There are rumors that Mitt Romney may pick Condoleeza Rice as his running mate, but he may want to think it through; Rice is an archcareerist whose only goal is to make deals so she can advance her career. And as Secretary of State, she didn’t stand for right or wrong but was only interested in finding a resolution. Case in point: Jerusalem.
As Rice wrote in her memoir, No Higher Honor, her meetings with Israelis and Palestinians in 2008 afforded her the opportunity to hear leftist Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer to divide Jerusalem, and she wasn’t about to let the chance for a peace agreement die just because the eternal capital of the Jewish people was being summarily divided by the ambitious prime minister.
Olmert started by saying:
“I know what he (Mahmoud Abbas) needs. He needs something on refugees and on Jerusalem. I’ll give him enough land, maybe something like 94 percent with swaps. I have an idea about Jerusalem. There will be two capitals, one for us in West Jerusalem and one for the Palestinians in East Jerusalem … There should be a committee of people–not officials but wise people–from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinians, the United States, and Israel. They will oversee the city but not in a political role.”
Rice was stunned and pleased:
“Am I really hearing this? I wondered. Is the Israeli prime minister saying that he’ll divide Jerusalem and put an international body in charge of the Holy sites? Concentrate. Write this down.”
Rice, delighted, commented, “Olmert was on a roll.” The conversation continued with Rice responding, “Prime Minister, this is remarkable, and I will try to help. I will talk to Abu Mazen tomorrow.”
“Tzipi Livni (Olmert’s Foreign Minister) urged me (and, I believe, Abbas) not to enshrine the Olmert proposal. ‘He has no standing in Israel,’ she said. That was probably true, but to have an Israeli prime minister on record offering those remarkable elements and a Palestinian president accepting them would have pushed the peace process to a new level.”
Well, yes, if you believe that dividing the very heart of Jewish existence is less important than giving concessions to a people that to this very day denies Israel’s existence, one could say that it’s a new level. And Rice concludes her statement son the affair by saying, “Now, as I write in 2011, the process seems to have gone backward.”
The salient question is, what the hell did she think forward meant?