Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

WITH luck, the destructive two-week battle between Israel and Hamas may soon draw to an end. But how long before the century-long war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine follows suit? It is hard to believe that this will happen any time soon. Consider: Israel’s current operation, “Cast Lead”, marks the fourth time Israel has fought its way into Gaza. It almost captured Gaza (behind a pocket containing a young Egyptian army officer called Gamal Abdul Nasser) in 1948, in the war Israelis know as their war of independence. It captured Gaza again in 1956, as part of a secret plan hatched with Britain and France to topple Nasser as Egypt’s president and restore British control of the Suez Canal. It invaded a third time during the six-day war of 1967—and stayed there for 38 years, until withdrawing unilaterally three and a half years ago.

Why they fight

And Gaza, remember, is only one item in a mighty catalogue of misery, whose entries are inscribed in tears. The Jews and Arabs of Palestine have been fighting off and on for 100 years. In 1909 the mostly Russian socialist idealists of the Zionist movement set up an armed group, Hashomer, to protect their new farms and villages in Palestine from Arab marauders. Since then has come the dismal march of wars—1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 and now 2009—each seared by blood and fire into the conflicting myths and memories of the two sides. The intervals between the wars have not been filled by peace but by bombs, raids, uprisings and atrocities. Israeli settlers in Hebron today still cite, as if it were yesterday, the massacre of Hebron’s Jews in 1929. The Arabs of Palestine still remember their desperate revolt in the 1930s against the British mandate and Jewish immigration from Europe, and the massacres of 1948.

The slaughter this week in Gaza, in which on one day alone some 40 civilians, many children, were killed in a single salvo of Israeli shells, will pour fresh poison into the brimming well of hate (see article). But a conflict that has lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments. Those who choose to reduce it to the “terrorism” of one side or the “colonialism” of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land. It is not the sort of dispute in which enemies push back and forth over a line until they grow tired. It is much less tractable than that, because it is also about the periodic claim of each side that the other is not a people at all—at least not a people deserving sovereign statehood in the Middle East.

That is one reason why this conflict grinds on remorselessly from decade to decade. During eruptions of violence, the mantra of diplomats and editorialists is the need for a two-state solution. It sounds so simple: if two peoples cannot share the land, they must divide it. This seemed obvious to some outsiders even before the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews prompted the United Nations in 1947 to call for the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. In 1937 a British royal commission concluded that “an irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.” The answer had to be partition.

The fact that the Arabs rejected the UN’s partition plan of 60 years ago has long given ideological comfort to Israel and its supporters. Abba Eban, an Israeli foreign minister, quipped that the Palestinians “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. Israel’s story is that the Arabs have muffed at least four chances to have a Palestinian state. They could have said yes to partition in 1947. They could have made peace after the war of 1947-48. They had another chance after Israel routed its neighbours in 1967 (“We are just waiting for a telephone call,” said Moshe Dayan, Israel’s hero of that war). They had yet another in 2000 when Ehud Barak, now Israel’s defence minister and then its prime minister, offered the Palestinians a state at Bill Clinton’s fateful summit at Camp David.

This story of Israeli acceptance and Arab rejection is not just a yarn convenient to Israel’s supporters. It is worth remembering that it was not until 1988, a full 40 years after Israel’s birth, that Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) renounced its goal of liberating the whole of Palestine from the river to the sea. All the same, the truth is much more shaded than the Israeli account allows. There have been missed opportunities, and long periods of rejection, on Israel’s part, too.

Look again at those missed opportunities. At the time of the UN partition resolution, the Jews of Palestine numbered only 600,000 and the Arabs more than twice that number. Most of the Jews were incomers. Although partition might have been the wiser choice for the Palestinians, it did not strike them as remotely fair. In the subsequent war, more than 600,000 of Palestine’s Arabs fled or were put to flight. Afterwards, disinclined either to take them back or return the extra land it had gained in battle, Israel was relieved that the Arab states, traumatised by the rout, made no serious offer of peace. Many of the refugees have been stuck ever since in a sad finger of dunes, the Gaza Strip, pointing at the bright lights of Tel Aviv.

