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

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that there are substantial roadblocks on the roadmap to peace in the region (Gaouette, 2003). The settlements maintained by Israelis on the West Bank, ongoing terrorist activity on the part of Palestinian groups, the apparent inability of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to achieve Palestinian political reform, and Palestinian perception that Israel under Ariel Sharon has no real intention of allowing the creation of a viable Palestinian state are among these roadblocks. Indeed, many Palestinians also have expressed concerns that because of its abiding commitment to Israel, the United States will ultimately be unable or perhaps unwilling to convince the Israelis that they must make significant concessions to the Palestinians (Gaouette, 2003). Agha and Malley (2003) take the position that negotiations - even those to be overseen by the Quartet - have exhausted their usefulness. Since the Oslo Accords, diplomatic negotiations have failed to build on common ground and served primarily to exaggerate the differences between the Israelis and the Palestinians. What is now needed, according to these analysts, is a new undertaking by the United States, its Quartet partners, and Arab and Muslim nations to put forward a comprehensi
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Approximate Word count = 1201
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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