From Annapolis To Islamabad

What a week we're having! Kevin Rudd sweeps to power as prime minister with a landslide victory over John Howard in Australia. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agree to resume long-stalled peace talks. President Pervez Musharraf steps down as Pakistan's chief of army staff and Turkish President Abdullah Gul accepts his invitation to hold talks next month in Pakistan. All these geo-political developments taking place against the domestic backdrop of Labour's latest funding scandal and the transfiguration of Brown from "a safe pair of hands" to slippery fingers, from "great clunking fist" to over-rated flunking fiddler — or, as the LibDem's acting leader Vince Cable so memorably put it in today's PMQs, from Stalin to Mr Bean, "creating chaos out of order rather than order out of chaos."

Whatever next? Keep your eyes on Russia, China and Iran...

Iran Has The Last Word

Is there not a degree of irony that, while the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has now welcomed last week's "Common Word" claims by 138 of the world's top Muslims that Islam is a religion of "peace", Iran's top cleric, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has urged Muslim countries to boycott a US-sponsored international peace conference on Palestinian statehood next month?

Middle East Optimism

While convinced that Mr Abbas needs a clear "political horizon", Mr Blair is said to accept Israel's position that it will not move to concrete final status negotiations until it is confident that such a state is coherent enough not to pose a threat to Israel's security.

In his view therefore a programme of Palestinian "capacity building"; the measures Mr Abbas needs to ease the restrictions on Palestinian economy - and boost it in areas like the Jordan valley, which Mr Blair toured this week; and the central diplomatic process, are all interdependent.

Part of this conviction stems from his experience in Northern Ireland, where he faced continuous objections from the Army to "demilitarisation" plans. But when the Army saw their objections might be blamed for holding back a political process, they were more reluctant to press them.

I was about to comment on The Independent's optimistic review of Tony Blair's Middle East mission, but notice that His Grace has already done so with his usual eloquence: He’s not the Messiah – he’s a very naughty boy. I am inclined to agree with his verdict:

Will he do it? Well, Cranmer has a hunch that he will. He achieved in Northern Ireland what had been deemed a religio-political impossibility, and today The Rt Hon Ian RK Paisley is governing the Province with an unrepentant terrorist at his side. It would be churlish not to put this down in very large part to the conviction, sincerity and charisma of Mr Blair.

A Question Of Viability

In further response to the reader who thought I ought to say more about the struggle for peace in the Middle East, in addition to my post yesterday exploring the effects of the 1967 Six Day War on the rise of political Islam, may I commend to you the Christian Aid report launched at Chatham House yesterday?

Israel and Palestine: a question of viability

Failure to secure a lasting solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is causing poverty to deepen, and allowing violence and despair to persist. Poverty in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) has increased more than threefold since the Oslo peace process began in 1993, while violence on both sides has escalated. Combined with the regional and global implications of this conflict, there is an urgent need to address the situation as a whole – and without delay – if further human misery is to be avoided, and before the rapidly changing facts on the ground preclude any lasting solution.

The international Quartet comprising the United Nations, European Union, USA and Russia, has repeatedly voiced its commitment to a viable Palestinian state but has yet to define what this means. Meanwhile, Israel is imposing de facto changes that erode the very foundations of a viable Palestinian state.

Christian Aid believes the way forward requires a long-term, just and peaceful solution that brings an end to occupation and guarantees viability for both Palestinians and Israelis. This requires a radical shift from the current political stalemate to a position where Palestinians, Israelis and the international community create the political will to take the bold steps necessary to implement such a viable solution.

Christian Aid has consulted with its Palestinian and Israeli partners, as well as other experts from the region and from Europe and the US, to consider what viability means for Palestinians and Israelis. In this document we explore the elements of and process towards a viable solution and bring it to the political debate. We demonstrate how viability is the defining characteristic of a lasting solution to the conflict, and provide a checklist against which any solution can be analysed to answer the question: is it viable?

Checklist for viability

Essential elements for viability are:

• an end to occupation: the bedrock of viability
• self-determination and sovereignty: exercise free political will and be free from external control
• effective governance: a coherent political system and government control over the collection and use of financial resources
• protection of rights: for Palestinians and Israelis
• security for all: the security of Israelis is indivisible from that of Palestinians
• freedom of movement: between and within the West Bank and Gaza Strip
• control over natural resources: land, water, minerals, sea – for the benefit of the whole population
• economic growth and prosperity: an end to aid dependency.

The process towards viability must be:

• guided by international law
• impartial
• and must hold both sides to account, bringing an end to impunity.

Israeli Time Bomb

A reader has written to ask why I have not mentioned the kidnap of BBC journalist Alan Johnston, who disappeared in the Gaza Strip on 12 March. In part I have not done so because others, such as Charles Moore in today's Telegraph, have done so far more effectively than I could do — In the spirit of which, I point you in the direction of an item that I suspect most readers in Britain will otherwise miss out on, "Israel’s “sadistic torture” of Palestinians" at AlJazeera. It begins:

In Israel, there is “no effective barrier – not legal and certainly not ethical – that stands in the way of using torture,” concluded a recent report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI).

The report slammed the Israeli High Court’s approval of the use of tough tactics to interrogate Palestinians classified as “ticking bombs”, saying that the ruling was interpreted by Israel’s internal intelligence service, the Shin Bet, as a green light to torture almost every Palestinian detainee. Moreover, PCATI said that prison wardens, policemen and even doctors took part in torturing Palestinian detainees, as well as lawyers, military judges and senior officials in the Justice Ministry.

In the report, titled “A Time Bomb”, PCATI detailed accounts of nine Palestinian detainees who have been subjected to physical, sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of their Israeli interrogators over the past year.