After three years George Bush has thrown his weight behind the roadmap. Where will it end, asks Graham Usher Whether the conclusion is "a just and comprehensive peace" or simply "another lull between Intifadas" George Bush's presence at the Sharm El-Sheikh and Aqaba summits marks a new page in the annals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if only in terms of the cast. The two meetings were as much about the Arabs realising the US president's condition of creating a "new and different Palestinian leadership" in the person of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas as about inaugurating the "roadmap for peace" under Bush's "personal" stewardship. By being invited to sit at the same table as the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Abbas has again placed the Palestinian Authority on the right side of the new regional order born of US conquest of Iraq. Out in the cold are Syria and Lebanon and the elected Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Despite protests from the four Arab leaders Washington insisted Syria and Lebanon be neither invited to Sharm El-Sheikh nor their conflict with Israel be included in the roadmap due to their alleged "support for terrorism", most recently during the Iraq invasion. As for Arafat, he no longer exists. "It is impossible to achieve peace with Chairman Arafat," Bush told Egypt's Nile Television channel last week. But the greater prize was Abbas' meeting with Bush in Aqaba on Wednesday. For the Palestinian leadership (including, ironically, Arafat) this consecrates the longed for return of active US diplomacy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after two years of indifference during which the governments of Ariel Sharon reconquered the West Bank and destroyed the PA as a functioning government. The hope now is that "re-engagement" will translate into pressure on Israel to withdraw from West Bank Palestinian cities and freeze settlement construction, two conditions essential if the PA is to evolve from a nominal entity to a viable Palestinian state. No one yet knows what the price of this US-led survival will be. But the Palestinian fear is that it may be paid in absolute concessions on their national aspirations for authentic decolonisation, self-determination and return. It will surely mean a "peace process" that is gradual, predicated on Israel's security and with an utterly vague destination. At Aqaba Sharon committed himself to the removal of "unauthorised" settlement outposts in the West Bank rather than a settlement freeze as called for in the roadmap. He "understood" that "territorial contiguity" in the West Bank would be necessary for any "viable Palestinian state". But he made no reference to ending the occupation that "began in 1967". With equal circumspection, Abbas said the "armed Intifada must end" and "we must see and resort to peaceful means in our quest to end the occupation and suffering of the Israelis and Palestinians". But he made no mention of disarming the Palestinian militias by force. Bush granted both leaders their deliberate ambiguity: for now he wants actions that are achievable. And removing a handful of outposts and a cease-fire are achievable: a settlement freeze and Palestinian disarmament are not -- or at least not yet. Bending to the cold wind blowing out of Iraq and through their closed offices in Damascus, the Hamas leadership -- "inside" and "outside" -- appears to be readying for some kind of conditional truce. Hamas would halt its attacks if there were American guarantees that Israel would reciprocate with a "withdrawal [from the Palestinian areas], even if it is step by step", Hamas political leader, Ismael Abu Shanab, told ABC television on Tuesday. This, broadly, is the consensus within Fatah, together with the demand to release 6,000 or so Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli jails. On Tuesday Israel freed 91 Palestinian prisoners, most of them administrative detainees, but including PLO Executive Member Taysir Khaled and Palestine's longest serving prisoner, Ahmed Jubarah, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for killing 13 Israelis in a bomb attack in West Jerusalem. Of those released, 66 were from Fatah as against six from Hamas. Fatah's political leadership believe the release of their men -- above all, Secretary-General Marwan Barghouti -- is vital to rehabilitating their organisation in the West Bank. The question is where it will lead. Many in the Palestinian leadership believe the most that can be accomplished with the present Israeli government is the completion of the roadmap's first phase, essentially bringing the two peoples to where they were in September 2000. And some are apprehensive that to enter into negotiations on the "provisional" borders of Sharon's "interim, demilitarised state" may result in transforming the terms of any eventual settlement. Many compared the statements issuing from Sharm El-Sheikh and Aqaba with those of previous summits. In 1991 George Bush senior launched the international peace conference in Madrid based on the formula of land for peace and grounded on the principles of international legitimacy. At Sharm El-Sheikh -- and without even the fellow members of the Quartet -- Bush essentially substituted the new formula of peace for the Arabs unconditional support in the American defined "war against terrorism", including, apparently, those organisations engaged in armed resistance against Israeli occupation, whether in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon or Syria. At Beirut in March 2002, the Arab League formally adopted the so-called Saudi initiative according to which the Arabs would collectively offer a full peace with Israel in return for Israel's full withdrawal from the territories it occupied in the 1967 war and an "agreed" resolution of the refugee issue based on UN Resolution 194. At neither Sharm El-Sheikh nor Aqaba did Bush mention the Arab initiative. It was transformed into Israel dealing with settlements so that "there is a continuous [contiguous] territory that the Palestinians can call home". It is unclear how this squares with Sharon's interim solution of a Palestinian state with provisional borders on around 50 per cent of the West Bank. But there was nothing in Bush's statements to contradict Sharon.
