Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. will continue monitoring Israeli compliance with an April pledge to ease restrictions on Palestinian travel throughout the West Bank — a promise that Miss Rice indicated the Israelis had yet to fulfill.
Miss Rice made her remarks to reporters on her plane while returning to Washington yesterday from a brief trip to Israel and the West Bank.
“We really have to look more at qualitatively what is the effect,” Miss Rice said.
“That means that our monitors get out among the communities, talk to people who are trying to get agricultural products to market, talk to people who are trying to get through checkpoints and really get a sense of how the movement and access are working,” she said.
Last month, Israel said it had removed 60 barriers, completing a pledge made earlier to the U.S. to remove at least 50 of hundreds of barriers to Palestinian travel.
The claim was immediately challenged by Palestinians who called for the U.S. to go see for itself whether the action had any substantial effect.
A senior U.S. official traveling with Miss Rice said that a “handful” of U.S. diplomats had gone to the West Bank and that some of the removed roadblocks had been “insignificant.” The official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution.
Aryreh Mekel, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said he was unaware of the U.S. criticism and could not comment.
The monitoring effort is being led by Lt. Gen. William Fraser, who has become a frequent visitor to Israel and the West Bank to assess firsthand exactly what Israel has said it has done, and the criticisms leveled by the Palestinians.
Gen. Fraser has been traveling throughout the West Bank accompanied by two State Department political officers to meet with officials on either side and is checking actual roadblock locations. He submits his reports to Miss Rice.
A U.S. Embassy official says the expectations for implementation of U.S.-backed “road map” peace plan are modest compared with the more ambitious goal of reaching a peace agreement by the end of the Bush administration.
“We know it isn’t going to be an easy process, or a fast process,” the diplomat said.”People are aware that this is going to take a lot of effort and patience. It doesn’t change over night.”
Israeli lawmaker Ephraim Sneh from the dovish Labor Party and a former deputy defense minister echoed the secretary of state’s criticism by saying that the Israeli defense establishment hadn’t done enough to raise the quality of life for Palestinians.
“We can do more to make it easier for the Palestinian economy in more than one aspect. For instance, the checkpoints — not all of them — we can remove more of them,” he said.
The U.S. and its allies are looking to spur economic growth in the West Bank to shore up grass-roots support for the government of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in his struggle against Hamas.
Israeli security officials argue that every roadblock removed constitutes a security risk, and that only when the Palestinians step up actions against militants will it be possible to remove more barriers.
Citing Israel’s restrictions, the World Bank cautioned last week that per-capita income in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank in 2008 would be static, if not lower than the prior year, despite $7.7 billion in aid pledged to the Palestinians in December.
In addition to the roadblocks, Palestinians are criticizing Israel for holding up a new mobile-phone company that would bring $650 million in direct investment, create hundreds of jobs and lower phone rates.
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