Tony Blair will be bitterly disappointed if he is expecting a Palestinian State to emerge in 2008.
Israel`s Prime Minister - Ehud Olmert - in his speech at Annapolis stated that:
"The negotiations will be based on previous agreements between us, U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the road map and the April 14, 2004 letter of President Bush to the Prime Minister of Israel."
That letter is going to be a central pillar in Israel`s continued rejection of PLO demands that the PLO be given every single metre of the West Bank, that the 450000 Jews living there be uprooted and that millions of Arabs be allowed to go and live in Israel.
PLO Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, is too weak to abandon these demands - first made by Yasser Arafat in 1974 - which have been parroted and trotted out by the Arab League ever since.
Unless Abbas is prepared to concede the heavily populated Jewish areas of the West Bank to Israel and abandon the claimed Arab right of return to Israel, these negotiations will become bogged down in the quicksand that marked the frenetic negotiating sessions prior to Annapolis.
Despite the posturing and grandstanding at Annapolis, there will be no change in the cycle of nothingness that has existed since President Bush`s euphoric announcement of his " two state vision" in 2002.
Fruitless negotiations over the next twelve months will see the President`s vision consigned to the shelves of his Presidential Library as a testament to six years of wasted diplomacy.
Paralysis has set in and become institutionalised for the next 12 months as a result of Annapolis - and nothing the President or Tony Blair does or says will be capable of producing any discernible movement.
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