Aqaba Summit

On June 4, 2003, a meeting of the prime ministers of Israel and Palestine was brokered by President Bush and hosted by the King of Jordan. To the extent it appeared to be a successful intervention to mitigate or move toward ending the terrible months and years of violence, this seemed to be a global event. The media anticipated it with strong interest, and the people of the region, presumably, with some hope.

The Aqaba summit will take place at King Abdullah of Jordan's palace in the city. It will open with a meeting between Sharon and U.S. President George Bush. Next, Bush will meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) while Sharon meets with Abdullah. At noon, the four leaders will hold a joint meeting, after which they will read their concluding statements.

Getting accurate timing was difficult, but I believe the summit meeting began roughly at noon, with the principals' concluding speeches about 13:00, local time. Since the import of the meeting for the world is primarily in the implications, I decided that we would look at several hours after the meeting per se, specifically, 12 hours beginning with the tripartite meeting itself. The analytical result is 43435 on 43200, corresponding to p = 0.212. The trend of the composite data trace (red) beginning at noon is negative, but around 7:00 in the evening, it reverses, and runs strongly positive for the rest of the day until midnight local time. In an exploration, I extracted the data from our single egg in Israel, and plotted it (green) for comparison. It is quite dissimilar, with a positive trend for the first four hours beginning at noon, followed by a steady negative trend for the later part of the day.

Aqaba Summit


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