Abrupt halt to Mideast diplomacy

Sunday's suicide bombings in Tel Aviv appear to have scuttled - or at least delayed - two international diplomatic attempts to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The attack also suggests anew that Palestinians are working at cross purposes.

Responding to the assault, which killed 24 people including two bombers, Israel announced Monday that it would not allow senior Palestinian officials to travel to London for a meeting next week that the British government has organized to discuss Palestinian political and security reform.

The violence also calls into question an Egyptian effort to have the two main Palestinian political factions agree to a common agenda, including a renunciation of attacks on civilians inside Israel.

"Usually escalating violence should mean escalating political and diplomatic intervention as well," observes Mouin Rabbani, an Amman-based Palestinian political analyst. Not so in this conflict, he continues, summarizing the view of many of the governments involved: "As long as there's violence, we're not going to try diplomacy."

This equation is the stated policy of the Israeli government, which has insisted since Ariel Sharon became prime minister in March 2001that a cessation of violence precede any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

The US has made some efforts to negotiate an end to the killing, but many diplomats and analysts view the US role as a holding action designed to tamp down the worst of the violence while it pursues other policy objectives, such as the toppling of Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

"The Americans, even if they are interested in meddling in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, have plenty of other crises on their hands," says Efraim Inbar, director the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

Since the two sides began fighting in late September 2000, nearly 2,800 people have been killed, almost three-quarters of them Palestinian.

The most significant US attempt to pacify the situation is a "road map" toward solving the conflict that US officials have drafted in conjunction with the UN, the European Union, and Russia. But the Bush administration postponed its unveiling last month, citing the need to wait for the outcome of Israel's Jan. 28 elections.

US inaction is one reason why British and Egyptians officials have stepped up their efforts. Now these two initiatives are also in jeopardy, at least for the time being.

Yesterday, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the BBC that he hoped Israel would "think again" about its travel ban, arguing that the resurgent violence demonstrated the need for dialogue. The status of the Egyptian talks was unclear yesterday, but a Western observer tracking the talks says they have not been derailed.

It was also unclear who carried out the attack. Both Islamic Jihad, a small militant group committed to Israel's destruction, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of the mainstream Fatah movement, said they were responsible.

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