Getting Syria to the table was a bit of a coup but it’s nearly impossible to believe that we’ll see see any substantive results from this event. If there is consensus it’s only on that very point – nothing much will come of this. Peace will come when Arab leaders and anti-Zionist forces worldwide (mostly on the far-left) no longer view the Palestinians as mere canon fodder. Arab leaders have spent decades manufacturing this crisis. They’re not walking away from it any time soon. Doing so would bring all of the ugly truths about their own societies, and their leadership, into focus. True peace will only be possible after the Arab world is transformed.
Anyway, there is an official site for those who are interested. Wikipedia has more information including a pretty comprehensive rundown on the participants.
National security advisor Steve Hadley recently laid out some goals, if you can call them that, for the event:
…the focus of these discussions are the Israelis and the Palestinians launching a negotiating process, supporting them in their efforts to implement the road map, which we still think is the critical path for achieving peace, and, in parallel, building Palestinian institutions and making sure there’s international support for that. That’s what really this meeting is all about and that’s what we hope will come out of it.
In other words, they’re not hoping for much. Or as Rick Richman puts it:
So the conference will “launch negotiations” — since the last few months of actual negotiations over a “document” have failed. Since failure is not an option, this will be called a success.
Frank Viviano is bit more optimistic:
The atmosphere is marked by weakness, uncertainty and pessimism. Yet that may prove to be the Annapolis conference’s greatest strength, an unexpected prelude to breakthrough on the 60-year road to an Arab-Israeli-settlement. It is between the lines of bleak editorials, op-ed columns and analyses in the press of the Middle East itself that this hope, however slim, can be read. From Riyadh and Beirut to Cairo and Jerusalem, pre-conference media coverage has been a strange mosaic of dark foreboding and unusual glimmers of light. No less unusual is the fact that Annapolis will bring together all of the governments and mainstream players in this unending conflict for the first time – precisely because because all of them are reeling in crisis. In a sense, there could be no more potent chemistry for success at the negotiating table. The closest equivalent is the “Nixon shock” of 35 years ago, when a fiercely anti-Communist U.S. president, faced with riots in the American streets and a war about to be lost in Southeast Asia, suddenly found common ground with a marxist China gravely enfeebled by cultural revolution.
John Bolton is cranky, pessimistic, and right (as usual):
“If there is a conference and it fails, we are not simply in the status quo that we had before,” Bolton said during a Web-based question-and-answer session. “We are in a worse position, because it will show a decline in American influence, a failure in a very visible way. I wish we weren’t doing this at all.”
And The Washington Post falls somewhere in the middle:
If there are causes for optimism, they lie in the hopeful public rhetoric of Mr. Olmert and Mr. Abbas — and the fears that lie behind it. Mr. Olmert has publicly pledged several times that Israel will negotiate seriously, and he said last week that he believed there was a chance to complete a peace deal by the end of next year. His government, like many in the Middle East, is deeply worried by Iran’s attempt to expand its influence throughout the region and believes a failure of the talks would play into Tehran’s hands. That prospect may be enough to produce some progress at the Annapolis meeting and in the months to come. But the breakthrough that Ms. Rice thought was possible still looks remote.
While, Henry Siegman hits all of the Arab talking points on the way to this ridiculously one-sided conclusion:
If the international community has been largely indifferent to—or impotent to do anything about—what some have tried to portray as a quarrel between Israel and Palestinians over where to draw the border between the two, it is far less likely to remain indifferent to an Israel intent on permanently denying its majority Arab population the rights and privileges it accords to its minority of Jewish citizens. It would be an apartheid regime that, one hopes, a majority of Israelis would themselves not abide.
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