Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday she will hold a summit with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on peace negotiation issues that have not been tackled for six years.
Rice said she will meet “relatively soon” with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The three-way meeting will be aimed at jump-starting the long-stalled, U.S.-backed peace plan for the Middle East, known as the “road map.”
At a news conference in Egypt, Rice said summit participants would “try and accelerate the road map and to move to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
“The parties haven’t talked about these issues for a long time — it’s been at least six years,” she said. “It seems wise to begin this.”
The announcement came after Rice met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Earlier, she spent three days visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Asked by a reporter whether the summit would inevitably lead to more “frustration and disappointment in the region,” Rice expressed cautious optimism.
“Before we say that this is going to end in frustration, let’s be glad that after six years and a long time that the parties want to engage in an informal set of discussions about the future between them,” she said.
Olmert suggested the summit is an outgrowth of his talks with Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, on Dec. 23.
“My meeting with AbuMazen caused a momentum and this momentum has to continue,” Olmert told lawmakers in Israel Monday. “This meeting is not a replacement, and will not be a replacement, for the bilateral negotiations between us and the Palestinians.”
Rice emphasized that the summit would be “an informal discussion to just really sit and talk about the issues.”
“I am very clear that the one thing that you do not want to do is to try to rush to formal negotiations before things are fully prepared, before people are fully prepared,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be progress as we’re moving along.”
Although President Bush once spoke hopefully of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before he leaves office, those hopes suffered a significant setback when the militant group Hamas won control of the Palestinian legislature a year ago.
