Tim Butcher-25/07/2007

Tim Butcher, (Daily Telegraph)

"For a world leader not shy of publicity, Tony Blair's first visit to the Holy Land as envoy to the Palestinians must have been a grounding experience. A modest motorcade drove him from Ben Gurion airport to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where he was met by a tiny group of autograph hunters. Give them anoraks and relocate them to Clapham Junction and you would have called them trainspotters.

And when the former prime minister drove the short distance to Ramallah, the de facto capital of the occupied West Bank, there was an even more muted reaction from ordinary Palestinians. Their inertia was born not just of the stultifying summer heat: many peace envoys have come and gone, but as the Israeli occupation remains in place, Palestinians have learnt to "manage expectations''.

Israelis are acutely sensitive about outsiders coming to address the Israeli-Palestinian question and it is interesting to see how comfortable they are with the appointment of Mr Blair. While President George W. Bush has often fluffed his lines about jihadism and its threat to world order, Mr Blair's eloquence has bestowed on him a sort of star status in the Jewish state.

For many Israelis, the threat they have faced from militant Palestinians for decades is no different from the threat faced by the West from militant Islam and they have lapped up Mr Blair's post 9/11 rhetoric. It was as if Israel found in Mr Blair the first Western leader able not only to feel its pain, but also to articulate it.

No matter that many would argue jihadism and Palestinian nationalism are quite separate, Mr Blair's analysis dovetailed nicely with that of many Israelis.

Israeli approval of Mr Blair reached new heights last summer when the international chorus grew condemning Israel's disproportionately heavy attacks that killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians after Hizbollah's cross-border raid. Mr Blair remained silent, tacitly approving Israel's military response and accepting the strategy spelt out so inelegantly by Mr Bush of getting "Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this s---".

But perhaps the thing Israelis feel most comfortable about is that Mr Blair's new job does not really involve Israel. There has been a lot written about the terms of reference for Mr Blair's position, but what they boil down to is this: he is mandated to help Palestinians prepare for statehood by exploring ways to build their economy, organs of state and infrastructure.

This is very much preparatory spadework and Mr Blair's remit does not, so far, stray one inch beyond this. As Condoleezza Rice, the American Secretary of State, made clear last week, the tough politics - getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree to live alongside each other in peace - will be led not by Mr Blair, but by Washington.

So with this in mind, Mr Blair spent a day and a half in meetings with Israeli leaders, including the newly elected president, Shimon Peres, and the might-not-be-re-elected prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who were comfortable in the knowledge that he is not, on paper, going to challenge them to take tough choices.

Inauspiciously, the first day of his trip marked the anniversary of the "saddest day in Jewish history'' - the Tisha Be'av commemoration of the destruction of the temples of Solomon and Herod in Jerusalem. This unfortunate coincidence should remind Mr Blair that history will stalk him every step of the way - and not always ancient history."

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