In the Middle East, no time to spare

The third reason, more subtle but more threatening still to Israel, is relentless demographic trends. Jews make up three-fourths of Israel's population but only half that of Palestine in its entirety, which includes the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. Given higher Arab birthrates, if prospects for a two-state solution collapse, Israel would be faced with the nightmare choice of being a Jewish state or a democracy. It could not remain both. If Israel thus reaches a "South Africa-style struggle for equal voting rights," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has bluntly warned, "the state of Israel is finished."

Only once in the 60-year history of the Arab-Israeli conflict has a two-state solution been seriously within reach. Starting in the late 1980s, a confluence of developments simultaneously nudged each of the frontline states to the conflict to the bargaining table. This constellation of auspicious factors, which reached its zenith in the 1991 Madrid peace process and its nadir with the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, has so far proved impossible to recapture.

Palestinian radicals, marginalized in the late 1980s and early 1990s by hopes for peace, now enjoy renewed strength and even exercise political control over Gaza. Coalition politics in Israel gives disproportionate power to intransigent right-wing parties that oppose giving up any land in biblical Israel, including large portions of the West Bank. Meanwhile, Israeli and Palestinian leaders command only limited authority.

The result is that the legitimate national aspirations of Palestinians for a state – and of Israelis for a secure state – have gone unrealized. Frustrated Palestinian nationalism, exploited by Arab governments, has exacerbated a crisis that will only be ameliorated when Israel and the Palestinians come to share Palestine on some secure and equitable basis.

Diminishing prospects for a two-state solution present Bush or his successor with an inescapable crisis, the solution to which will require consummate leadership and risk-taking. Among other things, it will necessitate restoring the US to the position of honest broker in the face of almost certain opposition from a pro-Israel lobby, influential in Congress, that for years has shielded Israel from pressure to make reforms that would have been conducive to the security of the Jewish state.

In the end, resisting such pressures will be critical to furthering the interests of all parties to this conflict. As former Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell once noted, there will never be a Palestinian state until Israel feels completely secure, and Israel will never be completely secure until there is a Palestinian state. This paradox should give both purpose and urgency to Bush's visit.

•George Moffett is a former Middle East correspondent for the Monitor.

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