Washington's efforts to organize the Annapolis talks on the Middle East look like someone trying to get an airplane to take off without wings. The event has been hastily cobbled together. The guest list is wobbly. And to avoid raising unrealistic expectations, it has been downgraded from a “conference” to a one-day “meeting.”
To say that it is all too little and too late hardly describes it. It looks like mere gesture politics. Not surprisingly, there is not much chance that the Bush administration's last minute effort to tackle the Middle East's core problem will actually fly.

There is neither the will nor the ability to push forward a new Middle East peace effort. That would require a radical change in tactics by the United States and Israel, and a profound change in Palestinian politics.

Neither the Bush administration nor its predecessors have ever leaned on Israeli governments hard enough to force them to end the relentless colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories, let alone reverse it. To imagine that this could happen during an American presidential campaign is simply not realistic.

The weak Israeli government under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is just as unlikely to defy the highly organized and politically powerful Jewish settlers. It will come to the Annapolis party more or less empty-handed – all talk but no action. Beyond the usual release of token numbers of Palestinian prisoners, the Israeli government has done little to prepare the way for real progress towards peace. The West Bank remains largely locked down under Israeli army control and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Its Palestinian inhabitants remain hobbled and humiliated by the roadblocks that make their everyday lives miserable. The state of the Palestinians locked in the narrow Gaza Strip is even more difficult. It is quite simply the world's largest prison.

And then, there's the Wall the Israelis have erected to separate the Palestinian territories from Israel. The Israelis prefer to call it a barrier (I recall that the communist East German regime used to call their wall the antifascist barrier), but it is very much a wall, and one that is basically permeable in only one direction. Jews can travel from Israel to their settlements in the Palestinian territories. Most Palestinians cannot travel to Israel.

The Wall has become part of the Holy Land landscape, both physically and psychologically. It symbolizes the change that has taken place in Jewish-Palestinian relations since the early 1970s, when I lived and worked as the CBS News correspondent in Israel. In those days, there was no wall, not even a sign or a roadblock to mark the border between Israel and the territory it conquered in the 1967 war. I used to drive all over the West Bank with my family. We bought fruit in Qalqilya, drank tea in the rose gardens of Ramallah and palmello juice in the cafes of Jericho. Today, because of the threat of Palestinian drive-by shootings, it can be dangerous just to drive along some of the new roads built for Israelis through the occupied territories, especially after dark.

The Palestinians themselves are split, both geographically and politically – with the Gaza Strip now under the control of the Islamist militants of Hamas, and the West Bank under the secular militants of Fateh. Since the United States and its allies refuse to deal with Hamas, only the Fateh wing of the Palestinians has been invited to Annapolis. The 44 percent of the Palestinian voters who elected the Hamas government last year will not have a voice, so the Palestinian delegation will stand on one leg in Annapolis. The Annapolis airplane – to use my metaphor again – will not only lack wings. It will lack legitimacy.

Meanwhile the pilot (President Bush) has his eyes on other horizons – namely Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, and is far too busy to devote the necessary attention to getting the peace effort off the ground.

Ironically, the easiest part of it all, if the Annapolis effort were somehow to succeed, is the flight plan. Everyone knows the outlines of any future settlement: a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders (with some adjustments and land swaps), a shared capital in Jerusalem, an agreement on the right of return of Palestinian refugees (primarily to the Palestinian territories rather than Israel proper) and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

I have spent a large part of my professional life covering events in the Middle East, and experience makes me doubt that I will ever see real peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But I would love to be wrong. It would be wonderful to drink tea again in the fragrant rose gardens of Ramallah, be welcomed with open arms as an American in the cafes of Jericho, and be able to stroll through the ancient streets of Hebron. Wonderful, because it could mean that peace has finally arrived in the land where Jews greet each other with Shalom and Palestinians with Salaam.