Jonathan Freedland- 24/10/2007

Jonathan Freedland, (Guardian)

"It takes a special kind of genius to unite the warring parties of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but George Bush may just have pulled it off. His proposal for what the US administration calls a "meeting", rather than a peace conference, in Annapolis, Maryland, before the end of the year has elicited a unanimity unheard of in the Middle East. From the hardmen of Hamas to the hawks of Likud, there is a rare consensus: Annapolis is doomed to failure.

"On the Palestinian street, no one has a good word to say for this exercise," says the analyst and longtime negotiator Hussein Agha: "At best people are sceptical, at worst they are calling for a boycott." Two recent opinion polls on either side of the divide show emphatic majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians convinced that success is impossible. That sentiment is shared at the highest level. Yesterday Gordon Brown, at a press conference with the visiting Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, lowered expectations so far that they were somewhere around his ankles. "We're not complacent about the outcome," he said by way of understatement. "We don't have false hopes."

Even the US administration cannot muster much faith in its own initiative. In a long and detailed speech on Middle East policy at the weekend, Vice-President Dick Cheney made only one passing reference to Annapolis, in just a single paragraph on the Israel-Palestine conflict. One suspects the Cheney-led hawks within the administration would not be too downhearted if Annapolis fails, thereby reducing the standing of its chief patron, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, regarded as dangerously soft by the Cheney camp. Ominously, the date for the event is already slipping. Once pencilled in for November 26, it's now scheduled only for some time "before the end of the year".

If the vice-president is hardly dreading failure, he's not the only one. Olmert's domestic rivals, led by Likud's Bibi Netanyahu, would shed few tears. Similarly, Hamas would believe itself vindicated if the Palestinian president, Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, went to Maryland in search of peace and came back with his hands empty. All Fatah's cosying up to the west, Hamas would say, had been for nought.

But such calculations leave out the peoples themselves. Most of them surely know the high price of failure. They saw it just seven years ago, after the Camp David talks collapsed, ushering in the second intifada. This is the pattern in the Middle East: a failed peace initiative does not lead to mere stasis but active deterioration. If there's a chance to move forward and it is wasted, everyone falls back - into violence and bloodshed.

What, besides bitter experience, convinces everyone that Annapolis is destined for disaster? It begins with the weakness of the three key players. Bush is a lame duck, a year away from winding up what even non-partisan historians are fast concluding is one of the worst presidencies in history. Olmert's reputation was shattered by the calamitous war in Lebanon of 2006; he has survived but is still hobbled by multiple corruption inquiries. According to Haaretz columnist Lily Galili, Olmert "has an impressive parliamentary majority, but he lacks moral legitimacy".

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