‘Map’ of Uncharted Territory

The squalid West Bank streets where Palestinian gunmen hide in safe houses and Israeli soldiers pursue them to the death is a long way from the blue sea and applause of the Arab-Israeli peace summit last week in the Jordanian port of Aqaba.

But it is there in the alleys and warrens that the peace plan may succeed or fail. And as a deadly incident just hours after the summit ended suggests, there are 101 ways the deal could fall apart.

On Thursday night, Israeli border security obtained intelligence indicating that three operatives with the militant group Hamas were plotting a terror attack inside Israel. The security forces surrounded a house near the West Bank town of Tulkarm, and when the alleged plotters refused to come out, the Israelis stormed the home, according to an Israel Defense Forces spokesman.

Inside, they found the three men in a hiding place armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and a handgun. The Israelis opened fire, and two of the Palestinians were killed.

The incident, not unusual by pre-peace summit standards, set off a storm of criticism that risks unraveling the “road map” before it has even begun to be enacted.

Palestinian politicians condemned the incident as an “assassination,” and it quickly became a prime example to Palestinians of Israel’s lack of good faith.

Within hours of the incident, a Hamas leader announced that the organization was withdrawing from cease-fire negotiations with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, raising the prospect of a renewal of suicide bombings by the group. As of late Saturday, Abbas and Hamas leaders appeared headed for a showdown, with the Palestinian leader ruling out further dialogue with Hamas.

Such a conflagration raises two critical questions: Will Abbas survive, at the very least politically? Will Israel turn over security responsibilities to the Palestinians? And that is only the beginning.

The road map addresses none of these on-the-ground problems. At issue is not the peace plan’s goals, which are similar to those agreed to by previous peace negotiators. Instead, the plan’s deep vulnerability is that it omitted many details about the means to the ends.

Exacerbating the problem, the language chosen to describe the steps that each side must take is open to widely divergent interpretations.

Such omissions and obfuscations were in part an effort to avoid having so many hard and fast requirements that the plan would fail before it even started. But the vagueness was also a product of the difficulty of getting the two sides to agree to steps that are genuinely painful.

That lack of clear signposts is likely to make progress problematic.

“The road map has no roads -- it just has some points: fighting terrorism, freezing settlements, reforms in the Palestinian Authority, territorial compromise,” said Uzi Dayan, a former general and head of Israel’s National Security Council. “There is no road that shows how to get from one point to another.”

Obvious policy changes such as the removal of Jewish settlement outposts in Palestinian territories raise the question: What is an “outpost”? Is it a group of houses a half mile from a main settlement but viewed by residents as simply a new neighborhood, or does it refer only to a group of homes on an isolated hilltop?

If the people are to leave the outposts, where should they go? Will they be reimbursed by the government for the loss of their homes? If so, how much will they get?

“One would have thought that by the time the leaders made their statements at Aqaba that some kind of agreement on details would have been reached so that step-by-step things could have been done in an organized way,” said Sari Nusseiba, a founder of the People’s Peace Campaign, a Palestinian organization that coordinates closely with Israeli peace activists.

Much hangs on the leadership of the two chief executives, and both must make moves that will be politically or personally difficult for them.

If Abbas is to control the militant groups that are threatening to resume violent action against Israelis, he will have to instruct members of his security force to take on their own people. Such actions would be enormously unpopular because, as was evident in the Thursday night incident, the Israelis are continuing to play a military role in Palestinian areas.

And Sharon will have to acknowledge that his robust support of the Jewish settlements for more than a decade must be reversed.

“Sharon is the founding father of the settlements,” said Avinoam Brog, head of Marketwatch, a market research and public opinion firm. “He is the man that is personally responsible for the settler movement more than any other politician. Withdrawing from all those settlements is not an easy thing to do.”

Furthermore, there remain serious doubts about whether Sharon is committed to the road map. The language he used in his speech at Aqaba avoided an endorsement of the road map as written. He said only that he would back the road map as it was passed by the Israeli Cabinet -- that is, with a number of changes that have been rejected by the Palestinians.

The road map is divided into three phases. Within each are a series of so-called benchmarks, concrete actions that each side must take. The entire process is to be completed by 2005, but there are no timetables for each of the specific benchmarks.

In the first phase, Palestinian terrorism is supposed to stop; Palestinian institutions are to be rebuilt and Israelis would allow Palestinian life to return to normal.

The second phase is a transition to a Palestinian state with provisional borders, the adoption of a new Palestinian constitution and a continuation of the institution-building of the first phase.

The final phase anticipates the permanent redrawing of borders, an agreement on the contentious question of how Jerusalem -- which Jews and Muslims both claim as their capital -- will be governed and an agreement on how to handle Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories.

The last is particularly tricky because some of them by now are cities with thousands of residents. But unless they are physically removed, it will be impossible to create a contiguous Palestinian state. Some Israelis are proposing that Palestinian areas be linked by tunnels and roads that run under settlements or around them -- but that is hardly what the Palestinians had in mind.

