There is plenty of speculation that the recently unveiled “road map” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents a cynical attempt to curry international favor and/or paper over the conflict, rather than a serious attempt to solve it.
I certainly hope so; that would be the most positive spin on the “road map.” It would be much more disturbing if the administration actually believed that the approach embodied in the road map actually represented the best options for peace.
The last two decades of Arab-Israeli peacemaking has provided policymakers with many examples of what works and does not work. The road map seems like a perfect distillation of what doesn’t work, “uncontaminated” by what does.
One of the biggest pitfalls of the Oslo-based peace process was the prevalence of those two words: the belief that peace can be produced via a negotiating process. Under that view, the two words were conflated: the perfection of the process was viewed as synonymous with the attainment of peace, and the continuation of the process was regarded as the sine qua non of any peace-seeking effort. The process thus became and end in and of itself. Thus, continued Palestinian terrorism, anti-Jewish propagandizing, arming of innumerable “security forces” and other violations of the Oslo accords were minimized so as to keep the process on track. The core issues – Jerusalem, the “right of return,” even settlements – were kicked down the road, lest they intrude on the process before they were ripe for resolution. And when President Bush essentially disavowed the entire Oslo-based approach in his June 24 speech, he was attacked for not putting forth a peace plan – after all, his speech didn’t come with an attached negotiating framework.
The problem was that the Palestinians’ fundamental rejection of Israel’s legitimacy did not vanish due to the negotiating experiences of the 1990s. The problem was that the Oslo-based process did not succeed in removing the incentives for the Palestinians to conduct terrorism, or for the Israelis to fight terrorism. And the proposed “road map,” on its face, does not solve these problems either. More technically, those problems are linked to the parties’ most fundamental strategic decisions, which are beyond the scope of any negotiating process to affect. While the road map is ostensibly “performance-based,” the map itself gives no indication that 3 out of the “quartet’s” 4 members would require stricter performance from the Palestinians than they did throughout the 1990s. Indeed, at certain points the map strains credulity in its insistence on symmetry:

At the outset of Phase I:

Israeli leadership issues unequivocal statement affirming its commitments to the two-state vision of an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside Israel, as expressed by President Bush, and calling for an immediate end to violence against Palestinians everywhere. All official Israeli institutions end incitement against Palestinians.

(Emphasis added.)
I’m not familiar with any Palestinian-leaning equivalent of MEMRI that provides constant examples of anti-Palestinian hatred in Israeli politics, media and schools. So on its face, either the a) such Israeli rare, non-official examples are deemed equivalent to the massively prevalent Palestinian ones, or, more likely, b) the whole thing is a crock, which does not bode well for the allegedly important judging of “performance.” (After all, it’s so unfair to hold the parties to different standards…) Now, I understand that it’s not recommended for diplomats to make a habit of trumpeting the moral superiority of one side in a negotiation. But at the same time, it would seem advisable for a plan supposedly based on performance benchmarks to avoid requirements that are utterly divorced from reality.
And even more fundamentally, the most contentious issues are left for Phase III, in the apparent assumption that they will be easier to solve at that point – in total contravention of the available evidence. If the Palestinians decide to give up terror and reach a genuine peace with Israel, any one of the peace plans on the State Department’s shelves will work – even the road map. If that decision is not made, no peace plan will work, no matter how perfect the negotiating process.
Now, it’s important to note that many of the choices made by international diplomats throughout the 1990s were defensible at the time. They didn’t have the benefit of the hindsight we now possess. But there is no defending a tenacious refusal to learn from mistakes. For the record, I supported the Oslo accords through the Camp David negotiations and until the Palestinian campaign began in October 2000. But I was – along with an awful lot of people who are smarter than I was or am - mistaken about a number of fundamental assumptions that underlay the enterprise. One of the best arguments for the peace process in the 1990s was encapsulated by Franklin Roosevelt’s supposed advice to Raymond Mobley:

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Even if that advice was apocryphal, I’m pretty confident that Roosevelt’s advice was not: “Try something, and if it doesn’t work, keep trying the same damn thing over and over again.”
The infamous “neoconservatives” are often attacked for promulgating grand theories about the Middle East regardless of the empirical evidence. It is remarkable how perfectly that criticism fits many champions of the Arab-Israeli “peace process.” As Colin Powell recently said after a recent suicide bombing in Tel Aviv:

We can't let these sorts of incidents immediately contaminate the road map or contaminate the process that we are now involved in.

As seen from that quote and from the “incitement” point above, it seems that the champions of the “road map” have certain differences with reality. Rather than negotiate those differences, though, they seem to single-mindedly press ahead, sure that the other party will bend to their designs and regardless of the costs…

The preliminary indications for the Quartet's insistence on performance is not encouraging. Ha'aretz recently reported:

With the swearing-in of the new Palestinian cabinet on Wednesday came a presidential order from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat for the establishment of a national security council to oversee all the PA's security mechanisms, including the counter-security apparatus, the uniformed police and the civil guard.
In keeping with the definition of powers of the Palestinian government, these security mechanisms are supposed to fall under the authority of PA Interior Minister Mohammed Dahlan. The move violates one of the clauses of the U.S.-backed 'road map' for Middle East peace, which calls for "all Palestinian security organizations [to be] consolidated into three services reporting to an empowered Interior Minister."

As a colleague of Eugene Volokh commented:

The road map has been public for less than 48 hours, and Arafat has already broken it.
...If the Bush Administration does not respond swiftly and firmly to this direct flouting of the road map, the entire process is dead. US policy should be clear: it will withdraw the road map and refuse to engage in any negotiations unless the Council is immediately terminated. The US should also immediately send a new military and civilian aid package to Israel. Criminologists have long argued that it is the certainty and swiftness of punishment, not its severity, that count. Here's a chance to test the theory with Arafat, the Palestinian arch criminal. Anything less essentially condemns the region to more violence.
The interesting question at this point is not whether Arafat will do all that he can to subvert the road map (and thus subvert Abu Mazen). It is, rather this: is there anything that Arafat can do that will convince his European backers that he isn't interested in peace and is committed to terror? Or is it just that they don't care?

There is an obvious temptation not to scuttle a promising initiative based on a disagreement over the structure of the Plestinian bureaucracy. But the lessons of the last decade are clear: failing to do exactly that will only lead to further violations and further violence, and the initiative will be destroyed anyway.
The answer to the question of Volokh's correspondent is far more important than the structure of any negotiating framework. Naturally, the parties would rather not discuss it.

P.S. I've read an awful lot of pieces on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and here are my picks for the best of the lot: this overview of the real underlying issues by David Brooks, this assessment of the Camp David and Taba negotiations by David Malkovsky and this evisceration of the "peace process" worldview by Jonathan Rauch.