Another year started, bringing hopes of peace in a region long engulfed in chaos.

Many analysts who attribute instability in the Middle East to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict are now wondering whether 2008 will see the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

The Annapolis conference held in November might have paved the way for peace in the region, but critics say it’s just another false dawn.

Israeli and Palestinian leaders have said they hoped to reach a peace agreement before the U.S. President George W. Bush leaves office next year.

The American President, who will visit Israel and the West Bank next week, is also trying to show that he is determined to push the peace process before his last year in office. But his job isn’t easy due to widespread skepticism over the U.S. foreign policy in the region.

With the problems of Iran, Iraq and Lebanon unresolved, few believe that the Middle East will become more stable any time soon.

According to an article on the BBC, Veteran U.S. peace envoy Dennis Ross wonders whether the Annapolis conference, which was hosted by Bush and his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was stagecraft or statecraft.

Addressing a conference held in December by the Transatlantic Institute, a Brussels think-tank, Ross questioned whether the Bush administration was committed to bring about a serious peace process.

There has to be real change on the ground, he said, for people to believe peace was coming.

• No breakthrough

At Annapolis, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to start continuous negotiations, with the aim of bringing about a two-state solution by the end of 2008.

But both leaders have made no headway because Israel refuses to stop building settlements in Jerusalem; one of the core issues Israel and the Palestinians agreed to tackle at Annapolis.

Israel also refuses to remove its network of hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints in the occupied West Bank.

On Tuesday, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak vowed that the barriers, condemned by Palestinians as collective punishment, would not be removed.

"The checkpoints and roadblocks will remain," said Barak, a former prime minister who now leads the center-left Labour Party.

Commenting on Israel's movement restrictions, Mahmoud Abbas said in a speech on Monday: "Each time (there is a meeting with the Israelis) they say they will remove (checkpoints) or have already removed some of them -- but I can honestly say they did not remove a single checkpoint."

• Weak leaders

Many analysts argue that both Abbas and Olmert are too weak politically to make risky concessions required for a lasting agreement. A joint Israeli-Palestinian poll carried out last week reflected this skepticism: only 23 percent of Palestinians and 8 percent of Israelis said they believed their leaders could reach a negotiated peace settlement by the end of next year.

After the 2006 war with the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, Olmert’s approval ratings have dropped to unprecedented lows. The Israeli prime minister might also be charged over a corruption scandal.

On the Palestinian side, Abbas has effectively lost control of a segment of the Palestinian nation since his Fatah party was routed out of the Gaza Strip by Hamas in June.

The legitimacy of Abbas, as the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) – the interim administrative organisation that governs the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip – will be questioned by a segment of the Palestinian population.

Abbas in an unenviable position, says Bilal Hassan, a journalist and former member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

“If Abbas accepts the Israeli conditions, the crisis within the Palestinian nation will increase – I believe that’s exactly where we’re heading,” he said. “On the other hand, if Abbas refuses the Israeli conditions, tensions will rise between the PA and Israel.”

Meanwhile, Avraham Sela, an Israeli academic and former intelligence officer, says that it’s counter-productive to exclude Hamas, arguing that Abbas’ Fatah party is already dead and efforts by the West to strengthen it are a waste of time.

• Little optimism

The conference held by the Transatlantic Institute also discussed other challenges in the Middle East ranging from demography to nuclear proliferation.

Sir Mark Allen, a former British diplomat, pointed out that by 2050 the population of the Middle East will have grown from 430 million to 720 million.

Discussing the U.S. foreign policy, Steven Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations, assessed the meager results of the Bush administration's “promotion of democratic reform” in the Middle East.

In his view, there could be no going back to uncritical support of authoritarian regimes. George Bush's successor, whether a Democrat or a Republican, would find the issue still firmly on the foreign-policy agenda.

Speakers at the conference also voiced little optimism about either Iraq or Iran.

There is a real risk the so-called "surge" in Iraq would buy short-term success at the expense of long-term gains, according to Michael Rubin, a neo-conservative at the American Enterprise Institute.

One of his colleagues, Reuel Marc Gerecht, said the new U.S. intelligence estimate on Iran, which said that Tehran stopped its nuclear weapons program, had "demolished" the administration's policy - and meant that a military strike against Iran was now "off the table".

Source: Aljazeera.com