LONDON: Now that the peace “road map” has hit a violent dead-end, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is likely to be left largely to its own grim devices while Iraq and next year’s US elections preoccupy the Bush administration.

The United States has squarely blamed the Palestinians for the deadlock in progress on the road map designed to lead to President George W. Bush’s vision of a Palestinian state.

“I don’t want to sugarcoat this,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Thursday. “The main problem now is terrorism and violence and the Palestinian Authority needs to take hold of that problem if we are to move forward.”

Many Palestinians will take this to mean Washington has no plan to press Israel just as hard on its road map obligations to end settlement activity and violence against Palestinians.

“It’s very convenient for the Americans to blame the Palestinians because the road map was not heading anywhere anyway,” said London-based Palestinian analyst Ahmed Khalidi.

He said this was not surprising given Bush’s worries over Iraq and the 2004 presidential election, and the absence of any improvements on the ground for Palestinians under occupation.

Yossi Mekelberg, an Israeli analyst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London, said the road map depended on sustained US and international energy and will.

“It needs attention for three or four years, but the international attention span is much shorter than this,” he said, citing Iraq and the US elections as key distractions.

Israel, criticising what it sees as President Yasser Arafat’s malign influence, blames the Palestinians for failing to dismantle militant groups as the road map demands.

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was unable and unwilling to do this by force, but persuaded the militants to accept a three-month ceasefire at the end of June.

Israel was not party to the truce and pursued assassinations of wanted militants, who hit back with an August 19 suicide bombing in Al Quds that killed 21 people — and the ceasefire.

Western diplomats in the region say privately they are aghast at the way the Middle East road map is unravelling at the same time as US policy in Iraq is failing.—Reuters