Enforcing the Peace

"For more than a decade, even before the recent eruptions of intensified border violence, technocrats representing the Quartet-the European Union, Russia, the United States, and the UN have been engaged in refining a blueprint for an Israel territorially augmented by limited and reciprocal security-border adjustments and a state of Palestine demographically configured to encompass a near totality of the Palestinian territories' current Arab inhabitants, with guaranteed contiguity for its population centers and a protected overland trade and travel route between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But with so-called proximity talks and even face-to- face discussions endlessly collapsing in a lethal series of cross-border Arab rocket attacks and Israeli military retaliation, the great powers themselves at long last are faced with the challenge of borrowing from historical precedent and operating not as mediators but as principals." (Foreign Affairs) The author contends that without Washington leading the way in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, peace will not be achieved.