Introduction

This paper will discuss the Annapolis peace conference inside the framework of applying the course of Foundations of International Relations on the American initiative of the conference .In this regard the paper will be divided into three parts ,the first will be a historical background of the Arab Israeli dispute ,the second part will discuss the conference itself and the positions and the stands of different parties, and the final part of the paper will have an analysis to the reasons of the American initiative and its timing throughout the current state of the International system .

I. Historical background of the Arab Israeli conflict

Before World War I, Palestine was, as was the Middle East region, a part of the Ottoman Empire. Tensions between the native Arab population of Palestine and the small, but growing, Jewish settler population in the area were on the increase towards the end of the 19th century.

After World War I the area came under British rule as the British mandate of Palestine. Jewish immigration to Palestine increased. This together with the dire economic situation in the land, as a result of internal factors and as a result of the world-wide economic difficulties, led to a large Arab immigration and further increased tensions in the region. These led to riots and general civil unrest.

The situation was at a boiling point by 1939. However, with the winds of war in the air, the issue was put on hold for the duration of the war. At the end of World War II, Britain wanted a resolution of the problem. It referred the issue to the United Nations. Its solution was a two-state solution. The UN partition plan was approved by the United Nations in November 1947 by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions, but was rejected by Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states which constituted the Arab League.

The main differences between the 1947 partition proposal and 1949 armistice lines are highlighted in light red and magenta

Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948. Almost immediately the Arab League countries Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq declared war

on Israel and invaded the territory of the British Mandate in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Israel managed to successfully win the war. The War came to an end with the signing of the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and each of its Arab neighbors. In relation to the UN Partition Plan, Israel's territory after the armistice agreements was considerably greater than that allocated to the Jewish State by the UN partition plan.

On July 26, 1956, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal Company, . Israel responded to this action on October 29, 1956, by invading the Sinai Peninsula with British and French support. During the Suez Canal Crisis, Israel captured the Gaza Strip and Israel agreed to

withdraw from Egyptian territory. Egypt agreed to freedom of navigation in the region and the demilitarization of the Sinai. The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was created and deployed to oversee the demilitarization. ]. The UNEF was only deployed on the Egyptian side of the border, as Israel refused to allow them on its territory.

On June 5 Israel sent almost all of its planes on a preemptive mission in Egypt. The Israeli Air Force destroyed most of the Egyptian Air Force, then turned east to pulverize the Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi air forces.[19] This strike was the crucial element in Israel's victory in the Six-Day War

In the summer of 1967, Arab leaders met in Khartoum in response to the war, to discuss the Arab position toward Israel. They reached consensus that there should be:

No recognition of the State of Israel. No peace with Israel. No negotiations with Israel.

In 1969, Egypt initiated the War of Attrition, with the goal of exhausting Israel into surrendering the Sinai Peninsula..

On October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, overwhelming the surprised Israeli military in a great day for the Egyptian history . The 6th of October war accommodated indirect confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union. When Israel had turned the tide of war, the USSR threatened military intervention. The United States, wary of nuclear war, secured a ceasefire by the end of the month.

Following the Camp David Accords of the late 1970s, Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in March, 1979. Under its terms, the Sinai Peninsula returned to Egyptian hands, and the Gaza Strip remained under Israeli control, to be included in a future Palestinian state.

In October, 1994, Israel and Jordan signed a peace agreement, which stipulated mutual cooperation, an end of hostilities, and a resolution of other unsorted issues.

In 1987, the First Intifada began. The PLO was excluded from negotiations to resolve it until it recognized Israel and renounced terrorism the following year. In 1993, Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords, and their Declaration of Principles, which, together with the Road map for peace, have been loosely used as the guidelines for Israeli-Palestinian relations since

As a response to the al-Aqsa Intifada, Israel raided facilities in major urban centers in the West Bank in 2002. Violence again swept through the region. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began a policy of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2003. This policy was fully implemented in August, 2005.

In July, 2006, Hezbollah fighters crossed the border from Lebanon into Israel, attacked and killed eight Israeli soldiers, and kidnapped two others, setting off the 2006 Lebanon War A UN-sponsored ceasefire went into effect on August 14, 2006, officially ending the conflict.

II. The Annapolis Conference

The Annapolis Conference was a Middle East peace conference held on November 27, 2007, at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, United States. The conference ended with the issuing of a joint statement from all partiesU.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice organized and hosted the conference. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and U.S. President George W. Bush attended the meeting. A partial list of over 40 invitees was released on 20 November 2007, including China, the Arab League, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations; most of whom have accepted the invitation.

The Egyptian position was that he peace, should be based on justice and equity by respecting international legitimacy and international law to which all must be subject and the UN resolutions pertinent to this historic conflict. Land should be exchanged for peace. And this is a necessity for the integration of Israel in the Middle East. And the following factors are the basis of the Egyptian positionFirst: Security Council Resolutions 242, 338, 1397, 1515 are all resolutions that uphold the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the creation of a Palestinian State on the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel following June 4th 1967.

Second: The Principle of Land for Peace, which was coined by the United States during the negotiations between Egypt and Israel at the end of the 1970’s, is a formulation that is acceptable to the Arabs for instituting just peace in the region.

Third: The Arab Peace Initiative, which provides Israel with a strategic vision of its position in the region should it conform to the will of the international community and return the occupied Palestinian and Arab lands to their rightful owners and reach a settlement to this conflict.

Fourth: The Road Map, which is a document that outlines the obligations of both parties on the path of establishing the independent Palestinian State.

