As Palestinians go to the polls tomorrow to elect a new leader, even skeptics admit that things have gone batter than expected. Yasser Arafat, the man who dominated Palestinian politics for almost four decades is fading into memory along with his autocratic and corrupt rule. The institutions that he had tried to undermine appear to be working in accordance with a constitution that he had violated daily.

There is little doubt that Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) will be elected as Palestinian chairman, or president as some prefer, with a convincing majority that will give him the democratic legitimacy that Arafat lacked.

Abbas, however, will be everybody’s second choice. And therein lies both his weakness and his strength.

The Arafatist old guards want Abbas because they know he has no base of his own and thus may be pressured into adopting at least part of their agenda while preserving at least some of their ill-gained privileges.

The democrats and the new generation hope that Abbas will prepare the ground for genuine democratization and thus allow them a greater hope of winning with a candidate of their own next time round.

The “Wipe-Israel-Off-The-Map” groups see Abbas as a stopgap leader who could buy them time to strengthen their positions, especially in Gaza, before making their bid for power.

Many in the outside world, including the Arab states, Israel, and Washington, also see Abbas as their second best choice, albeit for different reasons.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has gone out of his way to praise Abbas who is also the only Palestinian leader to have shaken hands with President George W. Bush. In the past few weeks Abbas has also received red carpet welcome from a dozen Arab leaders during a high-profile tour of the Middle East.

All that is good news, and explains the tsunami of optimism that seems to be sweeping away whatever is left of realism with regard to a conflict that has defied logic for more than half a century.

The bad news is that there is no indication that a majority either of the Palestinians or of the Israelis are prepared to switch from a mood of conflict to one of peace, if not reconciliation. It would be foolish to assume that that we are at the threshold of a golden age in the Middle East. Nor is it wise to assume that Arafat, his many failings notwithstanding, was the sole cause of a deadlock that has caused grief to Israelis and Palestinians since 2000.

Hostility among Palestinians to the very existence of Israel today is greater than 13 years ago when the peace process was launched in Madrid. The reason is that the Palestinian Authority under Arafat pursued a strategy of vilifying Israel, especially through the educational system and the media, as a means of regaining some of the popularity that it had lost as a result of the deals in Oslo. Some outsiders supported that strategy, albeit for different reasons. Saddam Hussein and Iran’s ruling mullas used it as a means of appealing to broader publics in the region. The advent of Arab satellite television made Israel-bashing a round-the-clock business, enabling some Arab states to divert part of the negative energies of their societies away from their domestic problems.

Israel, too, is less ready for peace than 13 years ago.

It is enough to scan the Israeli media, follow the Knesset debates, and look at election results and opinion polls to gauge the mistrust that many Israelis, if not most, feel toward their Palestinian neighbors.

The standard suggestion as how to get round these truths is that Washington should take the lead by reviving the peace process. The argument is that real or feigned passion over the Palestinian cause is the root cause of anti-Americanism in many Arab and other Muslim countries. President George W. Bush, however, would be making a mistake by transforming the Israel-Palestine conflict into an American problem.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict as “the most urgent issue of international politics” is an absurd claim by an otherwise levelheaded politician. Equally absurd is French President Jacques Chirac’s suggestion of an extended summit conference on the conflict in which he would presumably blame the Americans for its inevitable failure.

Even experts on the issue have lost count of the number of conferences held, resolutions passed, and peace plans proposed to deal with this conflict. All American presidents since Lyndon Johnson have grappled with this issue and failed because producing peace between protagonists that are not ready for it is not within the gift of any outsider.

In fact, one could argue that outside, including American, intervention has helped prolong the conflict.

During the Cold War the Palestine-Israel conflict was transmuted into a battlefield for rival superpowers with conflicting global ambitions. The involvement of other Arab countries gave the conflict a pan-Arab dimension that made any solution that much more difficult. Israel for its part knew that, when worse came to the worst, it could always count on American, and to a lesser extent, European, support for reasons that had little to do with the conflict itself.

As a result the protagonists were seldom faced with their responsibilities.

Having talked to Arafat on many occasions since 1975 I never managed to find out what it was exactly that he wanted. Whenever asked what might be acceptable to him as the basis for a peaceful solution he would come up with clichés such as “we want justice” or “we seek our full rights.”

Arafat and other Palestinian leaders have made many declarations, the latest such coming from Abbas himself last week, about what they wish to achieve. But they have never presented a formal peace proposal.

The first step toward any peacemaking, which is bound to be a long and tortuous process, is to deflate the issue to its real dimensions.

Any would-be mediator must begin by asserting that this is a Palestinian and Israeli problem that can only have a Palestinian and Israeli solution. The idea that Bush or anyone else can devise and impose a solution is fanciful and dangerous.

Once we have established that this is an Israeli and Palestinian problem, the next step would be to ask the two protagonists to state what is it exactly that they want in order to make peace. There are more than two dozen so-called peace plans named after various American presidents, Israeli premiers, Arab kings and rulers, and European “soft-power” politicians. But there is none named after any Palestinian leader.

The second step toward meaningful negotiations, as opposed to posturing and photo-op exercises on the White House lawn or Sharm El-Sheikh, is for Mahmoud Abbas to produce his peace plan. Once this is done he could have it approved by the Palestinian National Council (Parliament) or even endorsed in a referendum.

With a clear mandate to negotiate, Abbas could then demand that Israel, too, come up with its peace plan. The two plans could then provide the basis of negotiations aimed at producing a synthesis acceptable to both. That synthesis could, in turn, be put to referendums in both Israel and the Palestinian territories and, if approved, be supported by the international community.

Any new Bush plan or Blair plan or Chirac plan will lead nowhere except to new illusions followed by fresh disappointments.

The message of the outside world to the Israelis and Palestinians should be simple and frank: We are ready to help you make peace but we cannot make peace for you.