FOR the past four decades, two unshakeable principles have decided the fate of the tortuous search for peace in the Middle East. As any veteran diplomat of the "peace process" will tell you, no progress can be achieved without the full weight of the White House and the commitment of a strong Israeli government prepared to make painful territorial concessions. This was true at Camp David, when Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat penned the first land-for-peace deal. It was true a decade later when Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on their deal at the White House.

Until only a few days ago, the chaos in the Middle East illustrated perfectly why these rules still applied. Israel, led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's crumbling coalition Government, was locked in a bloody cycle of violence with Hamas, the militant Palestinian group controlling Gaza. Many expected an Israeli punitive ground attack. To the north, Israel and Hezbollah, the extremist Shia Muslim militia, exchanged regular threats. Many observers predicted another round of violence. Behind these tensions lay Israel's implacable foe Syria, which was attacked last year by Israeli aircraft after intelligence suggested Damascus was trying to build a nuclear facility. Despite US President George W.Bush's push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal this year, few believed his weakened administration would be able to deliver anything concrete.

Yet the region has been transformed. Israel and Hamas will implement an agreement brokered by Egypt for a six-month truce in Gaza. If the ceasefire holds, Israel has agreed to ease its blockade over the enclave. The breakthrough, after a year of fighting, was soon followed by two more important moves.

France, which under President Nicolas Sarkozy has worked hard to rebuild ties with Damascus, announced a meeting might take place between President Bashar Assad of Syria and Olmert. The rapprochement follows weeks of Turkish mediation between Israeli and Syrians officials. Simultaneously, Israel offered to begin peace talks with Lebanon to resolve a border dispute. The peace overture coincided with reports of an imminent prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah, brokered by Germany.

There is suddenly hope that some of the thorniest issues in the region could be resolved. The prize could mean an end to the Israeli-Syrian struggle. The impact could be enormous. Any peace moves between the two neighbours would immediately help rehabilitate Syria and isolate its militant ally Iran, regarded by many as the major threat to peace in the region.

Whatever the outcome, the old rules will have to be rewritten. Egyptian, Turkish, German and French officials were instrumental in this process. They have succeeded where the Bush administration so far has failed. As for Olmert, he faces serious corruption allegations and could even be charged and stand trial. His Government may only have days before it collapses. Some suspect that making peace is the only way he can cling to power. Whatever his motivation, he has demonstrated that peace can be forged from a position of weakness as easily as from a position of strength.

THE Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria accused the Western church of apostasy last night and attacked the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, for leading it into error. Peter Akinola told more than 1000 conservative delegates at the Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem: "We must rescue what is left of the church from the error of the apostates."

His comments added to the crisis facing the Anglican Church as a result of innovations such as gay blessings and the consecration of an openly gay bishop in the US. Several of the bishops in the audience in Jerusalem are drawing up plans to form a "church within a church" in an attempt to counter Western liberalism and reform the church. Senior sources said the most likely outcome of the divisions over homosexuality and biblical authority was an international "Anglican fellowship" that would provide a home and structure for conservative Anglicans.

Dr Akinola compared the Episcopal Church in the US and its liberals to those who enslaved Africans in the 19th century. "Having survived the ... physical slavery of the 19th century, the political slavery called colonialism of the 20th century, the developing world economic enslavement, we cannot, we dare not, allow ourselves and the millions we represent to be kept in religious and spiritual dungeon," he said. And the Nigerian leader warned: "We will not abdicate our God-given responsibility and simply acquiesce to destructive modern cultural and political dictates." Addressing signs of disunity within the ranks of conservatives, Dr Akinola accused the Archbishop of Canterbury and the US church of a policy of "divide and rule" and said they had used "money and other attractions to buy silence and compromise from some gullible African and global south church leaders".

In a section of the prepared speech that was omitted from his delivery, Dr Akinola had also raised the issue of Dr Williams's recent controversial speech on Islamic law. "In the face of global suspicion of the links of Islam with terrorism, Lambeth Palace is making misleading statements about the Islamic law - sharia - to the point that even secular leaders are now calling us to order. We can no longer trust where some of our communion leaders are taking us," he said.

