A leader in Israel’s hard-line Likud Party said in Washington yesterday that the tentative reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians begun in Annapolis was fundamentally flawed and practically moribund.
“To expect any real peace any time soon is impossible,” said Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. who heads Likud’s department of foreign relations.
Given the low popularity of both the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Mr. Shoval said, the best that could happen would be gradual steps toward reconciliation, “the way porcupines make love: slowly and carefully.”
The Bush administration has been trying to broker an agreement between the two sides to establish a Palestinian state by the end of President Bush’s term, but repeated trips to the region by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have failed to produce any concrete results.
Mr. Shoval, who has served as an Israeli delegate to several peace negotiations, said the fundamental flaw in the Annapolis initiative was to put the Palestinian status card “in front of a very weak cart.”
The only way the effort would even survive to the end of the current administration would be to retool it and tone it down, he said.
“It has now been downgraded to a framework, and this might actually happen,” potentially giving Mr. Bush a document to hold up on his scheduled visit to Israel next month, he said.
But implementation of the core issues — the future of Jerusalem, the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Israel’s borders — “is not imaginable,” Mr. Shoval told a gathering at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official involved in the Middle East peace process, said the more pressing problem in the region was the growing reach of Iran.
“The real worry today is not what is going to happen between Israel and the Palestinians. The real worry is Iran,” he said.
In Israel, at least three Palestinian gunmen from the Gaza Strip penetrated the border fence and a nearby gas terminal yesterday, killing two Israeli civilians in the first major cross-border attack from the coastal territory in nearly two years.
Israeli soldiers killed two of the gunmen before they could escape. At least one returned to Gaza through the fence. Israel’s military said its aircraft fired on a getaway car inside Gaza. Palestinian reports said at least one person died in the air strike.
The attack interrupted several weeks of calm along the Israeli-Gaza border. A militant spokesman told the Al Jazeera satellite channel that the purpose of the strike was to kidnap soldiers.
In June 2006, militants who infiltrated from Gaza kidnapped Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit back across the border.
The Israeli government blamed Hamas for the attack even though the Islamic rulers of Gaza were not among the organizations that claimed responsibility.
Three Palestinian groups — Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and the Popular Resistance Committee — claimed responsibility for the attack.
• Joshua Mitnick reported from Tel Aviv.
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