NEWSWEEK: How long does it take to draft a document like the Roadmap? Terje-Roed Larsen: It’s a very time-consuming process. We spent nearly half a year drafting it and negotiating absolutely every sentence.
Give me an example of a section that was really labored over. We had a philosophical debate that went on throughout the drafting sessions, which we termed “sequentialism versus parallelism.” I insisted that the political issues, the security issues and the economic issues have to be addressed in parallel and that doing it sequentially—saying first the security issues have to be resolved—that wouldn’t work without tackling the final status issues like borders, Jerusalem and refugees at the same time. The way it came out, the Roadmap allowed the Israeli government of Prime Minister [Ariel] Sharon to interpret it very strictly as security first, followed by politics and economics. And since it became impossible to improve the security situation, the whole enterprise got stuck.
So essentially you’re saying it was a mistake on the part of the drafters to leave the issue of parallel measures vague, because it let Israel hinge the whole thing on security improvement? Yes. And there must be a realization in the government of Israel now that it was a mistake to produce a sequentialist strategy, which only led to more bloodshed on both sides. And this is the beauty of the exercise at Annapolis, which is that you now have both sides working on all the issues at the same time. But it won’t necessarily work. It will require masterful diplomacy on all sides.
One of the things that strikes me in reading the Roadmap now is how optimistic the timetable was. What was the basis for that optimism? I think when you produce a document like that you have to produce timelines or else you won’t get anywhere. Timelines put pressure on the parties.
Put the Roadmap in a historical context. How does it compare, for instance, with the first Israel-Palestinian agreement, known as the Oslo accord? Oslo did not define the end goal, because the Palestinians and the Israelis in the Oslo process were not capable of agreeing on the establishment of a Palestinian state. Many of the Israeli figures at the time opposed a Palestinian state. What the Roadmap did was kind of close that loop by stating that the goal is a Palestinian state … And this was accepted by both Sharon and [Yasir] Arafat. So in a way Sharon radicalized Oslo. Many people seem to believe that Oslo is the radical document and the Roadmap is a moderate document. It’s actually the other way around.
But in the end, neither Oslo nor the Roadmap nor a host of other papers and documents actually succeeded in bringing about peace between the two sides. What does that say about the whole exercise, including Annapolis? All these exercises, though they have not materialized in reaching this end goal, have produced an ideological revolution both among the leadership of the Palestinians and the Israelis and also among the people, because now there has emerged a majority on both sides that believes the two-state solution is the best solution to this decades-long conflict. So Oslo and the Roadmap have produced ideological revolutions, which have reshaped the minds of the parties—both the leadership and the people.
At Annapolis, President Bush talked about getting the two sides to reach an agreement by the end of next year. Is that realistic? It is possible, but not necessarily likely. In a way, you have three parties in the region. You have the peacemakers, who really want to resolve the issues and create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. There are many Arab states in the region who will support and work for this. Then you have the peace breakers, who will say, “It’s not in our interests to have this state, because our goal is push Israel into the sea.” And they will use every means available to undermine this process. And then you have what I call the “conflict entrepreneurs,” who thrive on keeping the conflict alive. What they believe is that a resolution of the Palestinian conflict will take away a weapon of ideology from their arsenal.
These are countries like Syria? I don’t want to comment on which countries, but you find all three schools of thought represented throughout the region, both among nonstate actors and state actors.
What about the issue of Jewish settlements? The Roadmap called for a total freeze, but the settler population in the West Bank has grown by 20 percent since then. I think unless there is a settlement freeze on the Israeli side and a clampdown on security on the Palestinian, there will be very little credibility to the process.