When Israel fell in love

After the ignominious defeat of 1967, the Arab states again rejected the idea of peace with Israel. That was, indeed, a wasted opportunity. But even though the Israel of 1967 discussed how much of the West Bank it was ready to trade for peace, the Likud governments of the late 1970s and 1980s wanted it all. For Israel fell in love with the territories it had occupied.

This was the period of Israeli rejection. Israeli prime ministers such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir asserted a God-given right to a “greater Israel” that included the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in which Israeli governments of all stripes continued to plant (illegal) settlements. In some Israeli minds the Palestinians became a non-people, to be fobbed off with self-government under Israeli or perhaps Jordanian supervision. It took an explosion of Palestinian resistance, in the intifada (uprising) of the late 1980s and the far more lethal one of 2001-03, to convince Israel that this was an illusion.

What bearing does all this history have on the foul events unfolding right now in Gaza? The point is that there have been precious few moments over the past century during which both sides have embraced the idea of two states at the same time. The most promising moment of all came at the beginning of this decade, with Mr Clinton’s near-miss at Camp David. But now, with the rise of Hamas and the war in Gaza, the brief period of relative hope is in danger of flickering out.

If rejection of the other side’s national claims is one of the things that make this conflict so hard to end, the other is religion. The two are tied together. Hamas is a religious movement, and its formal creed is to reject the possibility of Jewish statehood not only because of Israel’s alleged sins but also because there is no place for a Jewish state in a Muslim land.

In Israel’s early life Zionism was a mainly secular movement and the dominant force on the other side was a secular Arab nationalism. Since 1967, however, religion, nationalism and hunger for Palestinians’ land have fused to create a powerful constituency in Israel dedicated to retaining control of the whole of Jerusalem and Judaism’s holy places on the West Bank. Israel’s system of proportional voting has given the settlers and zealots a chokehold over politics. Among Arabs secular nationalism is meanwhile waning in the face of a powerful Islamic revival through the region. And a central dogma of the Islamists is that Israel is an implant that must be violently resisted and eventually destroyed.

One far-seeing Zionist, Vladimir Jabotinsky, predicted in the 1930s not only that the Arabs would oppose the swamping of Palestine with Jewish immigrants but also that “if we were Arabs, we would not accept it either”. In order to survive, the Jews would have to build an “iron wall” of military power until the Arabs accepted their state’s permanence. And this came to pass. Only after several costly wars did Egypt and later the PLO conclude that, since Israel could not be vanquished, they had better cut a deal. In Beirut in 2002 all the Arab states followed suit, offering Israel normal relations in return for its withdrawal from all the occupied territories, an opening which Israel was foolish to neglect.

The depressing thing about the rise of Hamas and the decline of the Fatah wing of the PLO is that it reverses this decades-long trend. Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections of 2006 had many causes, including a reputation for honesty. Its victory did not prove that Palestinians had been bewitched by Islamist militancy or come to believe again in liberating all of Palestine by force. But if you take seriously what Hamas says in its charter, Hamas itself does believe this. So does Hizbullah, Lebanon’s “Party of God”; and so does a rising and soon perhaps nuclear-armed Iran. Some analysts take heart from Hamas’s offer of a 30-year truce if Israel returns to its 1967 borders. But it has never offered permanent recognition.

There is worse. On top of the return to rejection and the growing role of religion, a third new obstacle to peace is the apparent crumbling of Jabotinsky’s iron wall.

In Lebanon three years ago, and today in Gaza, Hizbullah and Hamas seem to have invented a new military doctrine. Israel has deterred its enemies mainly by relying on a mighty conventional army to react with much greater force to any provocation. But non-state actors are harder to deter. Hizbullah and Hamas, armed by Iran with some modern weapons, can burrow inside the towns and villages of their own people while lobbing rockets at Israel’s. A state that yearns for a semblance of normality between its wars cannot let such attacks become routine. That is why today, as in the 1950s, Israel responds to pinpricks with punitive raids, each of which had the potential to flare into war. Israel’s operation in Gaza is designed not only to stop Hamas’s rockets but to shore up a doctrine on which Israel thinks its safety must still be based.

At Camp David in 2000 Israel and the Palestinians discovered that even with goodwill it is hard to agree terms. How to share Jerusalem? What to offer the refugees who will never go home? How can Israel trust that the land it vacates is not used, as Gaza has been, as a bridgehead for further struggle? But—and this is the fourth thing that keeps the battle alive—the two sides are seldom left alone to tackle these core issues.

