'Envoy Blair' waits in wings at summit

Tony Blair is expected to be confirmed as a special international envoy to the Middle East today in the wake of a summit at which the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed the release of 250 Palestinians.

Mr Blair's post will be discussed at today's meeting in Jerusalem of the international "quartet" of the US, EU, UN and Russia.

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The prisoner releases - which have to be ratified by the Israeli cabinet - involve Fatah detainees who have not been convicted of murder and are therefore unlikely directly to affect the fate of the abducted Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, who is being held by Hamas.

Mr Olmert's cabinet had already decided before yesterday's Sharm el-Sheikh summit, designed to shore up the position of President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah organisation at the expense of the Hamas leadership in Gaza, to release some of the $600m (£300m) it owes the Palestinian authority, but only for use in the West Bank.

The relative lack of tangible results, beyond the prisoner releases, from yesterday's summit underlines the challenges faced by Mr Blair in a region which has long been a political graveyard for the hopes of envoys of every kind.

The last special envoy appointed to the quartet, also with the initial blessing of President George Bush, James Wolfensohn, the former head of the World Bank, came determined to create a genuine economic, and as a consequence, political opportunity out of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.

While the election of Hamas in January 2006 did not make his task any easier, he left his post last year frustrated with what he, by all accounts, saw as Israel's unwillingness to subordinate short-term security concerns - exemplified by its unwillingness to sustain the opening of the Gaza crossings - to the much wider security interests he thought would be served by a more functional Palestinian economy.

Mr Blair's brief, according to some sources, is to include efforts to ease freedom of Palestinian movement - which a World Bank report on the West Bank in May said was essential to reversing an economic collapse which saw GDP fall by 10 per cent last year alone.

The Israeli military, however, successfully opposed any move to announce an immediate relaxation of closures and checkpoints at yesterday's summit, even to bolster Mr Abbas.

One obstacle in the eyes of some Palestinian politicians was that his closeness to President Bush failed to reap dividends in engaging him more fully in finding a long-term solution. His attempts to organise a wide-ranging international conference in 2004 were reduced to a meeting on Palestinian "governance".

The timing to revive that project looks especially unpropitious given the disjunction between what are de facto separate administrations in Gaza and the West Bank. Another is that Mr Blair's efforts may complicate those of Gordon Brown, the prime minister- in-waiting, who has also shown considerable interest in a fresh push for progress in the Middle East.

And while Mr Blair is likely to find that is impossible to separate discrete problems from the larger task of attempting to advance a peace process, Israel is wary, to put it mildly, of any attempt at actual international mediation.

Mr Abbas was forced, under Egyptian pressure, to withdraw his earlier insistence that yesterday's summit should at least discuss a process leading to a "final status" settlement.

On the other hand, Mr Blair does have real potential assets - including his relative popularity in Israel, the historic importance many Palestinians still attach to Britain's role in the region, and his impressive record in Northern Ireland. The latter would give him the locus to argue for more releases of "terrorist" prisoners of the sort he repeatedly sanctioned there.

But perhaps the key question is whether Mr Blair would be prepared -or allowed - to risk Israeli wrath by drawing on his Northern Ireland experience to talk, as he did to IRA-Sinn Fein, to Hamas -or at least those elements interested in political dialogue - and urge that Israel does so too.

Several former members of the Israeli intelligence community have urged contacts with Hamas, whichhas wide support among Palestinians.

Mr Blair has given hints that he would have liked contact with more "moderate" elements of Hamas - though less so of late.

While not impossible, it would require him to complete a startling reversal of his previous policy and take risks out of office - not least the chance of a breach with President Bush -that he was not prepared to take as prime minister.