The speech was greeted with applause and whistles by the delegates, who included 300 bishops, about 200 of whom are boycotting the official Lambeth conference organised by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Kent University next month.

The new fellowship for orthodox Anglicans would have a leadership of six or seven senior conservative bishops and archbishops, such as the Bishop of Pittsburgh, Bob Duncan, who chairs the US Common Cause partnership that acts as an umbrella for American conservatives, Archbishop Henry Orombi, Primate of Uganda, and the Church of England's Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali.

The aim is not to split with the worldwide Anglican communion, which counts 80 million members in 38 provinces, but to reform it from within. Formal ties will be maintained with the Archbishop of Canterbury, but fellowship members will consider themselves out of communion with provinces such as the US and Canada. Members of the fellowship could attempt to opt out of the pastoral care of their diocesan bishop and seek supervision from a more conservative archbishop.

THE clock is ticking on whether military action will become the last available option to prevent Iran building an atomic bomb, potentially sparking a regional arms race in the Middle East and putting Israel under immediate threat of nuclear attack. The compelling logic that has so far stopped a military strike by either the US or Israel is that the threat of a nuclear armed Iran is not immediate. Until that point arrives, it is preferable that a negotiated solution be found. Even hard-line observers acknowledge the later an attack takes place, the greater the setback it will pose for Iran. In the meantime, the opportunity for a peaceful settlement exists. This includes the possibility of regime change in Iran through civil unrest that unseats Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An essay published in New Yorker magazine by journalist Seymour Hersh says the US Government has stepped up covert operations to promote political instability in Iran.

As Paul Kelly reports today, the trajectory of confrontation between the US and Iran has been building since the 1979 revolution in Iran and is most likely to peak during the term of the next US president. Having de-fanged North Korea's nuclear program using diplomatic and financial pressure, the prevailing argument in Washington is that the same multilateral approach be used with Iran. This would involve China, in particular, taking a much more forceful role to persuade Iran to back down.

In the twilight of its reign, the Bush administration is preoccupied with Iran's nuclear ambitions. The issue has polarised senior Bush officials. Public comments by President George W.Bush in favour of a diplomatic, multilateral approach confirm that the power in Washington currently favours Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rather than Vice-President Dick Cheney. With sentiment running against US military action, Iran looks set to become a key issue of unfinished business for the next president, whether that be Republican senator John McCain or Democrat senator Barack Obama. US public opinion is running three-to-one in favour of a negotiated settlement.

Military action cannot be ruled out, however. And Israel has recently undertaken military exercises that are widely considered to be a practice run for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Shabtai Shavit, a deputy director of Israel's intelligence service Mossad when Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear facility in Iraq in 1981, was quoted this week as saying that the worst-case scenario was that Iran may have a nuclear weapon within "somewhere around a year". This contrasts with the view in the US that Iran's nuclear capability is at least three years away. Iran, which insists its nuclear program is for civilian and not military purposes, has said it will dig 320,000 graves in border districts to allow for the burial of enemy soldiers in the event of any attack on its territory.

Former Labor leader Kim Beazley told Kelly that if Iran were not prevented from securing nuclear capability, either through force or negotiation, it would spark a regional arms race involving Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, at least. For Israel, geography makes it impossible to tolerate the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. For the US, an immediate attack would complicate the already difficult military task under way in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would expose the 150,000 US troops in the region to direct threat from Iran and greatly complicate plans for the withdrawal of US forces.

For the world economy, Iran has said it would retaliate against military action against its nuclear facilities by blocking oil movements through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula through which 40 per cent of the world's oil is shipped. This would throw world markets into turmoil, with potentially disastrous consequences for inflation and economic growth. The commander of the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet, Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, said Iran would not be allowed to close the seaway. Nonetheless, the potential for military conflict against Iran has already underpinned speculative buying on world oil markets, driving the price up past $US140 a barrel.

The best hope appears to be that the direct talks and multilateral negotiations that led to progress in winding back nuclear programs in the rogue states of Libya and North Korea can succeed in Iran. But the circumstances are different, the stakes are much greater in Iran and time is running out.

