Wolfensohn steps down; End of Quartet?

Jim Wolfensohn, the former World Bank President who has worked for the past year as the representative of the “Quartet” in furthering Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, has stepped down.
As is clear from this transcript of the press conference he and Condi Rice gave yesterday, he is not being replaced.
So is the “Quartet” now going to disband?
The Quartet, which comprises the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia, was formed in 2002, in response to the crisis in Israeli-Palestinian relations of spring of that year. (That included Ariel Sharon’s extremely lethal assault on the institutions of the PA, and a number of Palestinian suicide bombers who blew up Israeli civilians and soldiers.)
Back then, remember, the political map of the world looked quite a bit different. The US stood at the apex of glopbal sympathies and global power. Under the Quartet arrangement, the other three parties all knowingly subordinated themselves to the Bush administration’s “leadership” in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking….
At the time, that “leadership” was manifested mainly in Washington’s generation of something called the “Road Map to Peace”, which had a number of fuzzy deadlines on the way to a quite indeterminate future… Regardless of the Road Map’s many evident flaws, however, the UN, EU, and Russia all rallied around it.
All the fuzzy deadlines spelled out in it have passed, of course. And though Sharon and his government paid a tiny amount of lip-service to the Road Map, they went ahead with their completely unilateral exercise in boundary-drawing, regardless. So the Road Map is, these days, yet another sad casualty of the international “community’s” decision to subordinate itself to the Bush administration on this matter.
RIP.
… Well, the Road Map may have been flawed from the very beginning. But Jim Wolfensohn is probably a very decent man. That much seems clear from the text of the Monday press conference. For example, he said,

[I]t would surprise me if one could win by getting all the kids out of school or starving the Palestinians. And I don’t think anyone in the Quartet believes that to be the policy, although sometimes it is made to appear that that’s what it is. I think that’s a losing gambit.

He did, of course, also say, right after that:

But I do think that the Palestinians need to understand that it is not business as usual. Here you have a Palestinian group which has said that it wants to destroy its neighbor. I think the Palestinians need to understand and to accept that the future has to be one where the issues, however difficult, need to be resolved, but that you don’t start by telling the other side that you’re going to shoot them. I find that quite understandable and I think the situation that we’re now in is to try and find our way through that situation to a point where there can be a negotiated solution that is acceptable to both sides.

Meanwhile, the reporters over at Bloomberg’s have gotten hold of the text of Wolfensohn’s final report to the Quartet. They wrote this today:

“Over the past few years, the international community has spent about $1 billion annually on assistance to the Palestinians, much of it directed at ensuring that credible and well-functioning Palestinian institutions are built,” according to Wolfensohn’s report, a copy of which was provided to Bloomberg News by e-mail. “Will we now simply abandon these goals?”
… The report includes a warning that failure to address Palestinian economic and government problems may cause “other Middle Eastern states and political organizations” to have a greater role in the region, with “regional repercussions.”

Well, I won’t be sorry to see the Quartet fall apart. It’s long past time that the United Nations– and indeed, also, the EU and Russia– returned to some respect for the requirements of international law, including international humanitarian law, regarding the Palestinian question. Enough pussyfooting around and kowtowing to the Great Imperial Master in Washington and its ally, Israel’s Machine of Military Coercion. Let’s see the international “community” develop some strong strategies to win an outcome in which both Israelis and Palestinians can flourish.
If international diplomacy is truly focused on that goal, in an evenhanded way, then the diplomats of the world will not find either Hamas or anyone else on the Palestinian side blocking that outcome, or resorting to further violence. But the structural violence of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank (and of Gaza’s access points) has to end.