New Winds Blowing Across the Mid-East

TEL AVIV - THE legendary Israeli foreign minister Aba Eban once quipped that the Arabs never fail to exercise every mistake before considering a better option. The same can be said about Israeli diplomacy.

In an unexpected shift, the two sides to a century-old conflict are now trying the truce option. After an erratic war in Lebanon this summer and continued bloodletting in the Gaza Strip, fire stopped this week on both sides of Israel's south-western border.

But there is no sufficient reason yet to celebrate. The Palestinian Authority, headed by Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, nicknamed Abu Mazen, is still to prove his ability to line up the combative Hamas, a strong grassroots organisation sitting on his coalition government.

Israelis, anxious to have a change a climate away from one of almost incessant hostilities, this week heard their Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Olmert, promising the Palestinians a sovereign state, deep withdrawal from the West Bank's occupied territories, and the dismantling of Jewish settlements there.

Mr Olmert, on his part, has to show that this change of tone, heralded by his now comatose predecessor, Mr Ariel Sharon, is more than lip service.

Yet, there are genuinely new winds blowing here in Israel, in the rest of the Middle East and through to the fading Bush administration.

These seem to go beyond the diplomatic twists, spins and turns that have characterised futile attempts over the past decade at achieving an Israeli-Palestinian detente. One could almost regard these trends as echoes of a new zeitgeist.

Consider Israel first. Its highly esteemed armed forces conducted a rather ineffectual war against the Hizbollah guerilla army just a few months ago and still have not recuperated from the trauma. Cities in the southern regions of this country have been shelled from the Gaza Strip with hundreds of rockets, making almost a mockery of Israel's claim to be the safest place on earth for Jews.

A rocket fell this week on the town of Sderot during a visit by its once mayor and favourite son, Defence Minister Amir Peretz. While stock, and by now stale, statements hovered about the government's solemn intention to put an end to all this, every frightened kid in that town well knew that the massive military measures taken had helped only marginally.

Consider the Palestinians. Their government has been torn by chronic inner strife, contributing to a dehumanisation of the huge population in the Gaza region. If, as the saying goes, a gathering of a dozen Israelis produces two political parties and a candidate for premiership, such a Palestinian conclave would create three warring terror factions.

The United States and the European Union, fed up with Palestinian leadership's impotence that has led merely to intensified bloodshed, have frozen most of their financial assistance to the Abbas regime. And although the Israeli army has not been at its best, the unending pressure it brought to bear on Palestinian militias must have had some effect. They, too, have come to realise that more firepower is not going to achieve anything.

The rules are changing

THE most important contribution to the emerging change of game rules, though, comes from Washington. The Republican loss of majority in both houses of Congress signals the impending end of an era. Watch the neo-cons - headed by ousted defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld - fading away from Washington's corridors of power.

President George W. Bush is expecting the recommendations of a committee he set up, headed by his father's foreign relations vizier, Mr James Baker. It is said to advise a gradual pullout from Iraq, a move which is to be bolstered by coming to speaking terms with Iraq's influential neighbours, Syria and Iran. And by engaging the latter, to defuse by negotiations even its nuclear threat.

To be able effectively to do that much, Washington will have to come up with a dowry: willingness by the Israelis to talk peace seriously and to commit itself to what this entails; and a new commitment by the Palestinians in the same vein. That is how the circle seems to close around the ceasefire, the recent conciliatory statements by Palestinian and Israeli leaders and the extra American pizzazz in its habitually dreamy Middle Eastern diplomacy.

One existing building block for such a new axis of good is a peace initiative endorsed twice over the past four years by summits of 22 Arab countries. It is based on a Saudi plan, calls for the 'normalisation' of relations with Israel (a still stronger tag than 'recognition'), and avoids the emotional, non-starter issues of Jerusalem and the 'right of return' for Palestinian refugees to Israel.

The initiative expects Israel to go back to the 1967 borders, yet does not preclude territorial swops, as well as other imaginative ideas that had fuelled talks between Palestinian and Israeli peace groups over the past years.

But there is the rub. The American, Israeli and Palestinian regimes are all at low political ebb. It will take an extremely resolute US leadership, cushioned by equally astute European support, to put this mega plan together. It will need an Israeli prime minister ready to put his career on the line in the face of strong domestic right-wing opposition. It will call for a Palestinian realignment that is not yet clearly in sight.

A lot to demand in a case that has so far manifested more of suicidal drives than the power or will to overcome them.