‘Learn how to love each other’: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, left, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert after a press conference in Paris Picture: AP

PARIS: Israel and the Palestinians "have never been this close" to a peace deal, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said last night following talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Paris and before a diplomatic breakthrough with arch-foe Syria. Mr Olmert and Mr Abbas were among 43 leaders in Paris for the launch of a new Union for the Mediterranean, which aims to boost co-operation in one of the world's most volatile regions. "We have never been as close to an accord as we are today," Mr Olmert told a press conference following talks hosted by President Nicolas Sarkozy at the French presidential palace. "We are approaching the moment when we will have to make decisive choices," he said.

The declaration of optimism came as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was to make history and seal detente with Europe by attending the launch of the French-inspired union alongside Mr Olmert overnight. The diplomatic breakthrough — the first time Israeli and Syrian leaders would have been in the same room — enables Mr Assad to emerge from Western isolation three years after the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, a murder that many believe was orchestrated from Damascus.

On Saturday, Mr Assad held talks with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, who agreed to normalise relations between Damascus and Beirut. This was an early success for Mr Sarkozy, who hosted the talks. Mr Olmert said last night that while he hoped indirect peace talks launched with Syria, via Turkey, would "soon become direct", the peace process with the Palestinians remained Israel's utmost priority. Mr Abbas and Mr Olmert called on Mr Sarkozy, as President of France, chair of the European Union presidency and host of the new Mediterranean Union, to take a front-seat role in steering peace negotiations.

Though the two sides have met regularly since the relaunch of the process last November, after a seven-year hiatus, talks have stalled over the issue of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Mr Abbas said that Mr Sarkozy's "friendship" with both Israelis and Palestinians "enables you to play an important role to help the peace process succeed in a few months". "We have started an in-depth negotiation with Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni," Mr Abbas said. "We will pursue this effort. We are quite serious."

Mr Sarkozy has been stepping up France's Middle East diplomacy for the launch of the Mediterranean Union, bringing friends and foes together around the same table, and pushing to advance peace in the region. The French leader said union between Europe and its Mediterranean neighbours would help countries in the region "learn to love each other". "It doesn't mean that all of the problems are resolved of course," Sarkozy said. "But the goal of the summit ... is that we learn how to love each other in the Mediterranean, instead of continuing to hate and wage war."

Heads of state and government from the 27 European Union nations and an arc of countries running from Morocco to the Balkans — representing 756 million people — will endorse the new forum at the Grand Palais on the Champs Elysee. The summit aims to revitalise co-operation between the EU and Mediterranean countries, although it may be richer in symbolism than substance.

The new organisation aims to pursue practical projects with EU and private sector funding such as cleaning up the Mediterranean, using North Africa's sunshine to generate solar power, and building road and sea highways. "What we need is a new political impulse, a new revitalisation, a new dynamism," EU external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said.

France and Egypt will co-chair the new body for two years, but the location and powers of its secretariat remain to be resolved, and the Middle East conflicts that have bedevilled past EU-Mediterranean co-operation are still looming large. While Mr Sarkozy said after the Syrian-Lebanese meeting on Saturday that Mr Assad and Mr Suleiman had come to an historic decision to open embassies in each other's countries for the first time, the Syrian leader was more cautious, saying the sides must "define the steps to take to arrive at this stage". Syria and Lebanon have not had fully fledged embassies in each other's countries since Lebanon became independent in 1943 and Syria in 1945. Mr Assad, long accused by France of meddling in Lebanese politics, said: "We can say that Lebanon has moved from being a zone of turbulence, a war zone, to a more pacified zone where the Lebanese, and only the Lebanese, have the right to determine their own future."

United: Nicolas Sarkozy welcomes Syria's Bashar al-Assa, left, Lebanon's Michel Suleiman and Qatar's Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani

FOR the past four years, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been a pariah in the West and much of the Arab world, which blame his totalitarian regime for many of the region's woes. Nothing has changed, yet state ceremonies and overtures from enemies have suddenly replaced bids at shame and isolation. Without trying, Syria has lurched into some unlikely good books. By playing little more than a waiting game, Assad now finds himself anointed as a would-be kingmaker, with the potential to calm four regional troublespots and douse a few more.

