Mideast summit begins amid wary hope

Sometimes you have to pinch yourself.

The Palestinian group Hamas, responsible for dozens of suicide bombings, ponders a cease-fire. A hard-line Israeli prime minister, breaking a taboo, refers to his country's "occupation" of Palestinian lands. And President Bush, once loath to risk an attempt to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians, is expected to sit down Wednesday with their leaders at a summit meeting in Jordan.

After 32 months of Israeli-Palestinian strife, these developments may seem hard to believe. But even those who've been disappointed by failed peace initiatives in recent years say it is time for hope. "We should be cautiously optimistic, mainly because it seems Bush is quite determined," says Gershon Baskin, Israeli codirector of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information.

Still, this conflict rewards skeptics, and there are several reasons why Bush's intervention may falter. One is that the dynamic that has stopped earlier peacemaking initiatives - each side's insistence that the other act first - is still present.

In Catch-22 fashion, Israelis and Palestinians alike insist that the success of the US-backed road map toward peace, a plan devised with UN, European, and Russian input, depends on the other side.

The Israelis say the Palestinians must cease violence before substantive peace talks can proceed. Palestinian Authority West Bank security chief Zuhair Manasra says that ending violence - either by common agreement or by force - will be possible only if Israel and the US delineate "a clear political result that we can expect in a 90 percent guaranteed way."

Israel seems ready to take what one senior Israeli official calls "reversible" steps - releasing Palestinian prisoners, transferring tax revenues to the PA, easing the "closure" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip - "in order to help [newly appointed Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas] and his people."

"The Israeli government is willing to do more than in the past," says the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Indeed, Israel Tuesday released about 100 of the thousands of the Palestinians they have detained, though reports ahead of the release said the Israelis were likely to free those nearing the end of their periods of detention.

On May 25, Sharon's Cabinet offered a conditional acceptance of the road map - which calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza within three years - and the prime minister himself has alarmed his right-wing supporters by referring to Israel's presence in the Palestinian territories as "occupation"; but the Palestinians are a long way from convinced. The militant group Hamas, for instance, has debated for months its acquiescence in a cease-fire.

Members of the group, says one Western diplomat who also spoke on condition of anonymity, "are deeply skeptical about the road map and see this very much as a trap whereby the Palestinians are going to be forced to give up the resistance and the intifada without political gains."

"Hamas doesn't trust Israel and doesn't think it will respond positively to a truce," says Jawad Bahar, an Islamic leader in the southern West Bank city of Hebron who has spent years in Israeli jails on charges of belonging to Hamas, which he denies.

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