One thing is clear about President Bush's meetings at the White House with both Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to consult on his faltering Middle East peace initiative, known as the roadmap.

Any success in moving the roadmap forward depends upon his ability to press Ariel Sharon to make some of the "painful concessions" he has promised but has yet to deliver.

Dramatic Palestinian moves, such as installing Mahmud Abbas as Prime Minister, successfully negotiating a three-month cease-fire against Israeli's by militant groups and cracking down on incitement against Israel, were to be matched by equally dramatic Israeli moves. These have yet to materialize.

Israeli inaction has seriously undermined Palestinian support for Abbas and the roadmap. According to most observers, unless Abbas can deliver some concessions from Israel through meeting with Bush, both he and the roadmap are finished. The militant Islamic group Hamas has declared that the cease-fire is over if there is no significant progress and reports indicate that Abbas will face a no-confidence vote by the Palestinian parliament if he returns empty handed.

With such high stakes, President Bush must test Sharon's stated willingness to meet Israel's roadmap commitments. But it will be difficult.

Sharon is best known both in Israel and abroad as a right-wing hawk and patron of Israel's colonization of the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He strongly opposed the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords and has long opposed a Palestinian state, claiming that Jordan is Palestine.

But in the past few months, Sharon has startled many of his critics and his supporters by publicly endorsing the roadmap and its goal of creating a Palestinian state. In the respected Israel newspaper Haaretz on April 13, Sharon declared that he had "decided to make every effort to reach a settlement" and stressed that he was willing to make "painful concessions" in pursuit of peace.

Moreover, in a surprising May 26 speech to his Likud party supporters, Sharon finally described Israel's hold on land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "occupation". "We don't like the word, but this is occupation. To keep 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is bad for Israel and the Palestinians."

Nevertheless, Sharon has done next to nothing to implement Israel's commitments as called for by the roadmap. As a result, President Bush must press Sharon on four central issues for the roadmap to move forward.

First, Israel has only dismantled a dozen of the nearly seventy new settler outposts in the West Bank. According to the roadmap, Sharon must remove all of the outposts and freeze any new settlement construction.

Second, Israel has only conducted a token withdrawal from Palestinian population centers, removing a jeep from Bethlehem and tanks from a road in Gaza, bringing no relief to Palestinians from the stifling army blockade of hundreds of towns and villages. According to the roadmap, Sharon must authorize a full army withdrawal from all major Palestinian cities and towns to positions prior to September 29, 2000.

Third, Sharon has only agreed to release around 350 of the over 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners languishing in Israeli military prisons. While not officially called for by the roadmap, this issue has inflamed Palestinian public opinion against Abbas and the roadmap. Sharon must make a significant prisoner release of at least 3,000 prisoners, a compromise figure floated by Palestinian officials.

Fourth, Israel continues to build its provocative "security barrier," known by Palestinians as the "apartheid wall" because it loops deep into Palestinian occupied territory, embracing clusters of illegal Israeli settlements while surrounding and separating entire Palestinian cities and villages from their farmland and wells. The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem found that the barrier's northern phase alone "will likely infringe the human rights of more than 210,000 Palestinians residing in sixty-seven villages, towns, and cities."

Israeli newspapers report that Condoleezza Rice and President Bush recently raised objections with Sharon over Israel's construction of the "security barrier" because it unilaterally determines the boundaries of any future Palestinian state. President Bush must go further and demand that, at a minimum, construction on this project must cease.

If President Bush were to get Sharon's agreement on any one of these issues, let alone all four, he would send a strong signal to both Palestinians and Israelis that he is serious about peace.

Most importantly, he would give a major boost to Palestinian proponents of the roadmap and help marginalize the militant groups who only gain from Palestinian suffering and pessimism. It would give the Palestinian government the strength it needs to move forward in dismantling the militant groups that have inflicted so much damage on Israeli civilians through their criminal and brutal suicide bomb attacks.

With the defeat of Saddam Hussein and the major U.S. military presence in the region, Israel has never been more secure. The question remains whether President Bush has the political will or inclination to do what is necessary for peace.

Steve Niva teaches international politics at The Evergreen State College, is an editorial associate of Middle East Report magazine and recently returned from a three week fact finding tour in Israel and the Palestinian territories with Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.

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