The red-carpet reception he received in Paris over the weekend seemed an age away from the blackout he experienced under France's former president, Jacques Chirac, who blamed Syria for the 2005 assassination of his friend, former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. And if Assad's new patron, incumbent French President Nicolas Sarkozy, gets his wish, many more new doors will soon open for him across the European Union and in the Middle East.

Assad took with him to Paris two things the French saw as important to new beginnings -- a willingness to sit at the same table as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during a summit of 13 Mediterranean states, and a pledge to establish diplomatic relations with Lebanon. The latter is held particularly dear by France, which has maintained close ties with Lebanon throughout the turbulent 61 years since it was granted full sovereignty in 1943. Syria's role in Lebanon has been pervasive ever since, with a succession of leaders well before the 40-year dynasty of Hafez al-Assad and his Western-educated son, running roughshod over its fragile neighbour's attempts at self-determination.

In the eyes of many, including France, Syrian intervention was at its most damaging during the past three years, when the Lebanese parliament ceased to function under an opposition boycott, backed by Damascus; a war broke out with Israel, which Syria helped to facilitate by supplying weapons to the Hezbollah militia; and anti-Syrian politicians and journalists were picked off, one by one, under a climate of slow-burn terror. At last count, 11 so-called dissidents had been killed or maimed since the assassination of Hariri in February 2005. And as the ranks of the MPs thinned, so did Lebanon's tourist dollars, with plummeting revenues bringing an already fragile nation to its knees by the time a deal was done in May to bring the opposition into a power-sharing government, giving it a veto over laws and appointments and the effective reins of power. Through it all, Assad maintained the Sergeant Schultz defence of "I see nothing, I hear nothing".

The turnaround on recognising Syria is, at face value, significant. The opening of a Syrian embassy in Beirut, where none has existed for 65 years, could rightly be perceived as an acceptance that Lebanon is no longer under the tutelage of Syrian spy chiefs and regime heavyweights. In the eyes of sceptics, primarily in the US, it could also be the perfect Trojan horse from which a new takeover of Lebanese institutions could be launched. France's new open-door policy has not been received well by the administration of George W. Bush, which has pledged to shun Syria. To Washington, Assad remains a backer of Hezbollah, a facilitator of the insurgency in Iraq and a fellow traveller of Iran.

As Assad prepared for the Mediterranean conference, he was not missing a chance to talk up the symbolism of his visit to France. "This is for me a historic visit — an opening up to France and to Europe," he said. Assad's audience with the French leader reflects a dramatic divergence in views between Paris and Washington on three fronts. While France gives Syria credit for helping to douse the Lebanese crisis, Washington claims Syria has manoeuvred itself into a more dominant position. France sees the talks between Damascus and Jerusalem as a constructive bid to cool the region's most enduring flashpoint, while the US sees it as a ruse to gain false legitimacy.

However, Iraq sears deepest into the Bush administration's psyche. Washington is convinced the guns of the Iraqi insurgents blazed longest and loudest from 2004-06 because Syria had allowed its borders to be used as turnstiles for jihadis, at the behest of its patron Iran, which aimed to bog down the US military.

Assad and Olmert will be seated alphabetically around a long table today and are unlikely to meet, even in private. But Assad has given France what it wanted: a willingness to respond to overtures and some signs he will bend on touchstone issues. Sarkozy has made a naked bid to try to lure his counterpart from the "dark side" to causes he insists will better the Middle East. In doing so, he has openly recognised Assad's potential influence — a welcome ego-boost for a leader now in from the cold.

The French President, whom many compatriots have labelled as more than a touch Napoleonic, has cast himself as intermediary in a two-track peace process — Israel and Syria, and Israel and the Palestinians. The US will watch on from the sidelines as Sarkozy leads the way. Syria, rightly or wrongly, has been happily marking a two-pronged victory: the success of a waiting game and the fact it has re-emerged with an improving name among the neighbours.

