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By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Tony Blair is expected to be confirmed as a
special international envoy to the Middle
East today in the wake of a summit at which
the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
proposed the release of 250 Palestinians.
Mr Blair's post will be discussed at today's
meeting in Jerusalem of the international
"quartet" of the US, EU, UN and Russia.
The prisoner releases - which have to be
ratified by the Israeli cabinet - involve
Fatah detainees who have not been convicted
of murder and are therefore unlikely
directly to affect the fate of the abducted
Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, who is being
held by Hamas.
Mr Olmert's cabinet had already decided
before yesterday's Sharm el-Sheikh summit,
designed to shore up the position of
President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah
organisation at the expense of the Hamas
leadership in Gaza, to release some of the
$600m (£300m) it owes the Palestinian
authority, but only for use in the West
Bank.
The relative lack of tangible results,
beyond the prisoner releases, from
yesterday's summit underlines the challenges
faced by Mr Blair in a region which has long
been a political graveyard for the hopes of
envoys of every kind.
The last special envoy appointed to the
quartet, also with the initial blessing of
President George Bush, James Wolfensohn, the
former head of the World Bank, came
determined to create a genuine economic, and
as a consequence, political opportunity out
of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.
While the election of Hamas in January 2006
did not make his task any easier, he left
his post last year frustrated with what he,
by all accounts, saw as Israel's
unwillingness to subordinate short-term
security concerns - exemplified by its
unwillingness to sustain the opening of the
Gaza crossings - to the much wider security
interests he thought would be served by a
more functional Palestinian economy.
Mr Blair's brief, according to some sources,
is to include efforts to ease freedom of
Palestinian movement - which a World Bank
report on the West Bank in May said was
essential to reversing an economic collapse
which saw GDP fall by 10 per cent last year
alone.
The Israeli military, however, successfully
opposed any move to announce an immediate
relaxation of closures and checkpoints at
yesterday's summit, even to bolster Mr Abbas.
One obstacle in the eyes of some Palestinian
politicians was that his closeness to
President Bush failed to reap dividends in
engaging him more fully in finding a
long-term solution. His attempts to organise
a wide-ranging international conference in
2004 were reduced to a meeting on
Palestinian "governance".
The timing to revive that project looks
especially unpropitious given the
disjunction between what are de facto
separate administrations in Gaza and the
West Bank. Another is that Mr Blair's
efforts may complicate those of Gordon
Brown, the prime minister- in-waiting, who
has also shown considerable interest in a
fresh push for progress in the Middle East.
And while Mr Blair is likely to find that is
impossible to separate discrete problems
from the larger task of attempting to
advance a peace process, Israel is wary, to
put it mildly, of any attempt at actual
international mediation.
Mr Abbas was forced, under Egyptian
pressure, to withdraw his earlier insistence
that yesterday's summit should at least
discuss a process leading to a "final
status" settlement.
On the other hand, Mr Blair does have real
potential assets - including his relative
popularity in Israel, the historic
importance many Palestinians still attach to
Britain's role in the region, and his
impressive record in Northern Ireland. The
latter would give him the locus to argue for
more releases of "terrorist" prisoners of
the sort he repeatedly sanctioned there.
But perhaps the key question is whether Mr
Blair would be prepared -or allowed - to
risk Israeli wrath by drawing on his
Northern Ireland experience to talk, as he
did to IRA-Sinn Fein, to Hamas -or at least
those elements interested in political
dialogue - and urge that Israel does so too.
Several former members of the Israeli
intelligence community have urged contacts
with Hamas, whichhas wide support among
Palestinians.
Mr Blair has given hints that he would have
liked contact with more "moderate" elements
of Hamas - though less so of late.
While not impossible, it would require him
to complete a startling reversal of his
previous policy and take risks out of office
- not least the chance of a breach with
President Bush -that he was not prepared to
take as prime minister.
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