The U.S. and an Israeli/Palestinian Peace Settlement

Since the United Nations voted for partition and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, conflict between Arab Palestinians and Jewish Israelis has shaped the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. Numerous attempts to broker a meaningful and lasting peace have been made over the course of more than 50 years and as Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (2003, p. B2) have noted, "years of intermittent talks between Israelis and Palestinians have produced a good notion of what a settlement acceptable to both sides must look like." At issue herein is the question of whether or not the United States should actively promote an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, and if so, what more the U.S. can do to help the process. It will be argued that the United States, as the sole remaining global superpower, should be involved in this process and that the "roadmap to peace" proposed by President George W. Bush should be aggressively pursued.

The Israeli-Palestinian question has been the focus of diplomatic efforts for over five decades and has proven to be almost impossible to resolve. As the editors of The New York Times (The President's Mideast vision, 2003) have pointed out, both the Israelis and the Palestinians are cursed with a powerful minority obsessed with disastrous goals. There are factions among the Palestinians who remain determined to destroy Israel and who deny the right of Israel to exist. There ar