Racing against time — US President George W. Bush’s term ends early in 2009 and Israel may hold an election next year — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is pursuing a hope, against all signs to the contrary, that the international conference on the Middle East in the fall might revive peace negotiations with Israel.

He met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the West Bank town of Jericho three weeks ago. The two leaders met again in Jerusalem on Tuesday (Aug. 28). They will be meeting twice in September and will meet for a third time during a Palestinian-Israeli business conference in Tel Aviv in October.

In the Israeli capital they will also meet with Tony Blair, the Quartet’s special envoy. During this month (Sept. 16 to 19) both men will receive US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; her assistant for Near Eastern affairs, David Welch, is to travel to the Middle East ahead of Rice’s planned visit. Later in the month Abbas will head for New York.

The aim of this diplomatic flurry is to lay the ground for a successful conclusion of the international gathering proposed by Bush. However, the Bush administration’s refusal to pay any serious attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict has dampened expectations. The proposed conference promises to change nothing.

According to Abbas, the conference “lacks clarity” on the date, the participants and the agenda. “I do not know an official date and the agenda for the conference, and I am not sure about the participants,” he told the official Jordan Television following closed-door talks with Jordan’s King Abdallah II in Amman on Tuesday. “If we go to a conference without clarity on a solution and without a declaration of principles within the framework of a work plan, I don’t think that the conference will be fruitful,” he said.

Moreover nobody knows whether the event would be at the summit or at the foreign ministers’ level.

Earlier in the week, Abbas told the Voice of Palestine the proposed conference would be a “waste of time” if it focused solely on a “declaration of principles.” He even hinted, though indirectly, at boycotting the event: “If there is a clear framework including final status issues, we will welcome this and go to the (November) conference,” he said.

Bush is urging Olmert to make “concessions” to Abbas to avert a Hamas takeover of the West Bank. Reportedly, Olmert is now willing to cooperate with Abbas in writing something like a “framework agreement” that will lay down the principles of a settlement that may be achieved later, but without details or a timetable or guarantees.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak expects an early election next year and his recent assertion that Israel would not be ready to make a large-scale pullback from the West Bank for at least 2 1/2 years raises more doubts than assurances.

The Abbas-Olmert meeting on Tuesday did not produce any results that might enthuse the Palestinians. Despite reports that the two sides had agreed to set up negotiating teams to advance their talks, neither side issued a statement, announced any breakthrough, had anything in writing or reported any tangible progress after the meeting. Both sides confirmed they did not address any details of the final-status issues after the nearly three-hour meeting, held at Olmert’s residence, mostly in private man-to-man session. Chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erakat, denied any exchange of memos of understanding.

Ynet, Israel’s leading news website, quoted a senior political source in Olmert’s office as saying, “at this point no agreement has been reached” and made it clear that “it is too soon to tell if such an agreement would find its way to the proposed conference,” probably in Washington.

However Abbas still acts betting the survival of the Palestinian Authority (PA) as well as his own presidency on the hope that the US administration might deliver on its promises to revive the peace process with Israel. He seems to be hoping that the break with Hamas in the Gaza Strip would prompt his international friends to convince Israel to translate the “diplomatic process” he is conducting with Olmert into honest and serious negotiations over the final status issues.

And in spite of all his reservations on Bush’s vague proposal, Abbas is determined to pursue his faint hope that the world community might yet intervene to make something out of the November event.

His Fatah-led PA is similarly optimistic about the outcome of the coming gathering. The chances of this conference achieving anything are very slim and nothing concrete has so far emerged to support their optimism or to dispel the pessimism of the overwhelming majority of Palestinian, Israeli and Western observers.

“I am really terrified that these meetings and the meeting in November ... will create the illusion among certain parts of our public, on both sides, that peace is possible and both leaders are capable,” Nazmi Al-Jubeh, a Bir Zeit University professor and one of the Palestinian negotiators on the Geneva Accord, told The Globe and Mail on Aug. 29, warning the collapse of such an illusion “will lead us into another kind of intifada.”

— Nicola Nasser is an Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, Palestine.