Saudi Arabia initially insisted that all 'core issues' should be discussed, the most important of which are borders and Israeli settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and the Palestinian right of return, as a condition for Saudi participation. On 4 November 2007, P.M. Olmert declared that all core issues were on the Annapolis agenda.[4] The Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, Saud al-Faisal, finally announced on 23 November 2007 that

he would participate due to the near-Arab consensus on the summit, following an Arab League meeting in Cairo.[5] On 26 November 2007, it was reported that despite his decision to attend, Saud al-Faisal had announced that he would neither shake the hand of Ehud Olmert, nor converse with him during the summit, since he is coming for business and not for political

plays, while Ehud Olmert said that a hand shake is not necessary. Although the decision to attend by the Arab League states was supposedly a collective one, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem insisted, following the League meeting, that Syria had not yet made a decision due to uncertainty over whether the issue of the Golan Heights would be on the agenda. The rebuttal re-iterated an October 2007 declaration by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Syria has, however, been given informal assurances that it will be discussed. On 25 November, it was announced that Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad would attend.

The goal of the conference was to produce a substantive document on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along the lines of President George W. Bush's Roadmap For Peace, with the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state. President Abbas and P.M. Olmert had been meeting repeatedly since June 2007 to try and agree on some basic issues ahead of the summit.

A final round of discussions between Olmert and Abbas was held in Washington D.C. on 26 November 2007, the day prior to the conference.

Secretary Rice visited the Middle East on a four day tour of shuttle diplomacy in mid-October to shore up support for the summit, and hinted at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities (GA), in Nashville, Tennessee on November 13, 2007, that Israelis are prepared to give up the West Bank in exchange for peaceAbbas stated that a clear agenda was necessary for the conference, and affirmed in early October that only a Palestinian state comprising the West Bank and Gaza Strip in their entirety would be acceptable, with any permanent Israeli control of land beyond its 1967 borders subject to discussion on a one-to-one basis He further demanded that all six central, borders, settlements, water and security.

Abbas has said that he hoped to reach an agreement with Israel by the end of November 2007 which Abbas would then put to a referendum. Furthermore, he has expressed his hope that a final agreement with Israel would be possible within six months of the conference, although he refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a deal-breaker as far as the Olmert government is concerned.

In October 2007, Prime Minister Olmert indicated that he would be willing to give parts of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians as part of a broader peace settlement at Annapolis,] drawing considerable criticism from right-wing Israeli and foreign Jewish organizations and Christian Zionists. Knesset members from within Olmert's own ruling coalition have also been trying to stop such plans.

III. Why the US administration Initiated this conference?

It’s a really tough question and it has the following possibilities to answer

1. Does the US expressing itself as an empire?2. Is it the pressure of other parties like the EU ,Russia and the Arab

World or in other words a state of hegemony ?3. Is it a reflection to the US Internal politics?4. Or is it the status of Anarchy which is spreading the contemporary

World?5. Is it a kind of a media propaganda for the US or by other words a way

of expressing the soft power of the American Administration?

Concerning the first question , The reality is that the US is the super power which is on the top of the pyramid of international system since it have all the means of power which are economic ,political ,military ,and off course the power of the media , but is this enough to move the unmovable peace process ,the answer in some sense is yes because the US is the only power that can put such a process into dynamics but there are limitations to this power which will be discussed while answering the second question.

Since I reached the point of that the US is the only super power in the contemporary World but does this mean that the US doesn’t face pressure from other powers of the World , the fact is that there is an international interest for peace in the Middle East after the conflict has lasted for nearly sixty years , there is a will from other external parties like the European Union ,Russia and China ,this is plus the will of the Internal moderate powers in the region for just ,lasting and comprehensive peace . So in these regards the US is reacting to the pressure from outside after the accusations to the current administration of neglecting the peace process in the Middle East for the last six years and concentrating on taking security and preemptive measures after the 9/11 attacks which have put the US policy makers in a big dilemma ,add to this the war on Iraq and its impacts and the

disapproval of the International Public opinion especially after the appearance of evident that there was a violation of human rights of the prisoners of Abou Gharieb prison in Iraq.

The above paragraph leads us to discuss the third question I raised which is the Bush administration decision of initiating such a conference a reflect to the US current internal politics ? The fact is that this Administration has the lowest approval rates in the American Public opinion , son in some how the administration has nothing to lose and such an event could be a reason if the conference succeed in raising these rates ,another reason it could be a practice from the administration to disperse the public opinion on concentrating on Iraq , another option of the reasons that could be inside the minds of the US administration is to trap the next administration in which there is a great possibility that it will come from the Democrats side into a policy that they cant withdraw from it .

The answer to the fourth question is in some sense also is yes the current world witness a state of Anarchy Because of that the US is the only super power in the contemporary world ,and there is an absence of institutional framework so the US cant control every event in the current world we have many examples , one is the 9/11 attacks, the second is what is happening in Iraq, the third is the rise of Hamas as an elected power in Gaza in which US had nothing to do with such events .

This will lead to an answer to the final question ,the US is trying to express its soft power by initiating this conference to change the negative image which is drawn in the Arab and Muslim Worlds public opinion specially after the measures taken after the September 11 attacks and the injuries it had and still having in Iraq and Afghanistan ,and it somehow succeeded in this job despite the opposition from radical parties in the region .

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab-Israeli_conflict

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Conferencewww.mfa.gov.eg

www.daralhayat.com/opinion

www.iht.com

Paper presented by

Abdelhamied Hanie ElRafie

About

The Application to the Concepts

Discussed throughout the course

Of Foundations of International

Relations on The Annapolis Peace Conference

Under the Supervision of

Professor Ana Cristina Petersen