MIDDLE EAST: Lara Marlowe examines the Geneva Accord, an unofficial plan for the Middle East, which will be signed today
Two "peace planes" carrying 400 Israeli and Palestinian politicians, musicians, writers and intellectuals, will land at Geneva airport this morning.
US actor Richard Dreyfuss will act as master of ceremonies when a freelance agreement known as the Geneva Accord is celebrated at the city's main conference centre. It could almost convince you that peace has broken out between Israelis and Palestinians.
Speakers will include former US President Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, and the former South African President Nelson Mandela, both winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.
But real peace could still be a long way off. The 50-page Geneva Accord has been denounced by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, as a "plot" that is "more dangerous" than the 1993 Oslo agreement which his government scuttled.
Pro-Israeli newspaper editorialists have been even more scathing. Uri Dan, the New York Post's Middle East correspondent, writing in the Jerusalem Post, called the Geneva Accord a "ludicrous document of surrender to Palestinian terror". The American commentator Charles Krauthammer said it was disgraceful that the US Secretary of State encouraged the negotiators. "This is not a peace treaty; this is a suicide note," Mr Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post.
Extremist Palestinian groups reject the Geneva Accord as an act of "collaboration" and "betrayal" because it all but abandons the Palestinians' "right of return" to what is now Israel, recognised by UN General Assembly resolution 194.
It is virtually impossible that the Sharon government will ever accept the terms of the accord, but its instigators want to increase pressure on Mr Sharon and energise the opposition Labor Party.
They are praying that the continuing confiscation of Palestinian land, Israeli assassinations of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members and suicide bombings by Palestinians will not bury their work altogether.
Whatever its ultimate fate, the former Israeli Justice Minister, Yossi Beilin, and the former Palestinian information minister, Yasser Abed Rabbo, have called the bluff of their respective governments in a powerfully symbolic way, proving it is possible to reach agreement.
Both men participated in earlier negotiations, including the Camp David and Taba meetings which almost succeeded in July 2000 and January 2001. It was Mr Beilin who organised Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.
"It's the first time in our history," Mr Abed Rabbo told the Philadelphia Inquirer, "that Israeli and Palestinian groups laid out a solution which is final, detailed, conclusive, no ambiguities." Opinion polls show that 53 per cent of Israelis - and a higher percentage of Palestinians - support the Geneva Accord. Although Yasser Arafat has some reservations, he agrees with the basic outline.
The biggest breakthrough in years started when Mr Beilin gave a lecture in Geneva in August 2002. Alexis Keller, a professor of history and politics at the University of Geneva asked him: "Why don't we complete the Taba negotiations?"
Taba built on the December 2000 Clinton plan, but failed because Mr Sharon announced he would rescind any agreement when he came to office.
Mr Keller (40), the son of a prominent Swiss banker, used his family's fortune and chalet near Berne to facilitate meetings between Israelis and Palestinians. He travelled several times to Israel and the Occupied Territories and eventually enlisted the support of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Geneva initiative was formally launched in Jordan on October 12th, 10 years after the failed Oslo agreement. Since the second intifada started in September 2000, some 2,600 Palestinians and 900 Israelis have been killed.
Other developments have converged with the Geneva Accord to create the most hopeful mood in at least three years.
A separate initiative, the People's Voice campaign, led by Maj Gen Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, and Sari Nusseibeh, the president of Al Quds University, has collected close to 200,000 signatures demanding that Jewish settlers leave the Occupied Territories, that Palestinians give up the right to return to Israel and that a Palestinian state be created alongside Israel.
A week ago, the Israeli Labor Party adopted a peace plan similar to the Geneva Accord. Earlier, the Israeli army chief of staff, Gen Moshe Ya'alon, warned that Israeli treatment of Palestinians was provoking further violence.
In an interview with Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, four former heads of Shin Bet said that Mr Sharon's policies were leading Israel to disaster.
Until the Geneva Accord, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators routinely postponed the most difficult issues: borders and settlements, refugees and the status of Jerusalem.
The agreement celebrated in Geneva today resolves all four issues, albeit not to everyone's satisfaction. The borders of the future Palestinian state would closely follow those of the 1949 armistice, which held until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
The map annexed to the Geneva Accord was drawn up by the former Israeli army Col Shaul Arieli, working with Palestinians he knew from previous negotiations since 1994.
"We had three guiding principles," Col Arieli told Le Monde: "to pick up where we left off at Taba, to keep the 1967 borders as a reference and to resort to land exchanges based on parity where necessary." The fairness of the land swaps is an innovation in the Geneva plan. In the mid-1990s, Col Arieli said, he "never imagined" drawing up such a map.
"At the time, I was convinced that Israel could make peace without . . . giving up land in exchange for the settlements it was annexing. \ Barak was convinced of the same thing at Camp David." Under Geneva, Israel would annex the big settlements it has grafted on to East Jerusalem: Givat Zeev, Pisgat Zeev, Maale Adoumin and Gilo.
Other West Bank settlements along the "green line" would also be annexed. All other settlements, including those in the Gaza Strip, would be abandoned within 30 months.
In compensation for settlements annexed by Israel, the Palestinians would receive a comparable amount of land contiguous with the south-west of the West Bank and the eastern border of the Gaza Strip. Unlike previous Israeli proposals, the acreage thus handed over to Palestinians would not be desert wasteland.
A land corridor, under Israeli sovereignty, would link Gaza and the West Bank at their closest point. A similar corridor was envisaged under Oslo but never materialised.
The biggest concession made by Palestinians is de facto renunciation of the right of return for some four million refugees. Geneva would give them two years to resettle in Palestine, stay where they are or move to a third country. Israel would accept a symbolic number of refugees; a few tens of thousands. Exiled Palestinians would receive compensation for lost property and would cease to hold refugee status.
Jerusalem, claimed by both peoples, was another seemingly intractable issue. Negotiators agreed that predominantly Arab neighbourhoods would become part of Palestine, Jewish neighbourhoods part of Israel. Under the supervision of an "international group", Palestine would hold sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif or Temple Mount, while Israel would keep the adjacent Wailing Wall and the cemetery on the Mount of Olives.
The Geneva Accord would create a follow-up group composed of the "Quartet" (US, EU, Russia and UN) who drew up the dormant and considerably less ambitious Road Map. The absence of such guarantors helped to doom Oslo. The accord also foresees a multinational force - something always rejected by Israel - keeping peace in a demilitarised Palestine.
After today's ceremony, the negotiating teams will travel to the US, where they will meet US Arab and Jewish groups, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, and the US Secretary of State,Colin Powell.
Mr Annan has been one of the strongest supporters of the Geneva initiative. "The policy of small steps didn't work," he said this autumn, "and it's not likely it would work in the future."
Mr Powell wrote to the negotiators, saying that "projects such as yours are important in helping sustain an atmosphere of hope."