The President's proposals make peace in the Middle East impossible

The speech itself was not so much White House as Little House on the Prairie. All, said George Bush, that had to happen for there to be a Palestinian state (which, of course, we all want) was for the Palestinians democratically to kick out their horrid old leadership and replace it with a nice, new, peace-minded leadership. This new dispensation – plus major reforms – would clear the way for talks which, in the fullness of time, might or might not settle a few other tricky little matters, such as how big a Palestinian state might be, whether part of Jerusalem would be in it and whether Israeli settlements built in violation of United Nations resolutions would be dismantled. We'd have to see about that.

So it's all knitted samplers and best bonnets. As the President argued, the present situation is hopeless. "It is untenable," he said on Monday, "for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation". And you can't say fairer than that. It was the same belief that drove his predecessor, Bill Clinton, to his hunt for a peace plan, which just eluded him, first at Camp David and then at Taba on the Israeli-Egyptian border.

It's worth recapping on that process. There was, for a moment at the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001, a deal possible in which the Palestinians ended up with almost all of the West Bank, with part of Jerusalem and with a territory that was contiguous. But the Israelis had done too little to build Palestinian confidence in the period following Oslo, and Arafat lacked the courage or vision to seize the moment. A new intifada began, that was met by tanks, the number of terrorist attacks increased and Israel reoccupied much of the West Bank. Now, so far have the prospects for peace receded, that even exchanges between participants – conducted in the almost scholarly pages of the New York Review of Books – sound as though they can only be resolved by violence.

So what is George Bush's Ingredient X, the thing which, when added to the punch, makes agreement possible? It is, apparently, that Yasser and his mates sling their hooks and make way for a new generation of leaders. "Peace," says the President, "requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror." If they do this, then Ariel Sharon and the Israelis will presumably be cajoled by the United States into reviving the Taba agreement (or something like it).

Well Amen to that. I don't actually possess (nor have I seen) the evidence that Arafat has been organisationally involved in the suicide bombings, but I do know that – Janus-like – he has said one thing to the Western media while talking the easy language of martyrdom to his own constituency. But I find myself asking why it is that his constituency requires the language of martyrdom to be spoken to it in the first place. Surely that's the reality that must be dealt with. OK, I'm getting ahead of myself, so lets take a rain-check on reality for a moment and go back to George W. Who continues: "Leaders who want to be included in the peace process must show this by their deeds and undivided support for peace." Never mind the Palestinians, how should we apply such a sentiment to Ariel Sharon and his Likud party? Let alone to the vulture figure of Binyamin Netanyahu and those cabinet ministers who support the forcible transportation of the Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza? Should we wish them all away, blow on them, like dandelion heads in the summer?

It is not even a matter of democracy. After all, was not Arafat himself elected back in 1996, in a process overseen by, amongst others, ex-President Carter? And when Bush adds, "If Palestinians embrace democracy, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on America's support for creation of a provisional state of Palestine", one wonders what would happen to other nations were their statehood only to be recognised under the same conditions. No wonder that, according to a Likud minister, Danny Naveh, Bush's address is to be remembered as "the end of Arafat speech".

Even so, if any of this were likely – for one single moment – to work, then many people would be prepared to ignore its naïveté and asymmetry. But it can't. It is, uniquely, the peace plan that makes peace impossible. Successful peace processes depend upon narrowing the number of people and situations that can, in effect, place a veto on progress. They operate by allowing the accumulation of small confidences, and binding their results into a bigger picture. This is the opposite. It offers just about anyone a veto who wants one.

Cherie Blair's mistake, when she gave her short impromptu answer to that journalist the other day, was to seem to assume that desperation alone leads to suicide terrorism. It is probably the case that desperation causes more young people to volunteer for such missions, but the organisations and ideologies behind the murders are not motivated by temporary anger. Their objective is the destruction of a peace process that they see as being the end to their hopes of eventual victory. For the lover of peace they have no redeeming moral features whatsoever. They are the enemy. It follows that if you allow acts of terror to disrupt the process of peace, then you allow the suicide bombers an effective veto. You give them what they want.

There are brave Palestinians who oppose the suicide bomb obscenity. Two thousand academics and intellectuals have signed a petition calling for an end to this form of terrorism. These, presumably, would be the type of people whom we would want to encourage and to strengthen, who would become the partners for peace. In the elections already scheduled for next year, these are the forces who we might hope will come forward. Just as we might have hoped that Sharon, with his grim history, would never lead the state of Israel. If I were a careerist in Ramallah I'd start organising the Palestinian version of the early Sinn Fein right now.

In any case, imagine the results of the Palestinian election. "Him?" says an Israeli spokesman, justifying a refusal to negotiate. "He was once a member of an organisation whose armed wing was behind a bombing in Haifa 10 years ago. "Her? She was a journalist on a station which broadcast a eulogy to a bomber."

On the other side, any Palestinian opposed to peace only has to reject the seeming attempt to impose a leadership on his or her people.

I have my own ideas about what can work, but this cannot. You cannot make peace by dictating who represents the people you are dealing with. Especially since the voters who will have to find and elect these negotiators have no guarantee even that there will be negotiations. Colin Powell's original plan was to recognise a provisional Palestinian state, and to move gradually on from there. Then someone in the White House got to mess with it. Someone stupid.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com