Olmert Ouster Likely To Slow Peace Parley

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WASHINGTON — Israeli peace talks with Syria and the Palestinian Arabs will likely stall in the aftermath of Ehud Olmert’s decision to step down as prime minister and not seek his party’s nomination in a vote scheduled for mid-September.

The political shake-up in Jerusalem will hurl Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, into the middle of a primary contest with Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, who has emerged as an Iran hawk in the last year, pledging the Jewish state will not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. Meanwhile, the winner of that primary will likely be forced to run in a general election where a plurality of Israelis today support the Likud party of Benjamin Netanyahu, who vocally opposes both the Syria negotiations and the Annapolis process.

RELATED: Olmert’s Shoulders.

The winner of the race with have to deal with either Senator McCain and Obama. Both American presidential candidates have pledged not to allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, and both have expressed their views that America’s relationship with Israel is of paramount national interest, but either would be new to the presidency.

Mrs. Livni yesterday met with a Palestinian Arab negotiator, Saeb Erakat, and Secretary of State Rice for another round of the process started last November at Annapolis, Md. Mr. Erakat told reporters, “We decided today that we are going to continue pursuing to reach an agreement before the end of the year.” But he later added that the Palestinian Arabs would not accept a piecemeal proposal that failed to address final-status issues such as refugees and the status of Jerusalem.

This is a problem for Ms. Rice, who behind the scenes has pushed for a statement from the two parties noting areas of disagreement and areas of convergence before the end of the Bush administration. This aspiration for the Annapolis process is a significant step back from President Bush’s position in November that the Palestinians would be able to forge an independent state by the end of his presidency.

“Basically, Secretary Rice would like a summation document that points to the disagreements and the points of convergence between the two parties. The problem is that no political figures like to expose to the public the concessions they make in the absence of a diplomatic breakthrough. To politicians, they have all the pain and none of the gain. There is not much hope for such an agreed-upon document,” a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, David Makovsky, said.

On the Syria track, the American side has encouraged Syrian-Israeli talks openly since it confirmed this spring the successful Israeli raids on a nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert. At the same time, the State Department has not begun the hands-on summitry of other administrations aimed at producing a deal. This is in part because one of the main, unspoken goals of the Syrian diplomatic process is to get President Assad to break his military and intelligence alliance with Iran.

“The key question is, can you peel Syria away from Iran,” Mr. Makovsky said. “For that to happen, there needs to be a series of conversations with Syria, whether they will break their military alliance with Iran, whether they will stop importing Iranian rockets and the like. That is a set of conversations that will require the United States. I don’t believe this was ever going anywhere this year. This is a classic 2009 issue.”

The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, who was in New York for meetings with Secretary-General Ban, told The New York Sun that he approved of Mr. Olmert’s decision to step down in the face of a scandal involving allegations of cash payments from a Long Island businessman.

“I think Prime Minister Olmert took a responsible and proper decision not to run in his party’s primaries and to vacate his office once a new leader is elected by Kadima,” Mr. Barak said. As for whether Mr. Barak will seek to dissolve the government and call a new general election, the defense minister was coy. “All other decisions, we will take them later. All the options are well-known, and whatever needs to happen will happen,” he said.

Mr. Barak came closer than any other Israeli leader to dividing Jerusalem and creating a Palestinian Arab state when he went to Camp David in 2000 for negotiations with Yasser Arafat that were brokered by President Clinton personally. Since then, however, Mr. Barak has reinvented himself as a hawk in Israeli domestic politics, favoring a hard line against Iran and urging for the construction of the security barrier between Israel and parts of the West Bank.


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