everybody understands the obligations in it. But we had gotten to a place that it was stalled because if they weren't making progress on the first phase of the roadmap they couldn't talk about the end of the roadmap and what might lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state. And I think we broke through that. The next couple of weeks will be pretty intensive on the diplomatic front. I will obviously have a Quartet on February 2nd and then the next week the Egyptians are coming to Washington, Abu Gheit, and I think that we probably will have others to Washington as well. Undoubtedly, David and Elliott will travel to talk to advisors for Prime Minister Olmert and for President Abbas. I don't know precisely when they'll do that, but obviously we'll want to try and prepare the ground before I go back. And I would anticipate going back sometime in the first half of February. I have some constraints because of budget testimony and a conference that I have to chair on Liberia, but aside from that I plan to try to go back in the first half of February. We will spend, I think, a good deal of time really trying to think about the agenda for this, to see what the parties want to put on the agenda. It really should be up to them to put anything on the agenda that they'd like, but it's very important to think about the establishment of the Palestinian state as having many different facets. There's a tendency to go to the big three issues right away, but in fact there are many other things that would have to be achieved for a Palestinian state and so I would expect the entire agenda to be there: security, (inaudible) security concerns, the nature of the Palestinian state. One of the really important (inaudible) of the President on this issue, I think, has been that there has always been a lot of concern about what the borders of a state would be but there wasn't much attention given to its internal composition, democratic processes, institutions. And I find President Abbas more interested in that part of it, in building the institutions as well, and one thing that I think or want to do or will want to do over the next several weeks is to talk about what role others are going to play. This is not just a process that the United States is going to be able to press forward on its own. I think the Arabs obviously have an important role to play, but also the Quartet, I think, Frank-Walter Steinmeier said yesterday, kind of steering group. By that I think he meant what kinds of efforts might be needed by other actors in the international community. You can imagine, for instance, on the economic side, on the institution building side, that there are other countries, perhaps the EU and others, that might be interested in playing a role there. So I think establishing almost an international team or an international consortium to support movement toward a Palestinian state is also extremely important. We're not yet at the point where I think we can determine what we would do about formal negotiations when and if. It's really a time to try to get the parties into more of a confidence-building phase and we will see what comes after that. So with that, let me take your questions. /… QUESTION: May I ask about the Middle East peace process? SECRETARY RICE: Sure. QUESTION: Are you willing to basically put your reputation as Secretary of State on the line to get this done in the next two years, to keep going back to the region as often as possible? Because it's hard for I think a lot of us to see how you're going to get this done or anywhere close to that unless you do that. Or are you, in your mind, not quite decided that it's worth that effort? SECRETARY RICE: Well, I will do whatever I can do to try to help establish a Palestinian state. You know, I don't think about it in terms of my reputation. I'm enough of an historian to know that my reputation will be what my reputation is. I just — and it might be different in five months from five years to 50 years, and so I'm simply not going to worry about that. I'm going to be concerned about what we can get done when and how. And I obviously have been out here a lot and I expect I'll be out a lot again. I'm aware that it takes not just deal-making and shuttle diplomacy to make it work. It also takes certain circumstances and certain commitments, and I think we've been actually creating those circumstances or helping to create those circumstances over the last several years, not over the last several months. The President's declaration of a two-state solution, the President's decision that he was not going to try to deal with Yasser Arafat, that there needed to be a democratization of a Palestinian political space, the President's support for withdrawal from Gaza — I mean, there have been a number of steps here on the way to where we are now. And I just hope that when people look at where we are now, they'll think about that entire evolution, because you don't build the possibility for breakthroughs on something as intractable as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by five months of shuttle diplomacy. You just don't. There has to be a process of laying groundwork and I think we've been laying groundwork and we'll see if we've laid enough groundwork to actually produce a breakthrough. I do think we've — there's already been progress. QUESTION: You've said several times on this trip how it's important to (inaudible) that we're looking at the geostrategic stars align. When you look at the situation in the Middle East, Abbas and Olmert are incredibly weak right now. When you look at Iraq, military commanders there with experience in Bosnia, an important Muslim element, say that as horrible as ethnic cleansing was, it at least created a map that was sustainable. Some of them wonder whether you don't have to let the parties in Baghdad do that terrible thing to get to a sustainable map. So why, with all this effort, do you see the geostrategic stars aligning? SECRETARY RICE: Well, first of all, a lot has happened in the Middle East in the last several years and a lot has clarified in the Middle East. I do think that the removal of Saddam Hussein set in motion a number of other circumstances, other changes in the Middle East: the removal of an eastern front threat for Israel, for instance; the removal of the repression that, frankly, meant that Iraqis of different groups handled their politics through one group repressing another, and that has led to some deep grievances that have to play out in a political process. But a lot has happened. And if you look at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I think that the realignment in which people understand that perhaps their interests now rest with the creation of a stable two-state solution, that's a pretty dramatic change in and of itself. And again, a lot of groundwork, not — we tend to forget. You know, I hear people say a two-state solution, Palestinian state, as if that was always what we were driving for, when in