View a detailed map of the Gaza Strip, including Israeli settlements, Palestinian communities, IDF security zones, Egypt-Israel border buffer zone, checkpoints, and roads.
After four and a half years of terror and violence, the proverbial
stars seem to be aligned for a new push for peace between the Israelis
and the Palestinians. Unlike his predecessor, the newly elected
Palestinian Authority (PA) president, Mahmoud Abbas, stresses the
importance of peaceful problem solving and has condemned suicide
bombing (in Arabic and in English) as counterproductive. On the
Israeli side, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the onetime architect of
the settlement movement, is leading the drive to evacuate all settlers
from Gaza and the northern West Bank. At Sharm-el-Sheikh earlier
this year, he and Abbas committed to a cease-fire, an important step
even if rejectionists on both sides are certain to try to exploit it. In
Washington, meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice is as close to the commander
in chief as any secretary of state has been since James Baker
teamed up with George W. Bush’s father, guaranteeing that she
speaks with the president’s authority.
But even under such relatively favorable conditions, it is wrong to assume that the Israelis and the Palestinians can simply return to the summer of 2000, when Washington thought that an end to the conflict was within sight. Since then, trust between the parties has been shattered by violence, and rebuilding it will not be quick or easy. . . .
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs, 2005. Copyright 2005 by Council on Foreign Relations. For permission to republish, please contact lhammes@cfr.org
