Bush’s Mideast forum plan draws approval and shrugs

President Bush’s declared intention to refocus on the Middle East by sponsoring a peace conference this fall won cautious endorsement Tuesday from Israeli, Palestinian and other regional leaders who will be invited. But many in the region voiced skepticism about what it could achieve.

Five years after calling for creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel, Bush on Monday announced his renewed commitment to that goal during the final 18 months of his presidency, saying this is a “moment of choice” for the region.

But officials and analysts immersed in the 6-decade-old conflict said the initiative faces many obstacles: an untenable split among the Palestinians, weak leadership in the Israeli and Palestinian camps, widely differing expectations for the conference, and a sense that Bush is acting too late.

Recalling the 2002 policy speech in which Bush boldly set a three-year deadline for a peace settlement, Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea wrote of a “shrunken” American leader who, after long inattention to the conflict, took care in his address Monday not to specify any timetables.

“Comparison of the two speeches reveals that peace in the Middle East is like the horizon: The nearer you get, the further away it is,” Barnea wrote Tuesday in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot.

Several Israeli and Arab commentators said Bush’s initiative could fall victim to his own risky strategy: promoting peace talks between Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian entity in the West Bank while isolating the Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip and calls for Israel’s destruction. They warned that Hamas, which denounced the Bush plan as a “crusade” against Palestinians, is strong enough militarily to sabotage any progress toward a settlement.

Analysts said Bush diminished expectations by naming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, rather than himself, to preside over the conference. Uncertainty about its date and location, as well as the agenda and list of participants, clouded initial assessments of its prospects.

While embracing the idea of a conference, Israeli and Palestinian officials said Tuesday that they had not been informed about key details but expected to learn more when Rice visits the region late this month.

America’s Arab allies welcomed Bush’s call for a meeting without promising to take part.

“The devil is in the details, and we want to see the details,” said Arab League spokesman Hisham Youssef said.

Arab countries invited to the gathering “will evaluate it based on its likely outcome,” he said.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Bush’s initiative “contains positive elements that we must hold on to, and build upon and develop.” He applauded the stated U.S. goal of ending Israel’s “occupation” -- a pointed term Bush used in his speech -- of Palestinian territories.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II, on a visit to Canada, called the announcement a “step in the right direction.”

Saudi Arabia welcomed the initiative, saying it wanted the conference to “be part of a serious international effort tackling core issues of the conflict.”

The statement did not say whether Saudi Arabia would take part in the meeting, as Egypt and Jordan are widely expected to do and as Bush and the Israelis clearly want. Egypt and Jordan have diplomatic relations with Israel, but Saudi Arabia does not; the kingdom’s participation would be seen as a breakthrough in Middle East diplomacy.

“Despite all the suspicions over Bush’s intentions, his absolute bias toward Israel and the violence he has spread in the region, we should interact with this initiative,” said Mohammed Sayed Said, an international affairs specialist at Cairo’s Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “For the first time, Bush proposes a round of negotiations that addresses the fundamental issues.”

In 1991, the Soviet Union and the United States sponsored a Middle East peace conference in Madrid that paved the way for the Oslo peace accords two years later and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. But repeated stalemates have thwarted hopes for a definitive peace treaty and Palestinian statehood.

Yossi Beilin, a dovish Israeli lawmaker who took part in the Madrid conference, said the time was not ripe for another such forum. He said the only point of holding one was to gather leaders who would otherwise not meet, or give an existing agreement international backing.

“This conference does neither this nor that,” he told Israel Radio.

Israel is generally averse to multilateral peace conferences. But Israeli leaders were relieved by Bush’s proposal because it stopped short of demanding concessions they are unwilling to make, such as removing long-established Jewish settlements from the West Bank.

Bush accepted a demand by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to hold direct talks with Israel on a final peace settlement, skipping over an interim stage defined by previous negotiations in which the Palestinians would get a state with interim borders.

But Bush also gave Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has refused to discuss a final settlement with the Palestinians, an escape clause: First, the Palestinians must disarm militants who attack Israel and rid their administration of corruption.

As a result, Palestinians and Israelis will go to the conference with divergent expectations.

“We hope that this conference will make it possible to fix a date for the creation of an independent Palestinian state,” said Nabil abu Rudaineh, an Abbas spokesman. He said the Palestinian leader is ready to start talks on such final-settlement issues as borders, the return of Palestinian refugees and rival claims to Jerusalem.

Olmert’s spokeswoman, Miri Eisin, said it was too early to address such issues as long as Palestinian violence against Israel continued. But a peace conference “would certainly add to the capability of arriving at the core issues,” she said.

Breaking the deadlock, many analysts say, would require three badly weakened leaders to find a way to overcome their limitations and work together.

Like Bush, who wants to burnish a legacy tarnished by Iraq as his term expires, Olmert is widely viewed as a lame duck; the Israeli premier was hurt politically by an investigative panel’s criticism of his leadership in last summer’s war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

Hamas defeated Abbas’ long-ruling Fatah faction in parliamentary elections last year, then drove his security forces out of Gaza in June after months of factional fighting.

“I do not believe either Olmert or Abbas can take any decision to solve the bigger issues,” said Nashat Aqtash, professor of political science at Birzeit University in the West Bank.

By trying to shore up Abbas and isolate Hamas, Bush is adopting “a risky black-and-white strategy,” said Mouin Rabbani, a Middle East analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. He noted that Egypt and Saudi Arabia oppose trying to sideline Hamas.

“Any peace process based on that strategy is doomed,” he said.

boudreaux@latimes.com

Times staff writer Borzou Daragahi in Cairo and special correspondents Noha el Hennawy in Cairo, Hala Moughanie in Beirut, Ranya Kadri in Amman, Jordan, and Maher Abukhater in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.