Donald Macintyre: Does Israel want to seize this opportunity?

Some time in the mid-1990s, James Baker, who a few years earlier had probably done more than any other US Secretary of State to pressure Israel into making peace with the Palestinians, attended a dinner in Jerusalem given by the then Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Coming under fire from several of his fellow-guests, he told them: "I know that in Israel I am always suspect. I am not regarded as a friend here. A day will come and you will realise that I, of all people, was a true friend of Israel."

The story, recalled some months ago by Yossi Sarid, one of the ministers present at that dinner, is instructive. The point – that getting tough with Israel is very far from the same as being an enemy of Israel – is conveniently forgotten by those leaders of Jewish lobbying groups in the US who deal with the fact that they do not actually live in Israel by publicly regarding even the most modest concession to the Palestinians as treachery.

But it is worth remembering in the run-up to next week's summit in Annapolis, Maryland. For Annapolis, despite the probable thinness of its outcome, may in hindsight turn out to be a far-reaching event for Israelis as well as for the Palestinians.

Expectations for the summit are so dismally low that it is unlikely, at least in the short term, to be declared a catastrophe. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's dogged insistence that the mere fact that it is taking place is an achievement, may well carry the day. But if ever there was a chance that this would be the Israeli-Palestinian equivalent of the Good Friday Agreement, then that has evaporated. Instead, it is likely at most to signal the start of new negotiations on an end to the conflict, with at least some hint that they should be concluded before the end of the Bush presidency. Optimists – of whom there are not many – insist that there will be, if not a strong summit, a strong process.

The problems aren't hard to rehearse. The negotiations will be with only part of the future Palestine, the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and the West Bank administration he appointed in June. Hamas, which remains in full de facto control of Gaza, where some 40 per cent of Palestinians live, is wholly excluded from the process and is not even committed to its goals. It can be argued that last week's big commemoration for Yasser Arafat in Gaza indicated that Hamas's popularity was on the wane, as anecdotal evidence and the polls suggest it is.

Even if that impressive turn-out was an indication of support for Hamas's Fatah rivals and Mr Abbas, there remains the thorny problem of how Gazans could get rid of Hamas. And even if its popularity was reduced to its still sizeable, if minority, core constituency, they have the weapons and the power to disrupt any elections Mr Abbas might think of calling. And quite possibly, if they choose, the process that Annapolis is intended to start.

The only possibility, however slim, for neutralising these obstacles might be for the Olmert-Abbas negotiations to proceed with such speed and resolution that Abbas might be able to deal with Hamas from a position of real political strength. Certainly for most Palestinians, including in Gaza where Israeli control of the borders is total, the lifting of the ever-deepening miseries of the occupation could hardly be more urgent.

In the West Bank, where the settlements, supported by the huge military and road infrastructure surrounding them, control some 40 per cent of the territory, it is becoming ever harder to visualise the "viable Palestinian state" that will be on everybody's lips at Annapolis next week.

If existing settlements continue to expand – as they will unless Israel imposes a real freeze rather than the synthetic one announced by Olmert this week – it isn't difficult to see why many Palestinians increasingly believe time may be running out for a two-state solution. That we know. What is less often discussed is that those same relentless "facts on the ground" make it as urgent, at least in any sane world, for Israel to reach a solution too. Maybe it's too apocalyptic to see this as "the last chance" for a two-state solution. But some essentially Zionist intellectuals on the left have repeatedly pointed out that the alternative to an early two-state solution is, after decades of bloodshed and misery on both sides, the single entity in which Jews might well eventually be a minority, and which would make the "Jewish, democratic state" unsustainable.

In a persuasive article in yesterday's Yedhiot Ahronot Israel's best-known novelist, Amos Oz, suggested that the failure of the current process may see "the demise" of the two-state solution, leaving a choice between two "historical disasters": one state "approaching an Arab majority" between the Jordan and the Medi-terranean, or what Oz unapologetically calls an "Israeli apartheid regime" that "continues to repress the occupied Palestinians by force while the Palestinians continue violently to resist".

Some foreign politicians who have met Olmert recently insist that he gets some of this, and does want the post-Annapolis talks to work, and not only to jump clear of problems like the police investigation into his handling of a bank privatisation as finance minister or the imminent final report on the Lebanon war. But if so, he, like Mr Abbas, faces formidable internal opposition – not just from the acknowledged right-wing parties in his coalition, but also, more threateningly perhaps, from Labour leader and defence minister Ehud Barak. He is jockeying for a second term as prime minister and is apparently deeply sceptical of any negotiations with the Palestinians, at least on someone else's watch. Barak has come under strong attack from within his own party for "deserting the peace camp" and yesterday by the liberal daily Haaretz in an editorial savagely headlined: "Barak-suspected saboteur."

Which means once again that only the US has the power to drive this process through such obstacles. Some diplomats think President Bush may be more engaged in a possible solution, or has been persuaded to be by his Arab allies, in order to avoid the conflict festering during a putative confrontation with Iran. There have even been hints that the US-imposed quid pro quo for doing what Israel wants in Iran is that it compromises with the Palestinians. But that is unlikely to be enough to ensure a successful process which, stripped of the familiar domestic constraints of internal American (and Israeli) politics, is actually per se manifestly in US and – arguably – Israeli interests.

Condoleezza Rice has staked her reputation on a success. To achieve it she would at the very least need to become – and with the same backing from Bush junior as he had from Bush senior – a James Baker.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk