KEY POINTS:
On the eve of President George W. Bush's visit to Israel an Israeli journalist Yoel Marcus in Ha'retz says: "Let's not raise our expectations too high.
"We are talking about weak leaders on both sides, leaders who can barely stand on their own two feet ... It seems
fair to say that no great miracle will happen here."
The two weak leaders he was talking about were Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, but it applies equally to Bush.
The most positive thing that can be said about Bush's whirlwind seven-day tour of the Middle East (Israel, the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, plus perhaps a surprise stop in Iraq) is that it probably won't make matters worse.
On the other hand, that's mainly because they are so bad already that it would take real creativity to make them worse.
The spin machines are spinning and optimistic forecasts are being made for the outcome of this Bush Administration initiative, which seeks to create a legacy of success in the form of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement after failure on almost every other front. (Please don't mention Camp David, Bill Clinton's similar failed bid for a legacy in the last year of his eight-year tenancy at the White House. It annoys them.)
Back in the Clinton era (1993-2001), there was still reason to hope there might actually be a "two-state solution" that saw an independent Palestinian state co-exist peacefully with Israel on the territory of the former British mandate of Palestine.
The Oslo accords of 1993 had drawn up a plan intended to lead to such a goal through phased negotiations and concessions, and hard-line opponents of a compromise peace on both sides worried that the deal might actually be made. But thanks in large part to their obstructionism, it never happened.
After the pro-peace Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a Jewish extremist in 1995, Palestinian hard-liners in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad organisations were so afraid that Israelis would elect a radical pro-peace government on a sympathy vote that they launched a terrorist bus-bombing campaign to prevent it.
The aim was to kill enough Israelis to cause a wave of outrage that drove voters into the arms of the right-wing Likud Party, which fundamentally opposed any "land-for-peace" deal with the Palestinians.
The bus bombs during the 1996 election duly delivered the prime ministership to Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who spent the next three years pretending to negotiate with the Palestinians (to keep the Clinton White House happy) while dragging his feet on the moves that were actually required to make a Palestinian state viable.
And the bus bombings stopped, because there was no longer any genuine danger of a "two-state" peace settlement.
The change of government in Israel in 1999 created a slim chance of reviving the Oslo plan, although Palestinian disillusionment was already deep. The Clinton Administration held the Camp David talks in July 2000 in the desperate hope last-minute success could be snatched from the jaws of failure, but it didn't happen.
By 2001, when George W. Bush took office, the second "intifada" (Palestinian uprising) was well under way. Since then things have gone from bad to worse. Israelis have despaired of a negotiated peace and shifted towards unilateral measures like the wall that wends its way through the West Bank, separating the Israeli settlements from the Palestinian hinterland.
For many Palestinians, the death of Arafat in 2004 drained the last credibility from the two-state solution, and the star of the hard-liners has risen there too. It culminated, last summer, in Hamas' armed seizure of control in the Gaza Strip, which effectively divides the Palestinian Authority in two.
Little of this is President Bush's fault, and it probably wouldn't have happened very differently if he had been hyper-active rather than comatose in his pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
He has done great damage further east with his invasion of Iraq, and the Arab world will be dealing with the Islamist radicals whose cause he has so greatly empowered for a long time to come, but the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" was already a train wreck before Bush set foot in the White House.
* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