fact, when the President said it in 2001 it was considered a very big thing for the President of the United States to do. In fact, the United States had been, in past times, and not too far in the distant future — or in the distant past, opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. And so when you have a Palestinian state — the President declared that a Palestinian state is going to be the outcome here, it begins to change the — it begins to condition the environment. And now you hear everyone, from the successors to Likud, including Prime Minister Sharon, the father of the settlement movement, talking about the two-state solution, accepting the two-state solution, accepting dividing the land, the Arabs saying essentially Israel is going to be here, we might as well learn to live with each other, even those who have not recognized Israel. And I think those conditions then, over the last few years, have now led to the place where these people want to get on about doing it. Now sometimes, you hear, "Oh, they're this far apart." I don't think that for a minute. I think there are still really, really hard issues here. But you sense that the tectonic plates underneath this conflict have shifted. QUESTION: Madame Secretary, you've talked a lot about the false stability of the Middle East (inaudible) there, and yet you're courting support from three of the longstanding and arguably most authoritarian of those regimes still in power. Do you risk sort of the — that you're selling out the democracy argument by asking for their help this way? SECRETARY RICE: The processes here are long ones and what is very clear is that there are some young democratic states that have now been established and are at risk. And the support for those young democratic states is coming from a coalition of states that are concerned about the most immediate threat to those young democratic states which are actually playing out their extremism through trying to bring these young states down: Lebanon — and I put Lebanon in that category because until they got rid of Syrian forces I think you were not talking about a democratic state that could operate in any fashion like that; Iraq and the Palestinian Authority, which is not a state but a democratic entity that could become the basis for a democratic Palestinian state. Now, that doesn't mean that you don't continue to press for reforms in the states that make up that coalition that are not yet democratic. So I don't think you will ever go completely back in Egypt after the presidential elections that they held when certain taboos about what you could talk about and who you could criticize simply broke. The Saudis had municipal elections. They've now raised expectations that that process is going to continue and that, in fact, women are going to be included in that process at a point in time. I had very interesting discussions with the Kuwaiti women, who now have the right to vote, about the effect that they think the women's right to vote in Kuwait is having throughout the Gulf. And of course, Jordan has actually been pretty actively reforming its political systems. So it's — no one ever expected that there would be a complete democratic revolution throughout the Middle East overnight, but you have had some very important democratic breakthroughs. And part of the goal is to safeguard those as you continue to press for political reform, and we're going to continue to press for political reform. QUESTION: Madame Secretary, coming back to the Arab-Israeli question. SECRETARY RICE: Yes. QUESTION: I mean, you act as thought this is somehow new, but I mean it's — back in 2000 there was a summit with the leader of — the Israelis' leader, the Palestinians, who met for all those days and talked about all these issues. Will the U.S. at some point be ready to put down some bridging proposals to have that kind of summitry? SECRETARY RICE: Barbara — QUESTION: What is new and different? It seems to me that Olmert now is weaker, frankly, than Barak was, and certainly Abbas is weaker than Arafat was. SECRETARY RICE: Well, Barbara, let me just go to the premise that 2000 is just like 2007. QUESTION: I'm not saying — I'm saying that we're actually farther along in — SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, but let's look at where it really was in 2000, all right? You had Yasser Arafat, who I think now who had one foot in terror and one foot in politics. I would submit to you you were never going to get a Palestinian state and peace with Israel under those circumstances. And if you'll remember, we caught him a couple years later taking arms from Iran through the Karine A. So I just don't think that you can make a comparison between Yasser Arafat and Abu Mazen, somebody who's clearly committed to peace and who's prepared to stand on a peace platform. There's a reason Yasser Arafat couldn't make a deal. It's also the case that you had at that time a Palestinian Authority that was overrun by corruption, overrun by its ties with terrorism. And you — and strangely, you had Hamas, of course, sitting out as a resistance movement, not at all, by the way, involved in the politics at all. Now, I know that the inclusion of Hamas into the political system for elections has made things in some sense more complicated, but it has also made Hamas contest in the political system, and their inability to govern has led Hamas to, I think, some very — to a very difficult situation in which they're trying to find their ways out. So the differences on the Palestinian side are very fundamental from 2000. The differences on the Israeli side are also very fundamental. Do you really think Ariel Sharon was going to support the Camp David Accords — Likud? Doesn't look like it, does it? Because in fact, the — what has happened now is that by 2003 Ariel Sharon was able to — was willing to make a shift for the right of the Israeli political spectrum and to begin to talk about dividing the land. The Herzliya speech was one of the most important speeches in Israeli political — recent Israeli political history. He starts to talk about dividing the land. He accepts the two-state solution. He accepts the roadmap. And now the breadth of the Israeli political system that is actually united behind a two-state solution is very different than in 2000. Finally, the Arabs in 2000 — not really very involved in that process. And so I think you can — yes, I think on paper there was a lot that was close. But the underlying circumstances, the ones who had to accept it, support it, I think those conditions are better now. But I totally agree that the proof will be in the pudding. We'll see how far they're able to go, given their specific political conditions today. QUESTION: And can you anticipate bringing bridging proposals at some point? SECRETARY RICE: Barbara, I'm not going to get ahead of the discussions I have with — /… 2007/T1-13 |
Country: United States of America
Subject: Palestine question, Peace process
Publication Date: 18/01/2007