For too long the conflict in Palestine was a hostage to the cold war. America was once neutral: it was Eisenhower who forced Israel out of Gaza (and Britain out of Egypt) after Suez. But America later recruited Israel as an ally, and this suited the Israelis just fine. It gave them the support of a superpower whilst relieving them of a duty to resolve the quarrel with the Palestinians, even though their own long-term well-being must surely depend on solving that conflict.

It may be no coincidence that some of the most promising peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians took place soon after the cold war ended. But now a new sort of geopolitical confrontation stalks the region, one that sets America against Iran, and the Islamist movements Iran supports against the Arab regimes in America’s camp. With Hamas inside Iran’s tent and Fatah in America’s, the Palestinians are now facing a paralysing schism.

And so to Gaza

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, has been saying all week that, although Israel’s immediate aim is to stop the rocket fire and not to topple Hamas, there can be no peace, and no free Palestine, while Hamas remains in control. She is right that with Hamas in power in Gaza the Islamists can continue to wreck any agreement Israel negotiates with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. Mr Abbas, along with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, may quietly relish Hamas being taken down a peg. Egypt is furious at Hamas’s recent refusal to renew talks with Fatah about restoring a Palestinian unity government.

There is a limit, however. Taking Hamas down a peg is one thing. But even in the event of Israel “winning” in Gaza, a hundred years of war suggest that the Palestinians cannot be silenced by brute force. Hamas will survive, and with it that strain in Arab thinking which says that a Jewish state does not belong in the Middle East. To counter that view, Israel must show not only that it is too strong to be swept away but also that it is willing to give up the land—the West Bank, not just Gaza—where the promised Palestinian state must stand. Unless it starts doing that convincingly, at a minimum by freezing new settlement, it is Palestine’s zealots who will flourish and its peacemakers who will fall back into silence. All of Israel’s friends, including Barack Obama, should be telling it this.

Contrary to the absurd claim of the rapporteur of the UN’s Human Rights Council, to whom Israel refused entry this week, the Gaza Strip is not facing a Nazi-like “Holocaust” at Israel’s hands. But the lot of the 1.5m Palestinians cooped up in this miserable scrap of desert is undeniably awful. Locked in on one side by Israel and on the other by Egypt, the Palestinians of Gaza have been subjected to an ever-tightening economic siege since the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, booted the secular Fatah movement out of the strip in June 2007. The possible end this week of a truce between Hamas and Israel can only make things worse. As the truce has frayed, Israel has responded to the Palestinian rockets flying over the border by closing the crossings for long periods, depriving Gaza’s residents of many necessities of life (see article).

A house divided

If the lot of Gaza is awful, the condition of the Palestinians as a whole is not much better. Unlike Hamas, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank stands by the decision the Palestine Liberation Organisation made a decade and a half ago to recognise Israel. Since the summit George Bush held last year in Annapolis, the PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, has been talking to Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, about how to form a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But they have not closed the gap on crucial issues such as borders, Jerusalem or refugees. And even if they had, it is not clear what such an agreement would be worth. Mr Olmert is a lame duck who will leave office after Israel’s election in February. Hamas calls Mr Abbas a lame duck too: his four-year term expires in January. Though he will probably stay on anyway, a Palestinian president who speaks only for the West Bank and not for Gaza is in no position to deliver peace.

Faced by this dispiriting stalemate, it would be understandable if Barack Obama concluded that he could do nothing big in Palestine when he becomes America’s president in January. There can certainly be no final deal while the Palestinians are split in half. Hamas is strong in the West Bank as well as Gaza and could easily blow up any deal it did not like. And for all its equivocation, Hamas still refuses to say plainly that it can ever accept the permanence of Israel. That is, by anyone’s standards, a deal-breaker, ruling out any sudden sprint to the two-state solution supported by almost everyone else.

