Despair and confusion are the dominant sentiments arising from the latest suicide bombing atrocities in Israel. Twenty-six people have been murdered in two days, many of them young children. As a result President Bush postponed an important speech on a peace initiative, while the Israeli cabinet has announced a new policy of reoccupying land already ceded to the Palestinian Authority.
The only people who can gain from these events are those intransigently opposed to a peaceful settlement involving a secure Israel and an independent Palestinian state living side by side. If they are not to prevail it is essential that those who believe such a settlement is possible should speedily recover the initiative.
The United States has a central role to play in creating the framework that can end Israel's occupation and lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. This is acknowledged by the other major players in the region and internationally, including the European Union and the United Nations. Those responsible for the latest suicide bombings have timed their atrocities to undermine that role. Their intervention immediately alters the balance of the argument within the US administration, as well as in the Israeli government. It is equally intended to affect the positions taken by the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat and by Arab leaders increasingly critical of him for not doing more to prevent such terrorism.
President Bush has to build a bridge between such a potential settlement and the despair and hopelessness these atrocities create on the ground. It is reported that his preferred means of doing so is to propose an interim Palestinian state with provisional boundaries ahead of a three-year negotiation to deal with the three most difficult outstanding issues: final borders, the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees. That strategy is now being questioned within the administration by a powerful coalition of forces opposed to Mr Arafat and sympathetic to the Israeli prime minister, Mr Sharon. If they succeed in convincing Mr Bush to back away from his plan or to postpone it indefinitely the region will be plunged into an increasingly dangerous instability.
In order to succeed Mr Bush would have to face down this conservative coalition within his administration and in the Israeli government, giving him a firm time-table for negotiations. Were he to do so he would attract support from an alternative coalition of Europeans, Arab and Muslim states and the United Nations. Increasingly, too, Israelis and Palestinians sickened by the cycles of violence and terror and convinced that a peaceful settlement is possible would rally to such a process. All concerned would have to be willing to proceed despite continuing acts of violence, in the conviction that gradual success would reduce support for the perpetrators.This may seem an impossibly utopian scenario, seen from the present depths of despair, and given the political configuration of the Bush administration. But it is worth spelling out, to underline that only a comprehensive approach can overcome this dreadful impasse.