Excellent piece by Michael Gove in the Times on the forthcoming initiative by Tony Bair and President Bush on restarting the Middle East 'peace process'. As Gove observes, the premise underpinning this whole approach -- which consists largely of pressuring the Israelis not to defend thmselves but instead to 'negotiate' -- is false:

'The first wrong-headed assumption is embodied in the demand that Bush “re-engage” with the Middle East peace process, as though conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians was like a squabble between children, a dispute due primarily to a failure on the part of the figure in authority to assert himself. This error springs from a misplaced faith that major conflicts can be resolved if only outside figures apply themselves to brokering negotiations with all the energy at their disposal. The truth about peace processes is that outside brokers can achieve something only if the parties to the conflict want out. And that wasn’t the case with Arafat.'

Ah, say BlairBush, but now Arafat has gone the way is open for a fresh start. Maybe that is so. But as Gove observes, regarding the Middle East dispute as a discrete problem is to look at it through the wrong end of the telescope:

'Arafat was not the only Arab leader to blame his people’s problems on the Jews, to prefer the romance of the liberation struggle to the hard work of democratic modernisation, and to line his own pockets while his citizens scrabbled for survival. The root cause of violence, poverty and division in the Middle East is not a failure to solve the peace process. The failure of the peace process stems from the continuing addiction of so many of the Arab world’s leaders to fomenting violence, presiding over poverty and indulging in the politics of division.'

The great fallacy is to see the resolution of the Middle East impasse as a key to resolving world terror, when in fact it is only by defeating world terror that the Middle East impasse will be resolved. In other words, this will only happen when the rogue regimes of Iran and Syria are persuaded to stop arming and backing Palestinian terror; when Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran and the rest are persuaded to stop pumping out the grotesque lies and libels that demonise Israel and the Jews; when Palestinian sermons and TV stop inciting their population to hatred and mass murder of the Jews; and when the Arab and Moslem world is persuaded to stop using the Palestinians as pawns in the greater game of destroying the Jewish state altogether.

To resolve the Middle East impasse, therefore, BlairBush should be tackling Iran and Syria. Instead, the risk is that once again they will produce an ostensibly even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians -- which, because the situation is not morally even-handed at all but involves Arab mass murder of Israelis against which Israel is merely trying to defend itself, will once again have the effect of putting the Israeli victim in the dock, tying its hands and thus delivering the advantage to the people who are attacking it.

Bush has been down this road before with the ill-advised 'road map'. Then, as now, he did so at least in part as an act of gratitude to Blair for his support. Bush was very wrong then; he will be very wrong now if he repeats this fundamental error.

Daniel Pipes, meanwhile, looks further ahead and sees even greater dangers:

'Israel has been spared from unremitting U.S. pressure during the past three years only because Arafat continued to deploy the terrorism weapon, thereby alienating the American president and aborting his diplomacy. Thanks to growing anarchy in the Palestinian territories, Israel will probably remain “lucky” for some time to come. But this grace period will come to an end once clever and powerful Palestinian leaders realize that by holding off the violence for a decent interval, they can rely on Israel’s only major ally pressuring the Jewish state into making unprecedented concessions. I doubt this will happen on George W. Bush’s watch, but if it does, I foresee potentially the most severe crisis ever in U.S.-Israel relations.'

One of the ironies of the current refrain that the US is in Israel's pocket is that America has often forced Israel to do things that have imperilled its security. The word is that the initiative being announced this week will be a big deal. It should be scrutinised with extreme care to see whether it really does address the issue properly, whether it delivers instead a further victory for terror -- or whether it is a confection full of sound and fury but signifying nothing of any real significance at all.