No time to waste on achieving peace in the Middle East

Jonathan Freedland, Guardian News Service, London

For once the outlook seems almost sunny. In a conflict where a change in prospects is usually from bleak to bleaker, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle has suddenly begun sprouting apparent green shoots of possibility. Perhaps after a season of war, pray the optimists, this could be the summer of peacemaking in the Middle East.

And there are signs of hope. In the United States, the only outside power with the strength to breathe the near-dead peace process back to life, President Bush and his team have hinted that they might end two-and-a-half years of inactivity and get stuck in. Last week in Belfast, Bush praised Tony Blair's unflagging effort to bring peace to Northern Ireland: "I'm willing to spend the same amount of energy in the Middle East," he promised. That seemed plausible enough. After all, Bush surely owes Blair something for his one-man coalition act during the war on Iraq: U.S. pressure for an Israeli-Palestinian peace seems to have been Blair's price.

History points that way, too. In 1991 Bush's father used the months after a Gulf victory to push Israel to the peace table. Would Israel's most committed friends in the Bush administration allow a repeat performance? Maybe. Last autumn Paul Wolfowitz, the superhawk often cited as the chief architect of the Iraq adventure, was booed at a pro-Israel rally when he insisted that Palestinians, as well as Israelis, were "suffering and dying" and that "hard decisions" would have to be made by both sides. Earlier this year Wolfowitz told the Washington Post that once the Iraq war was over: "Our stake in pushing for a Palestinian state will grow."

But the optimists do not stop there. If Washington demands action, they believe it may find an unexpectedly receptive audience in Jerusalem. The Israeli prime minister's interview this week with the liberal Ha'aretz newspaper seemed to show a new Ariel Sharon, one ready to contemplate painful concessions. He even named the West Bank towns that Israel might have to "part with" and said he recognized the "ethical problems" inherent in Israel continuing to "rule over another people and run their lives."

No wonder the Downing Street optimists are excited. Doesn't this sound like an aged warrior who has finally seen one pivotal enemy, Iraq, removed and at last feels able to make the peace that will be his lasting legacy?

It'd be nice to think so. But -- and this might be good advice for our prime minister -- it's best, when gazing at the Middle East, to put aside the rose-colored spectacles. For there is every reason to be skeptical, rather than hopeful, about the intentions of both the Israeli and U.S. administrations.

Take Sharon first. The story is told that, early on in his premiership, Sharon was taken aside by Shimon Peres, the former Labour prime minister and Nobel peace laureate. "You know, Arik," he said. "The difference between me and you is that when the world asks you to make peace, you say 'no'. When they ask me, I say 'yes, but'." If you say no, you are intransigent. If you say 'yes, but' you are a peacemaker."

True or not, Sharon has certainly learned that lesson. For two years, he has always accepted peace initiatives -- only then to lodge enough objections to kill the plans stone dead. So "painful concessions" sound dovish to Anglo-American ears -- but Sharon may have a rather lower pain threshold in mind. He may, for example, be thinking of the pain of giving up 42 percent of the occupied West Bank, rather than almost all of it.

"With Sharon, you always have to read the small print," advises Israel's top-rated columnist, Nahum Barnea who interviewed Sharon on Monday, for publication in the mass circulation Yediot Ahronot today. The PM set out a string of demands that would render a peace deal all but impossible. Palestinians would have to give up their demand for a "right of return" to homes in Israel-proper from the outset, as a precondition. They would have to make all their moves before -- not in parallel with -- any action taken by Israel. And the sole judge of Palestinian performance would not be the European Union or the UN, but Washington, DC. "The rhetoric may be dovish," says Barnea, "but the substance is not."

Unfortunately, the outward signs from the U.S. might be just as misleading. For all Bush's Belfast promises, most Washington hands -- Democrat and Republican alike- unite in their agreement that this administration will do little or nothing for Israeli- Palestinian peace this side of next year's presidential election. "The politics are just not right," says one ex-Clinton official. The hard-headed calculus says there is no domestic constituency for Middle East peacemaking -- only plenty of groups ready to get angry if Bush puts a foot wrong.

And this is about more than the crude (and often mistaken) assumption about the Jewish vote. Perhaps Jewish voters can make a difference in Florida and they certainly count in New York, a state which Republicans would at least like to see "in play". But more important is what Barnea calls the "iron triangle" within the Republican party. It consists of Jewish donors, ideological neo-cons and, critically, the Christian right.

It is this group -- which stands to the right of the American Jewish community -- which Bush would be reluctant to offend. Bush Snr made that mistake, and believes it helped lose him his job. Since the "invisible election" -- the fundraising campaign -- begins as early as this June, and with Republicans keen to make inroads into the traditionally Democratic Jewish donor base, the "window" for Middle East activity may be open for no more than a few weeks.

Put simply, the message from Washington is: Don't hold your breath. The White House will put no pressure on Israel until the Palestinians are deemed to have made the grade on internal reform -- and that judgment is not coming soon. Right now, Bush's political focus will be on scoring some domestic points again, to break the spell of Bush Snr, punished in 1992 for caring too much about the world and not enough about America. Come 2005, when the election is out of the way and the Palestinians have passed all their tests, will Washington lean on Israel? "It's about 50-50," says one hawkish insider.

Given all this, it seems odd that Tony Blair insists that Bush is to become a full-time peacebroker in the Middle East. Even Blair's Washington admirers are puzzled. "He does keep digging himself in these rhetorical holes," says one.

Maybe Blair knows this, deep down. Maybe he realizes there won't be any progress -- but reckons that the mere act of calling for it will placate a restless Labour party, his European partners and the Arab world. Politically, that may be right. But for Israelis and Palestinians it is not enough. They need more than calls for action. They need action -- and there is no time to waste.