Donald Macintyre: Some reasons for hope in the Middle East

An optimist, and there are not many of them left in the region, might make the following case for this being a highly auspicious moment in the benighted history of the Middle East. Leaders of the Arab League, meeting under the Saudi chairmanship in Riyadh today and tomorrow, are expected to relaunch their 2002 Beirut initiative, which promised pan-Arab recognition of Israel in return for the latter's withdrawal to the borders before the Six Day War in 1967.

The Beirut declaration in favour of a two-state solution to the conflict marked a historic departure, even by the most hardline states. But it came at the bloody peak of the intifada and it was ignored by the US and rejected by the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon.

The atmosphere now is very different. Not only has the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said warm words about the initiative, but the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has gone out of his way publicly to stress that it has "positive elements".

More, the US - at least in the person of Dr Rice - has become diplomatically engaged in the conflict in a way that her predecessor Colin Powell was never able, or allowed, to do. Having visited Jerusalem and Ramallah four times in the past four months, she has spoken openly about the need for the Palestinians - in return for guaranteeing Israel's security - to have a "political horizon".

Among other things, Israel would need to spell out how it envisages the "viable and contiguous" Palestinian state to which it is publicly committed, and which - though Dr Rice does not put it this way - the relentless process of de facto annexation and settlement-building by Israel in the West Bank has made so difficult to achieve.

Add to that, whatever the deficiencies of the Mecca deal brokered by King Abdullah and paving the way to the now established national unity government, Hamas appears (appears, because there is much still to be clarified) for the first time to have committed itself to empowering the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to negotiate with Israel on a two-state solution.

Hamas, and the agreed platform of the unity government, has famously not committed itself to actual recognition of Israel, which is Israel's most frequently stated reason for not having anything to do with the coalition. But the more sanguine members of Fatah - which, of course, has long sought a two-state solution - boldly go so far as to insist that in practical terms there is little difference between the two positions.

The former Fatah Cabinet minister Sufian Abu Zayda, for example, is no friend - indeed, is a vigorous critic - of Hamas, and was briefly kidnapped in December by its militants in Gaza. But speaking to foreign journalists yesterday, he pointed out how long it took the PLO to bring itself to recognise Israel and said that Hamas was inhibited from doing so for "religious reasons". He then went so far as to say that Fatah now had "no problem with Hamas regarding the political agenda. It is very, very close to my political agenda."

Israel does not for a moment accept this argument, continuing to insist that only when Hamas first agrees to recognise Israel will a real peace process have any value. And there are plenty of other reasons not to get carried away with the optimistic scenario. Having tussled with Mr Olmert into Monday night over the wording of her statement yesterday, Condoleezza Rice's final announcement was markedly short of the prospect she had floated earlier in the week, of mediating in a series of separate talks between Mr Olmert and Mr Abbas on the contours of a final settlement.

Instead, there is no sign that Mr Olmert, in the twice-monthly talks he is now to hold with Mr Abbas, is suddenly going to abandon his stated conviction that Mr Abbas is too weak to deliver Hamas in any endgame to a peace process.

Further, Israel has demanded amendments - which it appears it will not get - to the statement the Arab League will reissue this week, to remove, or at least significantly modify, the reference to the "right of return" to Israel of the families of 1948 refugees. The Saudi argument - and that of Mr Abbas - is that this formulation still allows broad room for manoeuvre in actual negotiations but that it should not be changed ahead of them. But the issue - arguably the most neuralgic of all for most Israelis - could yet be a reason for Mr Olmert's rejection of the initiative.

Nevertheless, if Mr Abbas is in a weak position so, too, is Mr Olmert - too weak, it seems, so far to prevent a group of right-wing activists digging in to stop the evacuation of the northern West Bank settlement of Homesh in an attempt to reverse part of Ariel Sharon's 2005 disengagement plan.

On the one hand, Mr Olmert's weakness post-Lebanon is an incentive to bow to an increasingly empowered right-wing. On the other, he is a man badly in need of an agenda, which, in a logical world, the prospect of a substantive peace process might provide.

And he is perhaps too weak to resist concerted pressure from the US, if it was exerted. Which raises, not for the first time, the question of whether the Bush administration is as serious about achieving progress towards a two-state solution as Dr Rice says it is. On the bright side, Dr Rice has - almost for the first time since Bush came to office - staked out differences between herself and Israel. She has allowed her diplomats to meet Salam Fayyad, the finance minister in the new coalition. And she has made it clear more than once that, unlike Israel, she is not demanding changes to the 2002 Beirut text.

But is this for show or for real? One conundrum is whether she has the full backing of Mr Bush, or whether he and some of those around her are as happy to see her fail - in which case they will jump clear - as to see her (inevitably less likely) succeed, in which case they will share the credit.

That may not begin to become apparent until after Riyadh. The summit could just have the potential to inject new momentum into a peace process, but only on certain tough conditions. Much will no doubt depend on how the Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal conducts himself this week. But how and whether the Saudis and others sell the initiative matters, too.

Maybe the creative solution advocated by the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - that King Abdullah should make a dramatic Anwar Sadat-style visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah to sell the text - is too much to expect. But without a concerted diplomatic effort by the Arabs, the Europeans and, above all, the US, even the relaunched Beirut declaration is likely to go the way of all the others that have punctuated the conflict over the last 40 years.

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