United Nations – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged Israel on Tuesday to allow Palestinians to hold legislative elections in January without interference, implicitly criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
During a visit to New York City last week, Sharon said he would withhold cooperation with the Palestinian legislative elections if candidates from the militant group Hamas took part.
He and Palestinian leaders said elections could not be held without Israeli cooperation.
“This is going to be a Palestinian process,” Rice said after a U.N. meeting to discuss the Middle East, “and I think we have to give the Palestinians some room for the evolution of their political process.
“We hope that the elections can go forward and that everyone will work to make those elections go forward.”
Sharon’s assertion puts the Bush administration in the awkward position of having to choose between its two most important foreign policy goals: fighting terrorism and spreading democracy in the Arab world.
Rice met with representatives from the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, a group known as the Quartet that is focused on settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The meeting was called with the idea that it would be used to congratulate Sharon for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and to discuss moving the Middle East peace effort forward.
And while the officials did congratulate Israel, much of their final statement and individual remarks at a news conference came in response to several provocative statements Sharon made last week.
Israeli officials seized upon one line in the Quartet’s final statement, saying it supported Sharon’s position on the Palestinian elections.
“We also agreed that, ultimately, those who want to be part of the political process should not engage in armed group or militia activities,” the statement said.
U.S. officials seized on a different statement in Sharon’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week.
Sharon said Israel would pursue the peace effort “in accordance with the sequence of the road map,” as the peace plan that the United States and its allies proposed in 2003 is called.
But the day after Sharon gave that speech, he seemed to belie that pledge when he made a new pronouncement on West Bank settlements. He declared that Israel would not freeze growth in any of those settlements until the very end of the peace effort, years from now. The “road map” calls on Israel to freeze growth in the settlements as one of the first Israeli actions in its sequence of prescribed steps.
The Palestinians have yet to take the first step outlined for them in the road map: ending violence and disarming militant groups. The Quartet urged them “to maintain law and order and dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.”
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has invited Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a similar group, to take part in the elections, saying participation in the political process could serve to moderate their behavior.
Hamas is fielding candidates in the election, but there seems to be little evidence yet that the group has moderated its behavior.