Same Day Editorial - New approach welcome

Nicolas Sarkozy has brought fresh credibility to the EU
ISRAELI Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's optimistic statement that Israel and the Palestinians "have never been this close" to a peace deal gives renewed hope of a lasting breakthrough in the Middle East. Based on past experience, translating this tantalising prospect into reality will require delicate negotiations, vast patience and eons of goodwill on all sides. Most of all, it will require far greater discipline and common sense on the part of Palestinians than has been shown at other promising junctures.

In 2000, after the Clinton administration brokered an agreement in which then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak proposed a deal that would have set up an independent state in Gaza and 90 per cent of the West Bank, PLO leader Yasser Arafat rejected the offer and Palestinians launched a four-year suicide-bombing campaign directed at Israeli civilians. Again, when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas launched a bombing campaign on Israel and a brutal takeover of the territory, with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah attacking Israel from Lebanon. In both instances, it was the ordinary Palestinian people who paid the price for bloody-minded Islamic extremism.

Current hopes of a settlement are due to the energy and vision of French and European Union President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Mediterranean summit. In recent decades, despite significant expansion of its membership, the EU has been reluctant to take a leading role on the world stage, leaving the onus in the war on terror and the Middle East peace process to the US. But the EU and north African nations have a significant interest in Middle East peace, and the new body, to be jointly chaired by Egypt and France for two years, offers a worthwhile forum in which accords can be struck and built upon.

If the summit, being dubbed "Club Med", leads to an effective two-state solution, Mr Sarkozy will have earned himself a place in history as an international statesman and the most influential Frenchman on the world stage since Charles de Gaulle.

That said, the hard work starts now. In a gesture of amity, Israel has promised to release more Palestinian prisoners as a statement of goodwill to the Palestinian Authority. Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, is struggling to hold together a fragile truce with Israel, which has allowed limited supplies into the Strip in return for a stop to rocket fire on Israeli settlements. Nothing would undermine progress more than ongoing, provocative repeats of the aggression displayed by the Palestinian terrorist who earlier this month drove a bulldozer through central Jerusalem, killing two people and wounding 22 others.

Despite the ever-present difficulty of simmering feuds between Middle East neighbours, Mr Sarkozy's summit has already notched up an important achievement in terms of drawing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into the fold. Such are the background hatreds that this is the first time Israeli and Syrian leaders have been in the same room. On Saturday, the fact that Mr Assad and Lebanese President Michel Suleiman held weekend talks and agreed to normalise relations between Damascus and Beirut also removes a significant cause of Middle East instability.

As Mr Olmert acknowledged, Syria is an integral part of the solution to Middle East tensions. While some EU leaders, including Germany's Angela Merkel, remain to be convinced, Mr Sarkozy has shrewdly made the most of Mr Assad's presence at the summit. Being afforded the place of the president's honoured guest at the Elysee Palace, Mr Assad appears to have responded to the onus put upon him to be co-operative by holding a series of important bilateral meetings and agreeing to establish diplomatic relations with Beirut. Most promising of all was Mr Assad's pragmatic acknowledgement that "From the very start of the peace process, we have been speaking of normal relations" with the Jewish state. For long-term results, this attitude must be replicated across other recalcitrant Islamic nations. Progress depends on their recognising Israel's right to exist.

BARACK Obama embarks on a tour of Europe, the Middle East and Afghanistan this weekend - a feverishly anticipated audition on the world stage that includes the unprecedented spectacle of a US presidential candidate addressing a huge crowd in a foreign city.

In Jordan, King Abdullah is expected to get a promise from Senator Obama that he would place a high priority on invigorating Arab-Israeli peace talks. Senator Obama will then step into the minefield of the Arab-Israeli conflict with a visit to Jerusalem and the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Israelis have been uneasy about Senator Obama amid perceptions that he is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and because of his willingness to talk with the Iranian leadership. In a recent speech to a US Jewish lobbying group, Senator Obama, seeking to prove his pro-Israel credentials, declared Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel, which alarmed Palestinians and appeared to pre-judge final-status talks. He has since backtracked and is likely to seek to clarify it when he meets Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Wednesday.

In Jerusalem, he will meet Israeli President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defence Minister Ehud Barak and Likud opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu. He is expected to visit the Wailing Wall.