Sprinting, however, is not the only way to move forward. A world blocked by the Palestinians’ internal rift should not conclude that nothing can be done. It should push the Palestinians to form a unity government, empowered to continue the peace talks even if Hamas reserves its final position. The Saudis and Egyptians have already tried this and failed, but the Arab states collectively could try again. One thing that hampered previous efforts was the hope inside Israel, America and perhaps privately inside the Palestinian Authority too that Hamas could be felled by the siege. But this is almost certainly a false hope as well as a callous policy. Extreme privation did not prevent tens of thousands of defiant supporters in Gaza this week from celebrating Hamas’s founding. For tactical reasons as well as moral ones, Israel should lift its economic siege. If the rocket fire continues, it will have to find a military answer.

As for Mr Obama, it is hard to imagine an incoming president better placed to reach over the heads of Hamas’s leaders and restore the waning belief of Palestinians in the power of diplomacy. He can do this in two ways, one immediate and one more sustained. Some time before Israelis vote in February, Mr Obama should spell out precisely the sort of peace America envisages: two states sharing Jerusalem, with a border very close to the pre-1967 armistice line, not one that lets Israel keep its settlement blocks deep in the West Bank. Just as Hamas needs to hear that Israel is not going to disappear, so Israel—especially if it elects a Likud government—needs to hear that America will not let it hold those settlements for ever.

Mr Obama’s more sustained task will be to make sure as diplomacy proceeds that both sides honour their agreements. Israel and the PA, for example, long ago signed a “road map” that included a demand for Israel to stop expanding its settlements in the occupied territories. By persistently ignoring that obligation, Israel has chipped away at the belief of even the most doveish Palestinians that they will ever gain the state they are promised. To restore their faith, Mr Obama has to stop Israel settling its citizens in places that are to become the new Palestine. That may require a painful clash with an ally. But there can be no better way to restore America’s credibility as a mediator, and woo Palestinians away from Hamas’s dark vision of war to the end between Muslim and Jew in Palestine.

BETTER than nothing. For now, that is the most that can be said of the new Arab-Israeli “peace process” George Bush inaugurated in Annapolis on November 27th. After weeks of negotiation, the Israeli and Palestinian delegations did at the last minute approve 437 words for the American president to read out, but this was the sort of declaration that makes the phrase “lowest common denominator” sound generous. It commits both sides to the goal of two states but is utterly silent on borders, Jerusalem, Israel's West Bank settlements and the fate of the Palestinian refugees—all the issues, in fact, that have confounded previous bouts of peacemaking.

The pious hope of this newspaper that America's president might fill the gap was confounded too (see article). Annapolis showed that for all its woes in the Middle East the United States still has pulling power. Saudi Arabia, Syria and a dozen other Arab countries turned up. Had Mr Bush wanted to signal what sort of deal America wanted, this was his chance. Yet his own speech was almost miraculously content-free. There was the ghost of a reference to 1967 and a call for Israel to stop expanding settlements. But saying out loud (as Bill Clinton did) that the border would have to be based on that of 1967, or that the two states would have to share Jerusalem, was evidently too daring for this deadbeat White House.

So Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president Annapolis was intended to strengthen against the rejectionists of Hamas, returns to Ramallah with little to show except the promise of a year of bi-weekly meetings with Ehud Olmert. He has already met the Israeli prime minister umpteen times and they have been unable to agree on any of the substantive issues. Mr Olmert may feel that he came out better from Annapolis. But what a barren victory: how can he or any other Israeli centrist persuade Israel's religious hawks to accept the need to give ground on Jerusalem, for example, while America has a president who is not willing to make such a demand?

It is of course better that the two sides talk, even if their chances of making a breakthrough unaided are nil. Talking is better than killing. Talks might also prepare the ground for the day when America does have a president who is genuinely willing to spend political capital on Palestine. Having a peace process under way should also make it easier to take practical steps to improve the economic conditions of the Palestinians.

And it could get worse

On the other hand, history teaches that the start of even unpromising peace talks galvanises the spoilers from both sides. Right now, with the Gaza Strip under the control of Hamas, the prospects of escalation are all too real. As soon as one of the many rockets that Hamas fires routinely and indiscriminately into Israel's southern towns hits a school or synagogue and kills a large number of Israelis, Mr Olmert will come under intense pressure to send his army back into the Gaza Strip, from which Ariel Sharon controversially extracted it in 2005. That could lead to a war no less brutal than the one Israel fought against Hizbullah in Lebanon last year.

