Quotes of the Day

Last week, I attended two different dinner parties. In both, the participants, though coming from different fields of interest and different backgrounds, were highly politically aware people, and like at all social gatherings here, we debated the latest events and their significance to our life.

So it was weird that in both gatherings nobody mentioned the road map. In a dramatic week, in which Palestinian militants accepted a ceasefire, and Moshe Ya'alon, the Israel Defense Forces' chief of staff, declared "victory", you'd expect people to discuss nothing but the future of the road map. Yes, we spoke about the truce and wondered which side would be the first to break it. We pondered Hamas strategy: will they use the hudna [ceasefire] to regroup? We showed, as the commentators here love to say, "a careful optimism", mingled with generous quantities of careful skepticism.

But those two magical words, the "road map" weren't even mentioned. Almost as if they were irrelevant.

It's not that the Israelis don't care about the road map. It's mainly that it's too hard right now to see it with any proper perspective, as a real "occurring" peace process. This should not be so surprising. The Israeli estrangement from the road map has some very deep — and understandable — roots.

The first is the simple fact that the plan itself is quite vague. The "provisional" Palestinian state is as unclear as the promised final state, and the phases for its implementation are also uncertain. Secondly, after over two years of terror, acute recession and instability, Israelis have simply got used to thinking, feeling and planning only in the short-term. It's a matter of survival: one thinks of today, as tomorrow is too unpredictable.

The third factor, perhaps the most important one, is the huge disappointment of the Oslo Accords. In Oslo times, we were so busy with the concept of a peace process that we neglected to look into the details — the Israeli building and expansion of settlements, including wide infrastructure, clearly made for settlers only; the Palestinian corruption and misuse of weapons, given to them, ironically, by Israel — that later on caused its collapse.

That is pretty dangerous. The road map, though full of faults, is the only two-state solution in the neighborhood, and thus the only way to get out of the vicious circle of blood, hate and mistrust.

But Sharon might have his own interests in discouraging discussion about the map. Some on the left suspect he plans to freeze, or dissolve, the road map in its Phase Two — the provisional Palestinian state. At that point, according to Sharon's supposed vision, the Palestinians would have some kind of sovereignty in small, well-inspected enclaves, the Israelis would be free of the guilt of occupation, and the major settlements wouldn't have to be dismantled. That, of course, is an impossible solution, serving only extremists on both sides — the settlers and Hamas — who strongly oppose the two-state solution. For the rest of us it would be no less than a disaster, an eternal intifadeh.

That is why inserting the road map back into public discourse is imperative. The Palestinian prime minister was probably first to realize that. The Daily newspaper Maariv disclosed this Sunday (July 6th) that Abbas asked Condoleezza Rice to skip the provisional state phase in the road map and to go straight into a permanent arrangement. It's hard to believe that Abbas actually expects the U.S. to make such shortcuts. It's more likely that he was trying to evoke a renewed public interest in the process itself, bringing the road map back to life.

In 1977, a crucial year in Israeli history, when the Likud party first came to power, the Israeli basketball team Maccabi Tel Aviv won a game against ZSKA Moskva, then a giant in European basketball. One Israeli player, a newcomer from the U.S. named Tal Brody, minted then an expression that immediately became Israeli idiom. "We are", he shouted excitedly to the TV camera, "on the map!" Maccabi Tel Aviv is today one of the strongest teams in European basketball. The Likud government opened a new era of massive settlement building, setting Israel's fate for decades, if not centuries.

Today, staying on the map would mean starting to discuss the road map, and to do it seriously: not as a demonic plan to ruin us and not as a tool to supply the Palestinians with a semi-state, but as a road, which, even if not well-paved, is the only current path to sanity in this region.

• MICHAL LEVERTOV
• The Road Map. It's still there, but no one dare speak its name