Word: sharone
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...what will come next. That's because discussions between the two sides have yielded little progress, and President Bush will be called upon to prescribe the next step to each when he meets Friday with Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, and then next week with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. The Israelis and Palestinians are not really negotiating with each other; each is negotiating with the Bush Administration...
...Moreover, most of what has been achieved has occurred outside of the "roadmap" framework. The relative calm of the past month is a product not of negotiations between Sharon and Abbas, but of the "hudna" agreement that Abbas and Arab governments, particularly Egypt, managed to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the militants of Fatah to sign. Sharon, for his part, insists that his actions on the settlements are not dictated by the "roadmap" at all, but by a separate agreement between himself and President Bush...
...hard to see that in both instances, such agreements may actually work at cross-purposes to the "roadmap" plan: The Palestinian militant groups are hardly likely to maintain a truce with the Palestinian Authority if it launches a drive to disarm and dismantle them; and if Sharon is claiming Bush's backing for his own interpretation of the settlement issue (and the White House has yet to contradict him), then the credibility of the "roadmap" itself is at stake...
...appealing to the White House because his efforts to sway Sharon on this question have been fruitless. Israel plans to release up to 520 prisoners, including some members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But that's only 10 percent of the total number, and Israel is making clear it won't release anyone convicted of killing Israelis, and will act gradually as it sees Abbas cracking down on those organizations. That's unlikely to be enough for the militants, and may therefore not be enough for Abbas, who insists that prisoner-release is the single most important means of establishing...
...made even more difficult by the fact that while Sharon is the executive in charge of all Israeli actions, Abbas essentially functions as a mediator between the Americans and Israelis on the one hand, and the Palestinians with whom they refuse to talk on the other - Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the militants of Fatah and Yasser Arafat. He rules at Arafat's pleasure, and the only leverage Abbas has is to threaten to quit. He has repeatedly used that device in his clashes with Arafat, and he does the same in Washington, warning that unless the U.S. can squeeze more concessions...