Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas shakes hands with Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh (L) in Gaza City after agreeing to form a unity government. (Maan Images)

The recent agreement in Mecca between Fatah and Hamas demonstrates the fallacy of a widely held belief — that the United States alone holds the key to resolving the Israel- Palestine conflict. In fact, the Saudi-sponsored accord opens the door to a major European role in the Middle East peace effort. The question is whether Europe will walk through that door.

Although Hamas has committed itself to "respect" previous agreements between the PLO and Israel, it is not yet clear whether the Mecca accord obligates Hamas to explicitly recognize Israel. What is clear is that if Hamas and Fatah implement the agreement, form a unity government and return the rule of law to Gaza and the West Bank, they will have withdrawn from the brink of a Palestinian civil war that would have ended for the foreseeable future remaining prospects for a peace process and Palestinian statehood. That is a major achievement for which Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah deserves great credit.

What made this achievement possible was the realization not only by Hamas, but by Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and King Abdullah as well, that no matter how far Hamas might go in meeting the conditions called for by the so-called Quartet — the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States — Israel has no intention of returning to the 1967 border, and the United States has no intention of making the Israelis do so.

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There had been at least a theoretical plausibility to the notion that if Abbas could prove that the moderation he exemplifies yields major improvements in the lives of Palestinians, he might have been able to prevail over Hamas. But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government not only failed to make such improvements, despite repeated promises to do so, but humiliated Abbas and destroyed what credibility he had by pressing him to play the role of a Palestinian Pétain who accepts Israeli money and arms in order to kill fellow Palestinians. And the Bush administration has done nothing to press Israel to deliver on its commitments, beyond Washington's empty rhetoric about a two-state "political horizon."

Every time there emerged the slightest hint that the United States may finally engage seriously in a political process, Elliott Abrams, who handles the peace-process portfolio for the White House, would meet secretly with Olmert's envoys in Europe or elsewhere to reassure them there exists no such danger.

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