Two important events have taken place in quick succession and yet a pall of uncertainty hangs over a possible route to a viable two-state solution in Palestine.
Implicit in both events - the largely attended meeting in Annapolis, Maryland on November 26-27 and the just concluded donors conference in Paris - is a fresh recognition by the international community that in the final analysis the denial of Palestinian aspirations for statehood is the real locus of instability in the region.
This conclusion remains unchanged even if one began with Israel's security and not with liberty and self-determination for Palestinians that naturally was uppermost in the minds of Arab-Muslim states represented at Annapolis.
Doubts persist because the global powers have yet to demonstrate a firm resolve to remove the hurdles in implementing the understanding reached at Annapolis and in locating the otherwise generous pledges made in Paris in a grand design to reconstruct the Palestinian economy across the board. Messages emanating from Israel in either case are at this moment far from encouraging.
Annapolis was said to have reflected a wall-to-wall consensus in the Muslim world that time had come to negotiate a peaceful settlement.
An analysis of comments across this world, with the notable exception of Iran, showed this optimism despite the caveats about the nature of a future Palestinian state and Israel as a "Jewish homeland" that the US President George W. Bush entered into his concluding remarks.
It was considered as tactical help for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who would have to sell the Joint Understanding to his people from a generally weakened political position.
By now, however, this understanding is beginning to come under strain. Israel has moved ahead towards implementing the 1997 plan to build a large settlement in Jabal Abu Ghneim that would complete the iron ring around the holy city and, for all practical purposes, block a future link between East Jerusalem and the future Arab state in the West Bank.
Considering that Palestinians now reportedly control only 54 per cent of the West Bank and that the territory that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is supposed to administer has "570 concrete blocs, mounds of earth and check points"- all manned by Israeli security forces - the Jabal colonisation originally dreamt by Benjamin Netanyahu vitiates the atmosphere for achieving even what was finally agreed at Annapolis.
What was agreed was the launching of immediate negotiations for the final status with the end of 2008 as the deadline for their completion.
But did we all - Pakistan was represented by its foreign secretary at Annapolis - also accept the Israeli interpretation that the negotiations will remain an academic exercise till Tel Aviv decided that the moribund Roadmap, which had miraculously undergone a resurrection at Annapolis, had been implemented in separate inter-dependent stages as adjudged basically by Israel itself?
How would this purported link with the Roadmap ever be made satisfactorily if Gaza and the West Bank continued to be treated as sharply differentiated entities with Gaza still enduring aerial and ground assaults? Clearly, the holistic package envisaged in the Arab States' Plan remains a far more credible approach to peace.
Arguably, the Paris conference which received pledges of $7.4 billion will help bring this differentiation to an end. This would be a reasonable hope if Israel were to make a categorical declaration that it was reversing the policy of blockades by which it has plunged the Palestinians, particularly the 40 per cent of them living in Gaza, into unprecedented poverty.
Ariel Sharon made his outrageous incursion into the Holy Mosque on September 28, 2000 to trigger off a protracted period of turmoil and incremental reprisals.
Full seven years later in September 2007, the World Bank reported that the Palestinian GDP per head had slumped from $1,612 in 1999 to $1,129 in 2006. There is hardly any investment and existing projects like those of the Palestinian Economic Development Company have collapsed because their produce has regularly rotted at Israeli blockade points.
Due to closures, notes an Israeli analyst, imposed in response to attacks, and the difficulties in transit between areas in the territories and into Israel, export of goods from the territories was interrupted and from time to time stopped completely.
But true to form, Israel's foreign minister talks not of abandoning this ruinous policy to facilitate the objectives of the Paris Conference but of examining the restrictions closure point by closure point.
There is hardly any hope of a real turn around if availability of funds is not matched by a radically different approach by Israel to the economic under-pinning of a future Palestinian homeland.
Inherent limitations
It will be short-sighted to overlook the inherent limitations of Annapolis and the Paris conference; both events need to be taken together as the beginning of a fresh effort to overcome internal schisms and for a more energetic international diplomacy to overcome these limitations.
The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority would soon discover that a total marginalisation of Hamas would play into Israel's hand. Israel understood very well the new compulsion of the United States to respond more concretely to the Arab Initiative and the growing complexity of Bush's Iraqi dilemma.
But it has kept open its option of scuttling a resultant peace process if seeks to foreshorten the time table that it has in mind to tackle substantive questions like its final borders, the question of East Jerusalem and the right of return.
Judged from outside, Abbas would be in a better negotiating position if he were to restore unity amongst the Palestinian nation. Without that unity, each and every stage of addressing the core issues will be susceptible to a deadlock as Israel applies the incremental criteria of the Roadmap.
It is a hazardous journey with a booby trap at every turn and the Palestinian Authority that cannot justifiably claim to represent all the Palestinian people would not find it easy to navigate. Without that unity, an economic renewal of the nation would also remain elusive.
Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former ambassador and foreign secretary of Pakistan.
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