If we are not helping to ride forward, we are all falling down

The Middle East is never easy. In fact the major continuing determinant of Middle Eastern developments seems to be its infinite capacity to get worse, month after month and year after year. We look back to better times; looking ahead, it is hard to muster any kind of optimism.

With a little time on my hands, I have tried to take a look at some key factors. These won't overcome the present pessimism; they may add a note of some potential hope for confirmed optimists.

There are many basics about the region. I continue to be impressed with the fact that no one has presented a good, viable and fair alternative to the two-state solution. George Bush, it will be readily forgotten, at least deserves kudos for having embraced officially the concept, setting aside all of the other complaints about him.

It is in my view also true still that we know fairly closely what the deal has to be on the critical factors - Jerusalem, borders, security, refugees and the others. That doesn't mean that the players will accept as a fait accompli the imposition of such an approach from the outside. But it does mean increasingly that they know where the center ground is to be found; what they do not yet understand is that any amount of negotiation is unlikely radically to improve their ability to get a better deal from the other side. While each of us may have his or her own pet formula for defining to the next level of detail on these critical factors of a settlement, what this deal will look like in my view is close to that presented in a recent piece by Henry Seigman's group which sets it out pretty well as far as I can see.

So if there is no serious mystery about the substance of the resolution, why are we having such problems? It would be easy to say domestic politics in the region and be done with it. While not wholly true, it is true enough that we have always had more problems getting the parties together and working toward the answer than we have had in figuring essentially what the answer would or should look like. And the problem in getting them together has related to domestic constituencies and pressures much of the influence of which is magnified either by the coalition politics of Israel or the radical bias in Palestinian political life

Until recently we had a matched pair of misfit parties, each bifurcated or worse internally, and increasingly dominated either by incapacity or the domination of an opposition which while small had been effective in opposing both the process of negotiation and the end result. Israel was and is in trouble from the throes of an election campaign, close and hard fought, to what now appears to be an emerging 'pseudo hermaphrodite' government with uncertain possibilities for being able to address what is increasingly becoming for Israel an existential question -- can it stay Jewish and democratic and can it stay in the Middle East if it does not resolve the challenge? I say 'pseudo' because I wonder how long Barak and Lieberman can co-exist and even more how long Bibi can maintain control. 'Hermaphrodite' because Barak and Bibi are not from the same mold, or even world. One piece of good news is that baked into the present government are already the fast growing seeds of failure. If it cannot measure up, cannot cooperate, cannot operate in the interests of the state, its half life is measured in short term units. If it can persevere, the mitzvah of doing so may well carry it to a different conclusion. I put the odds at below 50-50 but am not entirely satisfied, for example, that Bibi wants again to become a Nordic-track Prime Minister over this critical issue, particularly with his success as Finance Minister behind him but not so far that he still recognizes winning the elections only to fail the Prime Ministership again is not a formula for a legacy of service to his people, for lasting fame for himself, or for re-election.

Palestinians are flattering Israel with an exercise in imitation. The splits remain large even though the canny players in the region, among whom I count Omar Sulieman of Egypt in the top rank, understand that Hamas gets nowhere alone but deeper into Gaza and maybe the West Bank, while al Fatah, the PLO or the PA, whichever you choose to call it, is toothless and ineffective without support from their Hamas opposite numbers on the other side. Moves to see once again whether some patch-up can occur and then be used, via one formula or another to enter the process, is a key question to be worked quietly for the future if we are to expect to see progress. It is good news that stirrings in the region toward some kind of glue-together, technocratic, patch up are underway. The key players here will be Egypt and Saudi Arabia with the others helping if they can be induced to do so.

Also some kudos to the administration for sending two folks to Damascus. As any process goes ahead, Syria needs to be engaged otherwise Syria will try to disengage the process.

I have always thought in a kind of lunatic way that it is much better to have two tracks working than to have none. It might now be time to realize that may also be true for one track, with two being better.

So priority one has to be the negotiating parties. We can and should be helping quietly, behind the scenes and out of the lime light. That should be first priority. We should at the same time be colossally wary of getting involved too deeply in side tracks. The Middle East has endless capacity to produce them and every time one pops up it seems poised to do inestimable damage to the process. We then mistakenly think that the answer lies in resolving the problems on the side track and once that is done assume blithely that all will fall into place. For too long we have found, particularly in Lebanon, that the road through Beirut goes only to Zahle.

Finally, when the time comes, we need to be prepared with a framework which will define the issues carefully enough to set the agenda for the parties and discretely enough that they will understand where the center focus of their effort has to be concentrated. Timing here is everything. It should come only after some negotiation is engaged, even a la Rube Goldberg, and not too long after that, because the parties will by then have already developed a firm formula for breakdown.

Let me end with a few principles:

The bicycle: if we are not helping to ride forward we are all falling down.

The US still remains the most significant outside player. The parties cannot do all of this by themselves although they will need lots of time with each other alone to make it work.

Finally, this process and issue are so important that we cannot opt out and it is in my view important to state once again that the only thing that is harder than finding a settlement in the region is to find a way permanently and for ever to break up the peace process.