WaPo Article on Roadmap
The article basically reads like a roadmap postmortem.
Some key quotes from Yossi Beilin:
"The cease-fire between the Palestinian factions overshadowed the first phase of the road map," said Yossi Beilin, who has played key roles in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations for the past decade on behalf of Israel. "The world went on vacation and left us alone. When the cease-fire broke, it exposed an unimplemented road map, and we did nothing. We are back to square one."
Beilin, like many analysts, said none of the parties met its obligations: "The Israelis did not dismantle outposts, and the Palestinians did no visible acts to fight terrorism." U.S. monitoring of the peace process, he added, was "a big failure."
On the U.S. monitoring role Beilin makes an excellent point:
The monitoring was important not just to apportion blame for any problems, observers said. More critically, public scrutiny was supposed to provide incentive for both sides to meet their obligations and not allow the process to collapse.
"You cannot monitor things in this situation with . . . such a low profile," said Beilin, the longtime Israeli peace negotiator. Wolf "has to report not only to his superiors, but also publicly."
I had blogged about the need for Wolf to (somehow) intensify his efforts here a few days back. I should have noted Beilin's important point as well. We need to have the U.S. "umpire" role more out in the open. That also helps keep us fair--so as to better retain our "honest broker" status. Put differently, other countries in the Quartet could thus better see, in transparent fashion, what party is doing what when.
Posted by Gregory Djerejian at August 28, 2003 05:31 PM