In the White House, Mr Bush's speechwriters are no doubt congratulating him on a good week's work. They appear to think that simply attracting a big crowd of Arabs to Annapolis and talking loftily about an independent Palestine strengthens the region's moderates against the extremists of Hamas and Hizbullah, and the Iranians behind them. But in asking Mr Abbas to lead his exhausted and sceptical people back into the tunnel of negotiations, and neglecting to switch on a light at the end of it, Mr Bush is asking a lot of the Palestinian moderates. If they fail, he will deserve a big share of the blame.

BEING a Middle East peace envoy is a thankless task. Ask James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank boss, who gave up his effort to revive the Gaza Strip in 2006, complaining that he had been denied the mandate to do more. Or ask Alvaro de Soto, the Peruvian diplomat who did the job for the UN until May, and later compared his role to that of the comical Black Knight in the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. The knight's limbs are cut off one by one in battle, yet he keeps up the fight. “I'm invincible,” he proclaims. “You're a loony,” retorts the king.

Tony Blair has been in the job for less than a month since retiring as Britain's prime minister, and is already feeling the slashes of the sword. The first swipe came from Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister, who complained that Mr Blair had been appointed behind closed doors by America without consulting the so-called quartet—the club of America, Russia, the European Union and the UN—that Mr Blair is now supposed to represent.

Then came an “open letter” from ten of Europe's Mediterranean countries, which said his mandate, to help build the institutions of a future Palestinian state, was too limited. Mr Blair, they said, should tear up the quartet's old “road map” and seek an all-inclusive peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Americans, though, insist that Mr Blair's authority will not extend to high diplomacy. They will lead the way along the “political track”, says Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state. Italy told Mr Blair not to isolate Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip, but Israel says that is precisely what he must do. Merely by taking the job, Mr Blair has stepped on the toes of all the other Middle East envoys, not least Michael Williams, the UN envoy, and Javier Solana, the EU's foreign-policy supremo.

Despite it all, he remains defiantly optimistic. On his first foray to the Middle East as envoy this week—with a staff of two, no permanent office and relying on the help of British diplomats—Mr Blair said his aim was to “listen, learn and reflect”, but he nevertheless felt “a sense of possibility...a moment of opportunity”.

Yet things have gone from bad to worse since the last abortive attempt to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, at Camp David in July 2000, which was followed by a Palestinian uprising. Neither the election of Mahmoud Abbas as the Palestinian president after Yasser Arafat's death in 2004 nor Israel's withdrawal from Gaza the following year stopped the downward spiral. If anything, they spurred the rise of Hamas, the most prominent of the factions waging a violent campaign against Israel—and led to the fratricidal violence in Gaza that resulted last month in the defeat of Mr Abbas's secular Fatah movement.

But the crisis may have jump-started Middle Eastern diplomacy. Mr Abbas has sworn in a new government led by a technocrat. Israel has given him part of the hundreds of millions of dollars it had frozen, freed 250-odd Palestinian prisoners and is letting Mr Abbas boost his Fatah-led security forces in the West Bank.

The immediate aim is to shore up Fatah and avert a Gaza-style collapse in the much larger West Bank. But there are also the first signs that the process may start going beyond mere crisis management. Mr Blair's mandate is to create the conditions for a viable Palestinian state, and he is due to present his proposals in September, ahead of an American-inspired international conference. This week the Arab League, a club of 22 countries, sent an unprecedented delegation to Israel, consisting of the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan, formally to present a peace plan. This envisages the Arabs agreeing fully to normalise relations with Israel if it fully withdraws from territories captured in 1967 and agrees to a “just solution” for Palestinian refugees dating back to 1948.

Israel has also started to talk differently. It still says it will not immediately negotiate a “final status agreement” with Palestinians. But an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reports that Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, is ready to negotiate an “agreement of principles” to create a Palestinian state on 90% of the West Bank.

Nothing about the latest diplomacy is plain. None of those involved—Mr Olmert, Mr Abbas, moderate Arab leaders, George Bush and even Mr Blair—seems likely yet to have the will or the courage to tackle the explosive issues (the division of Jerusalem, the removal of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, redrawing borders or addressing the refugee question) that have prevented a lasting peace before. Welcome, Mr Blair, to the snake pit.