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Bush, Rice Need to Get More Involved in Israeli-Palestinian Talks

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Martin S. Indyk, Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

May 7, 2008

Martin S. Indyk served two tours of duty as ambassador to Israel in the Clinton presidency and serves in a private capacity as an adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) campaign. He says it is crucial for President George W. Bush Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to become more involved in trying to bridge the gap between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Indyk says the timing of Bush’s visit to Israel next week “is going to be propitious for him to engage in a way that could move these talks forward.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has returned to Washington after a long weekend in Israel and the West Bank. What do you hear about what’s going on?

It’s important to understand that there’s a process that’s functioning on a number of levels. The negotiations themselves are being held in secret, so all we’re getting are kind of temperature readings from all of the sides. So, from the Palestinians, before Rice arrived, it was a very sour, cold temperature. This reflected President Mahmoud Abbas’ disappointment after his recent visit to Washington that Bush wasn’t ready to intervene and stop Israeli settlement activity. Today, we get a different read—the secretary of state saying that progress is being made and the Israeli prime minister’s office reporting progress as well. The Israeli press is saying that this may have more to do with the shifting attention from the ongoing, unspecified criminal investigation into Prime Minister Ehud Olmert than with what’s actually happening in the negotiations. But the bottom line is, we don’t know. In a way it’s a good sign that there are no details leaking out of what they’re discussing or where they are in the negotiations.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.