I have been traveling a bit recently. A month or so ago, I was in Bahrain (for a conference but not “that” one), Israel (for the Herzliya Conference) and Jerusalem (to catch up with old friends). Israel/Palestine was central to all three trips in different ways. In June, I was in Berlin for a conference on Iraq with a whole bunch of Shiite clerics. No one mentioned the issue: Iran was the elephant in that room. This week, I’ve been at a meeting with some old friends and colleagues to discuss Libya. Palestine didn’t get a look in. But, in spite of all the differences in emphasis, I see a pattern — even if sometimes unacknowledged — emerging throughout the region. And a central, if more and more complicated motif, remains what used to be called the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP). As a diplomat in Jerusalem, Damascus and London, I worked on this issue with British prime ministers and foreign secretaries for well over a decade. I have Palestinian and Israeli friends. So I have some personal equity invested in it. And, perhaps perversely, it still seems to me to offer a key of sorts to some of the other big geopolitical challenges facing the region — even if not in the way that we perhaps once thought. Looking back at the history of the conflict, it has always seemed to me that resolving it has always been important, but never urgent enough. Something else always got in the way. But there is now perhaps a new urgency. While Palestinians can seem politically adrift, the issue keeps cropping up in other regional contexts. And the danger that it will be instrumentalized damagingly in the context of an emerging new and unstable regional order should perhaps concentrate minds as nothing else has managed to do in recent years. For example, on July 12, Hassan Nasrallah, in his latest interview with Al-Manar, made much of the improved ability of Hezbollah, with Iranian help, to hit high-value targets throughout Israel, achieve a decisive victory in the next war and send that country “back to the stone age.” A week or so ago, Hamas sent an unusually high-level delegation to Tehran, headed by Saleh Al-Arouri, who these days reportedly floats between Turkey, Lebanon and Qatar, to seek fresh Iranian support in the face of severe Israeli pressure in order to improve the catastrophic situation in Gaza. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — in his first meeting with such a delegation since 2012 — told Al-Arouri that Hamas was the core of Palestinian resistance. In an interesting linking of Hamas and Hezbollah, he added that Nasrallah’s hope one day to pray in Al-Aqsa was “absolutely practical and achievable.” There are press reports that Hamas has, in turn, made renewed overtures to Hezbollah in Beirut and is also seeking to mend fences with the Assad regime in Syria, restoring the axis of resistance shattered by the events of 2011 — but with the addition of the major Iraqi Hashd militias and the Houthis in Yemen. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, which exists in an interesting dialectic of uneasy cooperation and outright rivalry with Iran, continues to make far more noise about the sufferings of the Palestinians than those of the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Qatar does the same. Meanwhile, in Iraq, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, probably with half an eye on those leaders of the Hashd who like visiting Lebanon and making threats against Israel, has reiterated his support for Palestinian steadfastness against Israel and has promised to economically support new Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh as he seeks — probably quixotically — to end the economic dependency arising from Oslo that keeps the Palestinian economy tied to that of its far richer neighbor. Meanwhile, Basra rots. My point is this: For all that many Arab leaders and opinion formers have run out of patience with Palestinian politics, the basic problem of how to settle this longest-running conflict remains unresolved. A one-state solution is highly improbable — just read the polls. A two-state solution seems ever more distant — the Trump administration seems to have no interest in pursuing it and even the Senate seems to be losing interest. Yet the Palestinians aren’t going to disappear. The Kushner plan — or those bits revealed recently in Manama — is fine as far as it goes. Who can deny the value of economic improvements to the daily lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza? But none of it is new. The $50 billion or so of donor funding it claims the plan will attract is — so far at least — magic money. And, as many others have pointed out, the principal obstacle to Palestinian economic growth is not the absence of money but the presence of massive Israeli restrictions. This was one of the chief lessons of the time in office — first as finance minister then as prime minister — of Salam Fayyad, who achieved miracles when he managed to persuade the Israelis to reduce the obstacles they put in the way of the daily economic activity of ordinary Palestinians. When they reimposed them, and continued settlement expansion, the economy (and Palestinian politics) suffered. But there is not a word about this in what we know of the Kushner plan. I personally believe the Palestinian Authority (PA) should have been represented in Manama. Even if they simply wanted to point out the flaws in the plan, the PA’s leaders should have done so on the spot. Making it clear that an invitation to an international event of intimate concern to them and sponsored by the US in a friendly Gulf state would be unwelcome strikes me as politically unwise. I also believe they should have used the opportunity to make the case once more that only a political settlement that results in a proper Palestinian state can work. The danger that the conflict will be instrumentalized damagingly in the context of an emerging new and unstable regional order should perhaps concentrate minds. Sir John Jenkins Equally I understand the depth of the frustration of ordinary Palestinians. If the regular polls conducted by the admirable Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah are any guide, many have little confidence in their own leadership — whether the PA or Hamas. They have not lost faith in the national cause or in the desirability of a peace settlement, but they feel abandoned and unrepresented. Nevertheless, they should resist the temptation to kick out at others — literally in the case of an unfortunate recent Saudi visitor to Al-Aqsa. That simply makes them even less likely to win and keep friends, when they need to do both. Because we shall come back to this issue again eventually, we simply cannot afford to let Iran — or indeed Turkey or Qatar — monopolize it. They will use it to pursue their own interests, which in the case of Iran at least are deeply damaging to the fabric of all its neighbors. Tehran clearly sees Hamas as a useful ally against its enemies and, if war were to come in the Gulf, then it would expect covering fire from Gaza, as it would from Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. And, while we focus on what is happening in the lower Gulf, the situation in southern Syria and Iraq becomes more and more worrying. Israel has stepped up the tempo of its attacks around Quneitra on what they believe to be emerging Hezbollah positions and networks (allegedly coordinated by Ali Musa Daqduq, who was intimately involved with attacks by Shiite “special groups” on coalition troops in Iraq a decade ago). In Iraq, it also seems likely that the Israelis recently struck a missile site operated by certain Hashd elements near Amerli. This seems to me like the beginnings of a perfect storm. It is perhaps also a product of the emerging realignment of forces in the region, with an Iranian bloc across the Greater Levant and in parts of Yemen; a pro-Islamist Turkey-Qatar axis that occasionally involves Iran; and a Gulf axis of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, with help from Egypt and Pakistan when they are not distracted by their own problems. Israel naturally sits with those who oppose creeping Iranian hegemony. But — as I know many senior Israeli security officials also believe — this relationship cannot be properly acknowledged or consummated in the continuing absence of a solution to the Palestinian issue. Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so the MEPP has always been too important to be left to the Palestinians or the Israelis. Finding a formula that offers enough to the Israelis to persuade them that a properly constructed and sponsored Palestinian state would not be a threat but would produce real normalization and offer an opportunity for sustained and open work against common challenges should be our collective goal. That will almost certainly mean demilitarization. But why not? After all, who is a Palestinian army going to fight? Pointless armies have been the bane of too many states in this region. Security guarantees can be put in place. And, if the state has no army, then there is no reason for a sub-state actor like Hamas to possess one either, unless its objective is the “Lebanonization” of a future Palestinian state, something which would simply make it an outlaw. By “our,” I mean principally the US (still), Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, a post-Brexit Britain and France, with others welcome to join if they subscribe to the basic principles of adequate land for peace and a practical solution to the issues of refugees, borders and Jerusalem. You might say this is simply a pious hope. People once used to say I was too pessimistic. To both accusations, I say that I have always claimed simply to be what the late Emile Habibi (who should have known) called “mutasha’il” — a “pessoptimist.” Or, to quote Antonio Gramsci, what we perhaps need on this issue above all is pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.