Blair Faces a Hard Road in the Middle East

By DONALD MACINTYRE

As Tony Blair prepares to meet his new bosses, the international Quartet on the Middle East, tomorrow in Lisbon, Monday’s speech by President George W Bush is hardly the flying start he might have hoped for. It’s true that the one new element, an international conference on the region, is akin to the one which Mr Blair pressed Mr Bush in vain to allow him to host over two years ago. But Mr Bush produced no other new policy, and precious little outline of how, if at all, the conference will advance the peace process.

Mr Bush’s demands on Mr Abbas – borrowed from the ill-fated Road Map – were as tough as ever; those on Israel little beyond the ritual call to dismantle settlement outposts and freeze settlement expansion. If this was meant finally to identify the "political horizon" he talked about, Palestinians – and Israelis – are going to need some powerful binoculars to make it out.

Which is a reminder of what a difficult job Mr Blair has taken on. This is not necessarily for the reasons frequently cited. The idea that the heavy baggage Tony Blair carries from Iraq – and from his much too protracted support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon – will undermine his relations with Palestinian society is probably wide of the mark. It underestimates the political desperation of Palestinians ready to welcome anybody with clout and a willingness to help.

It wouldn’t stop Hamas talking to him, if he were to risk Israeli wrath by inviting them to do so. And while his closeness to the US President, and his relative popularity among the Israeli political elite and public, may make Palestinians fear the worst about his future conduct, just as many, at least in the political classes, will also recognise it as the advantage it undoubtedly is, if he is to have any leverage in Washington and Jerusalem.

Secondly, the existing Quartet mandate may afford him more latitude than generally re-alised. Typically, the President only emphasised Mr Blair’s role in building the "effective governing structures" of some future Palestinian state. This conveniently glosses over the difficulties of expecting the Palestinians to perfect the institutions of a state without actually having a state. The one enduring legacy bequeathed by Oslo is a Palestinian Authority which has almost all the responsibility and almost none of the power.

But Mr Blair is also charged with tackling the Palestinian economy. He takes up his post three months after a World Bank report blamed much of the West Bank’s economic collapse on Israel’s use of checkpoints to inhibit the movement of Palestinian goods and people for the security of Jewish settlements – illegal under international law – in occupied territory. He surely knows he can hardly hope to improve the underlying Palestinian economy without confronting the much bigger political picture.

More problematic are the circumstances that will greet Mr Blair on his preliminary visit on Monday: including two Palestinian "governments", each of doubtful legality, and increasingly at odds with each other.

On Monday Mr Bush – whether because or in spite of the severe reverse for the US policy of backing the Fatah forces that Hamas’s bloody victory represented last month in Gaza – was in hyper- Manichean mode: Hamas in Gaza, murderous terrorists; Fatah in the West Bank and the Mahmoud Abbas- Salam Fayyad government, decent and peaceful.

It’s unclear how this will resonate with Palestinians in the street, who delivered Hamas a January 2006 victory in clean elections that Mr Bush could not bring himself to mention in his review of recent years on Monday. Hamas has done some terrible things to its internal enemies, and has not yet stopped, if a number of disturbing cases cited by the heroically evenhanded Palestinian Centre for Human Rights is to be believed. But so have Fatah militias.

And even if the picture were as black and white as the President suggested, it’s unclear how the Palestinians are supposed to accept his invitation to "choose" between these poles of good and evil. In fresh elections? And what if Hamas boycotts them, let alone prevents them from taking place? In Europe – including in Britain, where a highly tentative rethink is under way – there is therefore much hand- wringing over whether a new approach to Hamas is needed after the rejection of every opportunity to engage it politically since January 2006 in favour of sticking by the Quartet’s demands of recognising Israel, repudiating violence for all time, and abiding by previous agreements.

The case for it is very strong; that Hamas is not going to go away; and that contacts and gradual – and reversible – moves towards recognition in return for, say, enforcement of an end to rocket attacks on Israel, and a promise not to renew suicide bombings, would have an immediate benefit while helping to shift the moveable Hamas centre of gravity back to the more pragmatic and political end of its spectrum.

But in any case, to have the slightest chance of working, the alternative strategy of sticking with the Abbas-Fayyad government at the expense of Hamas would require Israel to move far more dramatically than the leisurely pace suggested by Mr Bush. It would be yet more bad news if Mr Fayyad, a real asset to Palestinian politics, was forced out of office because he had too little to show for being in it.

Some Israeli officials suggest that the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal’s unexpected apology for "mistakes" during the Gaza takeover is an indication that he fears the potential success of the Fayyad- Abbas government. But the release of 250 prisoners and an amnesty for 180 wanted Fatah men is not alone going to sustain Mr Fayyad, particularly when the US President’s fulsome praise for him doesn’t exactly help with much of the Palestinian public.

The minimum requirement, of course, would be some real momentum in negotiating a final settlement of the conflict. Mr Fayyad stressed just that in an interview this week with Haaretz, saying an agreement was possible in a "reasonable period of time" on the basis of the Saudi-sponsored Arab League initiative (which promises pan- Arab recognition of Israel in return for a settlement based on 1967 borders).

There was little indication in Mr Bush’s speech on Monday of whether – let alone how – he is ready to push Israel to meet that objective, even to help Mr Abbas – as Israel and the US so singularly failed to help him in his first, Hamas-free year as Palestinian president in 2005. Maybe, just maybe, an international conference would help, especially if the Saudis turned up. Maybe, just maybe, Mr Blair could too. But it will require a superhuman effort to overcome the obstacles Bush did too little to clear on Monday.

(c) 2007 Independent, The; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.