MIDDLE EAST: In Sharm al-Sheikh yesterday, the Palestinian Authority's Prime Minister, Mr Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) discussed the path to a better future for his people in the elevated company of Arab heads of state and US President Mr George Bush. From David Horovitz in Jerusalem
In Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority's President, Mr Yasser Arafat, was meeting with Mr Ahmad Jubarah, a 68-year-old Palestinian freed after three decades in an Israeli jail for his part in a 1975 bombing in Jerusalem in which 13 people were killed.
In the Jordanian port city of Aqaba today, the public shift in power will be re-emphasised. While Mr Arafat will again be languishing in his Israeli-besieged Muqata headquarters complex, Mr Abbas will meet again with Mr Bush and with the Israeli Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon. At the end of their summit, the trio are expected to announce the formal start of implementation of the so-called "road map" to Palestinian statehood - a political process in which Mr Bush and Mr Sharon are equally adamant that Mr Arafat, whom they regard as a terrorist, can play no part.
The American and Israeli leaders believe Mr Arafat's exclusion, and the success of their campaign to have Mr Abbas appointed as the first Palestinian prime minister, immediately renders the prospects of meaningful progress on the diplomatic front more realistic than in the recent past - and specifically more so than at the last serious effort at peacemaking, under the Clinton presidency, at Camp David in July 2000.
But that's not the only source of the rare optimism surrounding today's Aqaba talks. Chief among the other positive factors is the evidence of Mr Bush's new personal determination to play peacebroker - a role he had made clear at the start of his presidency he wanted desperately to avoid. September 11th and the ongoing threat of terrorism plainly changed that. As the president noted in Sharm al-Sheikh yesterday, "terror threatens my state" not just distant Middle Eastern countries. In that grim new reality, he simply could not afford to wash his hands of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Unlike Mr Clinton, furthermore, Mr Bush is taking the essential elementary step of involving moderate Arab regimes early in his peace push, attempting to provide a supportive environment for the kinds of dramatic compromise - on the status of Jerusalem, on West Bank settlements, on Palestinian refugees - that will have to be made if the new effort is to bear fruit.
Furthermore Mr Bush has simultaneously and subtly excluded from the peace push the other members of the so-called Quartet that drew up the "road map" - the European Union, Russia and the United Nations - to the immense relief of Mr Sharon, who profoundly mistrusts all three. In return, however, Mr Sharon will feel obligated to keep Mr Bush happy, and may perhaps offer deeper concessions to a fundamentally supportive American administration than he would have done to a more varied cast of international diplomatic players.
Indeed, Mr Sharon's apparent change of course these past few days is another central factor in the new optimism. Where just four years ago he was urging settlers to "seize the hilltops" of the West Bank, he is now vowing to bring at least some of them back down, defying his own party in endorsing limited Palestinian statehood, and echoing Labour prime ministers down the decades in characterising Israel's long-term rule over 3.5 million Palestinians - he's even used the dread word "occupation" - as untenable.
And there's one final factor, too, to bear in mind: the very weariness of the combatants after 32 months of Intifada confrontation. As Mr Abbas has been saying, the resort by Hamas and by Arafat loyalists to an armed Intifada has brought the Palestinians no benefit. Quite the reverse. Israel is back in the big West Bank cities, and the Palestinian economy is in tatters. And thwarting the bombers has cost Israel dear in terms of its image, its economy, and its morale.
Despite all these factors, however, exaggerated optimism would be more than foolish at this stage. There is absolutely no evidence that the two sides can bridge the gulfs that divide them on key issues - no matter how persuasive Mr Bush may be, nor how supportive the wider regional environment. Mr Sharon says he will not countenance Palestinian sovereignty anywhere in Jerusalem. And while he is expected today in Aqaba to declare a readiness to dismantle new illegal settler outposts and is reportedly prepared to evacuate some more established settlements to meet Mr Bush's demand that the Palestinians be given contiguous territory for statehood, he will not easily relinquish anything like as much of the West Bank as his predecessor, Labour's Ehud Bara k, would have ceded. Mr Abbas, for his part, has adamantly rejected the notion of dropping the "right of return" - a demand, in principle, for four million Palestinians to be allowed to make their homes in Israel, demographically overwhelming Israel as a Jewish state.
What's more, Mr Sharon is already facing criticism from the Israeli right, and any further moderate shift in his policies could be, literally, life threatening. Mr Abbas, in turn, not only has the Islamic extremists, who oppose Israel's very existence, looking over his shoulder, but he also works in the shadow of Mr Arafat. The PA president may not have been at Sharm al-Sheikh and will not be in Aqaba. But it is he, and not Mr. Abbas, who retains mainstream Palestinian public support. And as Mr Abbas acknowledged just two weeks ago in an Egyptian magazine interview, "We do not do anything without his approval."