Update: Bernard Lewis lays out the scenario especially well:
The first question (one might think it is obvious but apparently not) is, "What is the conflict about?" There are basically two possibilities: that it is about the size of Israel, or about its existence.
If the issue is about the size of Israel, then we have a straightforward border problem, like Alsace-Lorraine or Texas. That is to say, not easy, but possible to solve in the long run, and to live with in the meantime. . .
If the issue is not the size of Israel, but its existence, negotiations are foredoomed. And in the light of the past record, it is clear that is and will remain the issue, until the Arab leadership either achieves or renounces its purpose--to destroy Israel. Both seem equally unlikely for the time being.
Andy McCarthy in a biting article calls the Annapolis meeting a "farce."
Buried in Annapolis will be the last shards of the Bush Doctrine, the blunt marker the president once put down to signal a do-or-die choice for jihadist nations. Are you with us, he asked, or with the terrorists?
Caroline Glick says:
But in the interests of bringing about the declaration of a sovereign state of Palestine, Rice and her associates are advancing policies that smack of moral dementia.
Her powerful article explains why.
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David Horowitz can't put his objections too strongly.
An American Secretary of State should be in Baghdad brokering a reconciliation between Iraqi factions and locking down a victory for which nearly 4,000 Americans gave their lives. Iraq is the central front in the holy war against
the West being waged by al-Qaeda and the Islamic Republic of Iran, and an American defeat in Iraq would lead to an escalation of that war to proportions that would make the current conflict in Iraq seem tame by comparison.
Instead, Condoleeza Rice has been shuttling between capitals in the Middle East in an attempt to feed a piece of Jewish meat to the jackals in the West Bank in the hopes that bribery and concessions will turn them into doves and they will agree to live side by side with a non-Islamic state -- a state run by pigs and monkeys, whom their prophet has cursed.
This will not happen. The Palestinians do not want to live alongside a Jewish state in the Muslim Middle East, they want to destroy it. The majority of Palestinians have voted for a party, Hamas, which is dedicated to the "obliteration" of the Jewish state, as it decleares in its charter. Eighty years ago the Arabs of Palestine were given a state in Jordan, carved out of the Turkish empire. Fifty years ago they were given another state on the West Bank and in Gaza. They rejected the second state because the plan that created it from the land once owned by the Turks also created a Jewish state, half of which was arid desert. This inspired a sixty-year war against the Jews -- men, women and children -- which concessions like the ones Bush and Rice are pressuring Israel to increase only led to further slaughter and new demands. (more...)