Even getting to the first phase is fraught with difficulties, as Thursday night’s incident shows. For instance, the road map says that Israel should halt “actions that undermine trust.” But who is to say whether a restriction on Palestinian travel, imposed because of warnings of an impending suicide bombing, is a punitive measure “undermining trust” or a preventive one?

A case in point is the very first step required by the road map: “a cessation of violence on the part of Palestinians -- and the withdrawal of Israel from Palestinian areas.”

The only way such a formula works is if the Israelis trust that the Palestinians can stop would-be terrorists from carrying out attacks and, therefore, believe it is safe to withdraw from the majority Palestinian towns and villages.

But because an estimated 70% of the Palestinian security force’s infrastructure was decimated in large part by Israeli military actions over the past 32 months of the intifada, the Palestinian government has a limited ability to handle law enforcement.

That Palestinians lack the ability to take action could easily become a justification for a continuation of the Israeli occupation, which in turn undermines the peace effort.

“We are in a very vulnerable period,” said a Western diplomat in Israel who has watched the road map’s evolution. “The Tulkarm incident is the kind of thing, if it’s repeated, that could cause the entire process to break down.”

The problem, according to veteran negotiators, is twofold. First of all, the days immediately following an agreement are particularly vulnerable ones. If violence occurs on either side, it can undermine the entire effort.

Yet there seems to have been no plan for how to deal with this period. One of the most important features of the road map is that a team of monitors will watch over its progress. But the monitors weren’t scheduled to arrive in Israel until this week.

“The first months will be the most complicated,” said Shimon Peres, a former Israeli prime minister who has been involved in numerous peace efforts. “The Israelis say they expect 100% effort, and the Palestinians say they are not yet ready.”

The U.S. will be pushing Palestinian government ministers and their Israeli counterparts to meet with each other -- something that has not happened in years. “There’s been a total breakdown of trust,” a Western diplomat said.

Hardest of all is forcing enough to happen quickly so that both sides hang in for the long term. For the moment, there has been little change in day-to-day life for Palestinians.

Most places are still under curfew, meaning that the majority of Palestinians cannot leave their homes or can only go out for an hour or two a day. Other places have strict travel restrictions, meaning Palestinians cannot work anywhere other than in their hometown, and because there is little if any economy in most of the occupied territories, that means a continued worsening of living conditions.

But nothing will change unless both sides are willing to take a leap of faith.

“Everybody is looking for a sign that the other is really going to do what he promised to do,” Brog said. “But what we have to do is close our eyes and say ‘one, two, three’ and jump into the cold water. If we don’t do that, we’re all still waiting.”

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The peace path so far

The “road map” to peace in the Middle East, sponsored by an international “quartet” composed of the U.S., U.N., European Union and Russia, had many stops on the way to the three-way summit held last week:

March 7, 2002: President Bush, in White House remarks to reporters, says “there is a road map to peace” in the Middle East.

March 28, 2002: Arab leaders endorse a peace initiative that offers Israel “normal relations” in exchange for a Palestinian state and a “just solution” for the approximately 4 million Palestinian refugees.

June 24, 2002: Without mentioning Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat by name, Bush urges Palestinians to elect new leaders to oversee the transition to permanent statehood.

Dec. 20, 2002: After two drafts, final version of the “road map” is completed by quartet members

March 14, 2003: Bush promises to release the “road map” for a Middle East peace, reversing his previous view that the issue should wait until after the looming war with Iraq. He ties the release, though, to the naming of a new Palestinian prime minister.

March 19, 2003: Mahmoud Abbas accepts position as the new Palestinian Authority prime minister.

April 30, 2003: Road map is released to both sides and immediately accepted by Palestinians.

May 12, 2003: Arab officials express disappointment to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that the U.S. has failed to obtain concessions from Israel on the peace plan.

May 17, 2003: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Abbas meet in first top-level discussions between the two sides during the 31 months of violence.

May 22, 2003: Sharon agrees to place the road map before the Israeli Cabinet in exchange for a U.S. promise to consider his governmentOs reservations.

May 25, 2003: Israeli Cabinet votes to endorse the peace plan, but insists that Palestinians must first crack down on militant organizations.

May 29, 2003: Sharon tells Abbas he will ease closures in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and release some Palestinian prisoners but insists the new Palestinian prime minister must soon move against militants.

June 3, 2003: Key Arab leaders sign on to the peace plan, agree to back Abbas and fight terrorism.

June 4, 2003: Bush, Sharon and Abbas meet. Sharon agrees to dismantle some settlement outposts; Abbas pledges “full efforts” to end nearly three years of violence. But two militant organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, say they will not disarm.

Sources: Associated Press, Reuters, Haaretz; Researched by Tom Reinken and Scott Wilson / Los Angeles Times