Rice: The goal is a Middle East peace deal
The US will try to get a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians before President Bush’s term ends, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said today.
But she refused to guarantee success.
Ms Rice said Israeli and Palestinian leaders have pledged to work for an independent Palestinian state before the president leaves office in January 2009.
Ms Rice and the president host Israeli and Palestinian leaders next week in Washington and at an international conference in Annapolis, the capital of Maryland about 50 miwoles away.
The conference is supposed to launch the first direct negotiations on a peace deal in seven years.
Ms Rice said the Annapolis session was an important launching pad for talks to settle Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and their disputes over land, nationhood and rights that underlies the Jewish state’s other problems with Arab neighbours.
She said the US will give room for those other conflicts to be aired at Annapolis, including Syria’s dispute with Israel over the Israeli-held Golan Heights.
Earlier President Bush called Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss the conference, and also phoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak about the session, the White House said.
Egypt is one of only two Arab states that have negotiated peace deals with Israel, and the country is serving as a go-between for other Arab nations in the run-up to Annapolis. Egypt has pledged to attend.
The invitations to the three-day session went out yesterday after months of intense diplomacy. The Bush administration announced few details beyond the dates and a cursory schedule.
The two sides are expected to present a joint statement on resuming peace talks at Annapolis, yet less than a week before their delegations are to arrive in the United States, the document exists only in vague form.
The conference will be anchored around a marathon session on Tuesday at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, to be opened by President Bush.
Back in Washington on Wednesday, Bush plans to see Olmert and Abbas again privately for a third time in as many days, ostensibly to seal their intent to create a Palestinian state by the end of his second term.
The intense White House involvement in a meeting that was planned to be run almost entirely by Ms Rice when first discussed in July took some by surprise and was seen as a sign the president is making a serious bid for a Middle East foreign policy success as his legacy.
The invitation list includes select members of the Arab League, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the international diplomatic “quartet” on the Middle East and its special envoy, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Group of Eight industrialised nations and the European Union.
