Giving peace a chance

TO PUT IT MILDLY, hopes are not high for President Bush’s latest attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But there are two virtues in Bush’s call this week for a new international meeting to address it.

The first is his recognition that the “road map” for peace devised by the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union has produced a dead end. Equally important, by linking the proposed conference to support for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Bush implicitly has conceded that -- contrary to his own overweening rhetoric -- democracy cannot be the only guiding principle of U.S. diplomacy.

Since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, U.S. peacekeeping efforts have toggled between what might be called the wholesale and the retail approaches. Sometimes, as with the Camp David talks midwifed by President Carter, the United States has acted on its own partly to forestall an international peace conference. At other times, as with the Madrid conference convened by then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III after the Persian Gulf War, the “big tent” approach was preferred.

Now Bush is returning to the latter approach. The administration envisions a meeting in the fall, chaired by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at which Israelis would mingle with Palestinians and representatives of Arab nations both friendly and unfriendly. The ticket for admission, Bush suggested, would be acceptance of the “two-state solution,” in which an Israel recognized by its neighbors would coexist peacefully with a Palestinian state that rejected violence. So far the RSVPs haven’t exactly been pouring in. Jordan’s King Abdullah II has called Bush’s invitation a “step in the right direction,” but Syrian President Bashar Assad dismissed it as “just words.”

It’s easy to itemize the reasons why this initiative might founder. It comes late in the second term of a president who hasn’t made the Israeli-Palestinian issue a priority. Some of the would-be participants resent continued U.S. involvement in Iraq. The two-state solution Bush rightly advocates is opposed not only by rejectionist Palestinians but by right-wing Israelis who are loath to dismantle Jewish settlements in the West Bank or return the Golan Heights to Syria.

Finally, in coupling the conference with pleas for financial support for Abbas and his Fatah administration, Bush finds himself hoist on the petard of his simplistic insistence that democracy is the key to the transformation of the Middle East. Bush praised Abbas for “striving to build the institutions of a modern democracy.” Yet democracy produced the Hamas-dominated government that Abbas suspended after Hamas fighters took over the Gaza Strip. Now the United States must backtrack and urge that Hamas be marginalized despite its democratic credentials (a sales pitch that should be accompanied by pressure on Abbas to deal with corruption in his own Fatah movement).

Still, the alternative to Bush’s initiative is continued drift in the six-decade search for a solution that would allow Arabs and Jews to share the Holy Land. Better late than never, the president is giving this issue attention, even if his rhetoric remains imprudent.