Reining In Ms. Rice,Editorial Board

Happily, it would appear that President Bush has reined in the United States State Department's plan to sacrifice Israel on the altar of Arab coalitionism. Two weeks ago we noted that a senior state department official, Philip Zelikow, in a foreign policy address discussing the dangers posed by Iran, said that the U.S. is now moving quickly toward reviving the Mideast peace process in the light of the Iranian threat.

"For the Arab moderates and the Europeans," he said, "some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is the sine qua non for them to cooperate actively with the United States on the things we care about... That means an active policy on the Arab-Israeli dispute is an essential ingredient to forging a coalition that deals with the most dangerous problems."

Soon after, Secretary of State Rice announced that she was going to the Middle East to try to invigorate a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians and to seek to promote pursuit of the so-called "road map" toward Middle East Peace.

This page cautioned about the implications of this effort, namely, pressuring Israel, Clinton style, to make concessions contrary to it national interests. What we were primarily concerned, of course, was with the fact that Hamas, in charge of the Palestinian Authority, has still adamantly refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israel and to accept the agreements entered into by the Palestinians in the past. As we noted last week, what Hamas - and we feared Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction were really about - was simply to seek ways to have foreign money to flow to the financially strapped Palestinian Authority rather than a general solution of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

The New York Times on Tuesday was reporting, however, that Secretary Rice's mission has been suddenly diminished. She will only be trying to get Israel to be more sensitive to the plight of the Palestinians about their freedom of movement. And this effort is in the context, moreover, of the great pain taken by the Bush Administration to signal that changes in U.S. policy regarding financial aid to the Palestinians will only come about if the Palestinians unequivocally accept the legitimacy of Israel and make meaningful efforts towards real peace.

We are still not out of the woods, as they say. But clearly, we still have someone in the White House who gets it.

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