Rice planning 'Palestine' parley or bust

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By Stan Goodenough
October 29, 2007

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will not take no for an answer and is pushing ahead with plans to host the Bush administration's conference on the creation of Palestine.

Billed as an international Middle East peace parley, it is set to take place in Annapolis, Maryland in November.

Rice is scheduled to return to Israel early next week, during which time she will likely hand-deliver her invitations to the event.

This is according to officials in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's offices at the weekend. No further details were forthcoming.

Washington is the sole sponsor of the conference, to which the Jewish State of Israel and the terrorists Palestine Liberation Organization/Palestinian Authority are invited.

Egypt and a number of other Arab states are also expected to send delegations.

With the US playing the “honest broker” role and all the Arab participants standing with the PLO/PA, the deck will certainly be stacked against little Israel.

The conference will apparently go ahead despite doubts recently voiced by both Rice and Olmert as to its feasability.

Gaps between the sides remain wide, but some observers believe that with Bush and Rice running out of time because of the 2008 election year, they have just about exhausted their options.

On Friday, Olmert and PLO/PA chief Mahmoud Abbas met in Jerusalem to try and hammer out some kind of joint statement Rice has demanded that she receive before the Annapolis event.

Israeli officials who attended the talk said afterwards the two men had drawn fractionally closer, but that they still retained substantially different points of view on most issues.

Olmert wants the statement to be more general and vague, while Abbas is demanding specific details to be pinned down, including a timetable for Israel's full withdrawal from Samaria and Judea - the historic Jewish lands the Palestinian Arabs have been working for decades to steal for themselves.

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