TEL AVIV: US President George W. Bush has raised hopes he will turn his attention to ending Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians after any war in Iraq. But there are doubts in the region that he will turn his words into deeds.

Bush said in a speech in Washington on Wednesday that “success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace” and vowed to pursue every opportunity to end 29 months of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

A concerted US effort to end the conflict might mollify Arab and European leaders who have urged Bush not to go to war with Iraq to disarm President Saddam Hussein.

Israeli officials back the war, saying Saddam’s fall would start a domino effect where democracy and peace sweep the Middle East and their arch-enemy Palestinian President Yasser Arafat is ousted.

But political analysts in the region say the outcomes outlined by the Israeli officials are too optimistic, doubt Bush’s long-term commitment to ending the conflict and suggest Washington has no new ideas for resolving it.

“Palestinians are not able to take seriously American hints and oblique promises that after the war the Middle East conflict will have its moment of truth,” Palestinian Labour Minister Ghassan al-Khatib said.

Mark Heller, senior research associate at the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, said: “I don’t think the Americans are uninterested. They just have no clear idea of what they can do constructively to end the conflict.”

ABSENCE OF NEW IDEAS: The timing of Bush’s speech in Washington fuelled some hope that he might after Iraq turn to resolving conflict in which almost 1,900 Palestinians and more than 700 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinians rose up to demand their own state.

But he offered no new ideas, repeating instead the proposals included in a “road map” to peace being drawn up by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia which paves the way to the creation of a Palestinian state in 2005.

Some Israeli and Palestinian analysts say Washington could make some progress — but only if it came up with new ideas.

“If the war in Iraq is limited...I think that the Americans will want to deal expediently with the other destabilizing factors in the Middle East,” said Manuel Hassassian, a Palestinian politics professor and strategic analyst.

“There will be an intensive diplomatic onslaught after they finish the job in Iraq to implement the road map initiative.”

But he said progress in peace talks would depend on an end to violence, Israel starting a troop withdrawal from occupied territory and Arafat being offered a “real political reward”.

Israel shows no signs of altering its tough stance against the uprising and could even harden its line.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon set out the same list of demands he has long made of the Palestinians when he introduced his new cabinet to Israel’s parliament on Thursday.

He is now at the helm of a rightist coalition that is widely considered even less likely to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians than the previous government, which included the centre-left Labour Party.

“It will be Sharon’s government. It is a government that will serve settlement activities and undermine the road map plan,” Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said. “Sharon’s speech was a total departure from the peace process.”

FIGHTING MIGHT WORSEN: Before there is any talk of peacemaking after a war against Baghdad, Israel and the Palestinians worry their conflict will intensify while the campaign is being fought in Iraq.

Israel fears Palestinian militants will carry out new attacks on Israelis as revenge for any US assault on their Arab brethren in Iraq.

The Palestinians fear Israel will launch major military operations while the world’s eyes are turned to Iraq. They suggest the army might reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip or try to pull Arafat out of his West Bank headquarters and into exile.

Such concerns are dismissed by many Israeli political analysts. They say Israel is unlikely to do anything that would upset the Americans at such a sensitive time and that exiling Arafat could also cause lasting damage to any peace talks.

“This would be a hot issue — the Palestinians might refuse to negotiate until Arafat is brought back and anyone who agrees to negotiations might be seen as a collaborator,” said Menachem Klein, a senior lecturer at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.

“For the time being I see no peace process coming to the fore,” he said.

Yossi Alpher, who set up the Bitterlemons website which analyses the conflict, said peacemaking needed more than just the “road map”, suggesting it was proposed more to appease Arab and European leaders than to make a genuine search for peace.

“President Bush...has sponsored a weak, convoluted and ambiguous ‘road map’ process that seems designed more to see America and its allies through the war on Iraq than to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” he said.—Reuters