Bush Urged to Help Mediate Gaza Pullout

With arrangements for Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip far from complete, the Bush administration faces growing pressure to take a more active role in last-minute mediation between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

President Bush has long insisted that his administration avoid trying to direct such negotiations, fearing that it would squander presidential prestige without yielding progress. But now Palestinian leaders, some European leaders and other observers are warning that unless the United States intensifies its efforts, the pullout scheduled for mid-August could end poorly, endangering future steps toward peace.

The pullout may be disrupted by Jewish settler protests and marred by Palestinian attacks. If the withdrawal leaves the 1.3 million Gaza Palestinians isolated, and the Israelis too bitter to make further moves toward peace, U.S. goals for the region could be damaged, the critics warn.

Although the Israeli government’s attention has been focused on domestic political disputes centered on the pullout and the specter of violent settler resistance, the issue of coordination with the Palestinians is key. With the disengagement to begin in just two weeks, the two sides are still discussing how to coordinate the withdrawal of the nearly 9,000 settlers and ensure that the congested seaside enclave is economically viable when they leave.

Decisions have not been made on the role of the Palestinian security forces, who are to help ensure a peaceful withdrawal and assume authority as Israeli forces depart. Also unresolved is how Palestinians in Gaza, now restricted in their movements, will be able to move in and out of the territory, and how they will be able to send their products abroad to restore a feeble economy.

The two sides are still discussing plans to link Gaza to the outside world by reopening the airport and building a seaport.

Bush has said that he places the highest priority on the withdrawal, and American officials have accelerated their efforts to assist.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has visited the region three times this year, most recently in late July, and Army Lt. Gen. William Ward has been working since March to help reorganize the Palestinian security services and coordinate the disengagement.

But the role of Rice and the other U.S. officials has usually been to urge the two sides to work together, rather than to push them toward specific decisions. In her most recent trip, for example, Rice again called for closer coordination and underscored the U.S. concern that Palestinians gain free movement in and out of Gaza.

“We’ll work as we can to make [it] happen,” Rice said as she traveled to the region. “But ultimately, the parties have got to get this done.”

Edward Abington, a former U.S. diplomat who is now an advisor to the Palestinian Authority, said that despite their pledges, U.S. officials were reluctant to make the full commitment that was required.

The United States “is putting its hope for the peace process in this rather flimsy basket of the Gaza withdrawal,” he said. “But from what I can see, it’s not really making a commensurate high-level effort to make it succeed.”

For the withdrawal to come off smoothly, he said, “you’ve got to go in there, roll up your sleeves.... You’ve got to ask the Israelis and the Palestinians, ‘What do you need to get this done?’ And then you’ve got to broker the agreements.”

Abington, a former U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem, said the lesson of the last three decades of Arab-Israeli diplomacy was that “the two sides can’t make progress unless there’s high-level U.S. mediation.”

European officials, who are eager to see the disengagement lead to progress toward peace, have not publicly called for the United States to intensify its role.

But one European diplomat in Washington, who asked to remain unidentified, said anxious European officials had been privately pushing the Americans “to do all they can to make sure it happens.”

The diplomat added that although a number of nations and international groups were trying to push the process, the United States was best positioned to produce results.

The European Union is part of a diplomatic group known as the “quartet” that is trying to make headway in the peace effort. The other partners are the United States, the United Nations and Russia.

Dennis B. Ross, a Mideast peace envoy under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and Martin Indyk, a U.S. ambassador to Israel under Clinton, have called for a more active U.S. role.

“Impressive rhetoric without a commitment to the necessary hard diplomatic work has been the hallmark of the Bush administration,” Indyk wrote in the Financial Times on July 22, while Rice was in the region. But he said he hoped that Rice’s current efforts would mark a change from those in the previous six months -- during which, he said, the administration “ ‘sub-contracted’ peacemaking” to Ward and to former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, who was in charge of the economics of disengagement.

David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the Bush administration needed to step up its role for several reasons: to try to prevent a further unraveling of a cease-fire by Palestinian militant groups, to increase security cooperation to permit a safe withdrawal and to convince the two sides to promote the sense that the withdrawal is a joint endeavor rather than a unilateral Israeli enterprise.

If the disengagement looks like a solely Israeli production, members of the militant group Hamas will be able to argue to their fellow Palestinians that their attacks have forced an Israeli withdrawal, said Makovsky, who is director of the institute’s Project on the Middle East Peace Process.

He said he hoped Rice’s recent trip was a sign that “this deserves high-level attention, because the clock is ticking.”

Israeli officials have a different point of view. Although they regularly ask the United States to use its leverage to get the Palestinian Authority to go after militants, they insist that the administration is already fully engaged.

They praise recent U.S. efforts and say American officials should act as facilitators, because they cannot make decisions for the two sides.

Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said the success of disengagement “is clearly not just an Israeli imperative.... It has also become an American imperative.”

Ayalon said there was no question that the withdrawal would take place.

The greatest challenge, he said, is in getting the Palestinian Authority to move aggressively against militants and their infrastructure.

“The important question is how smooth and orderly will the process be, because this will signal to the Israeli people, more than anything else, whether this can be a continuous process” toward peace, once the pullout is complete, he said.

Israeli officials maintain that despite Palestinian complaints, progress is being made on many of the issues under discussion in the disengagement.

Part of the reason Bush has been unwilling to intervene too forcefully is his reluctance to push Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who he understands is under enormous domestic political pressure as he tries to change the course of Israeli history, analysts say.

“The overriding concern for the administration is, don’t do anything that is going to make [Sharon’s] job tougher,” said Edward S. Walker, the president of the Middle East Institute, a policy center focused on the region, and a former assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs.

Yet even if the United States is less involved than some would like, it too will be hurt if the disengagement goes poorly, Walker pointed out.

If the Gazans feel imprisoned, and Israelis balk at further steps toward peace, he said, disappointment and anger will ripple through the region, creating new resistance to the Middle East reform effort that is a top Bush priority.

“This is so closely intertwined with everything the administration is trying to do,” Walker said.