United States President George Bush meets with Mahmoud Abbas in Washington. (Maan Images)

President Bush's announcement of a new Middle East summit is being dutifully reported as a move to "revive" the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, designed to culminate in a two-state solution. But the meeting, if it ever comes about, will be nothing of the sort. U.S. officials have already made clear that the gathering's purpose will be "to review progress toward building Palestinian institutions, look for ways to support further reforms and support the effort going on right now between the parties together."

Mushy? Of course it's mushy. The Bush speech simply restated the key term of the administration's long dead "roadmap" - before there can be peace talks, the Palestinians will be required to destroy Hamas. In other words, there will be no peace talks, just a lot of wishful thinking. As White House Press Secretary Tony Snow put it, "I think a lot of people are inclined to try to treat this as a big peace conference. It's not."

The Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about the emperor's new clothes might accurately describe current U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - except for one important detail. In the fairytale, the emperor's courtiers are careful never to let on that they can see their monarch's nakedness; in the case of U.S. Middle East policy, there is what playwright Bertolt Brecht might have called an epic gap between some of the actors and their lines. Plainly, very few of them believe the things that the script requires them to say.

In this absurdist take on the old fairytale, whenever anyone points out that the emperor has no clothes, they are simply told "duh!" before the players get back acting as if it's fashion week in the palace.

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The parlor game in all of this might be deciding which of Bush's courtiers is the most craven and cynical. The competition is fierce, but here's a handicapping of the race:

The Israelis

The Israeli leadership recognized Hamas' takeover of Gaza's security as an opportunity - but not, as they still tell gullible journalists, to pursue a peace agreement with Palestinian "moderates." Quite the contrary, it's been viewed as a free pass to fend off any conceivable U.S. pressure to conclude, or even work toward, a final-status agreement with the Palestinians. All they now have to do is make wan gestures of support for Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority, while using the fact that he speaks for half or less of all Palestinians to prove their case that, as ever, "there is no Palestinian partner for peace."

According to the respected Israeli political correspondent Aluf Benn, there is now a cast-iron consensus across the Israeli political spectrum that withdrawal from the West Bank is inconceivable for the foreseeable future. "In this atmosphere," Benn writes, "it is clear that any talk about a ‘two-state solution' and [Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's] declarations at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit about ‘new opportunities' and ‘accelerating the process toward a Palestinian state' are bogus. This diplomatic lip service, disassociated from reality and real expectations, is meant to assuage the Americans and the Europeans and deflect pressure on Israel."

Such duplicity is fine with the Bush administration and various European powers, Benn writes, precisely because they are doing the same thing: "The international community is participating in the show, and gradually is losing interest in the conflict." When it comes to pursuing any kind of deal to end Israel's occupation of the territories it captured in 1967, the Bush administration's policy can be summed up in three words: Look reasonably busy.

Israel's longstanding, but constantly shifting, argument has been simple enough: It has no Palestinian partner. First that was thanks to PLO leader Yasser Arafat's duplicity; then it was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' weakness; next, it was Hamas' victory in the January 2006 elections (that the Bush administration had sponsored), followed by the decision of Abbas to join it in a "unity" government; now, with Hamas left to starve and die in blockaded Gaza, and Abbas setting up his own unelected government on the West Bank, we're back to Abbas' weakness as an explanation.

The Bush administration has faithfully echoed Israel's zigzagging evasion of talks with the Palestinians, a course that began when Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister in February 2001. Even as, in op-ed after op-ed in U.S. papers, Hamas signals its desire to engage, and even as Israel continues to negotiate a prisoner exchange with Hamas, Israeli leaders insist that negotiations with the organization are impossible. Hamas, after all, has waged a terror war against Israel and adamantly refuses to recognize the Jewish state.

Few now remember that Israel used the same argument to avoid talking to Arafat's Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Fatah, too, had engaged in terrorism against Israelis (and still does occasionally) and refused to revise its charter to recognize Israel until 1998, five years after Arafat and Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin had their historic handshake on the White House lawn. Non-recognition of Israel is the default starting point for Palestinian nationalism, as Hamas deputy head Abu Marzook recently made clear in the Los Angeles Times, not because of some religious absolutism but because, for Palestinians, Israel's creation in 1948 meant their violent dispossession. Hamas believes it is being ordered to legitimize this dispossession before negotiations can even begin, and it refuses to do so.

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