Middle East: the fog of peace

An Israeli-Palestinian Steering Committee meets on Wednesday to start the peace talks launched at Annapolis on November 27.  So far, so good, but very few other details were settled at Annapolis. 

While the two sides are to negotiate the core 'final status' issues -- Jerusalem, refugees, borders -- while simultaneously reviving the moribund 2003 'roadmap', their remit is exceptionally vague.  Is it tabula rasa, or are they starting from where they left off when negotiations at Taba broke down in January 2001? 

Olmert has managed to keep things satisfactorily vague, while Abbas got much less than he wanted from Annapolis.  While this will help Olmert keep his coalition together, it hardly serves one of the main purposes of Annapolis: to boost Abbas.  And even if Abbas were to secure some much-needed concessions from the talks, Olmert has a fallback option.  For as long as Abbas only controls the West Bank, the pressure on him to implement any concessions is never going to be too taxing.  But there is no sign that Hamas -- and thus Gaza -- is going to be brought into the process.

Nobody has so far tried to capitalise on Syria's attendance at the meeting to engage Damascus on the Golan and the fragile situation in Lebanon. Current US diplomacy is leaden, uninspired and reactive -- there is little evidence of the creative spark essential to chart a way forward where none seems to exist.