(Copyright National Post 2007)

The Israeli and Palestinian governments both came up with fresh ideas last week that underscored a mutual eagerness to restart the long stalled Middle East peace process.

If so, they finally have a peace broker of rock star magnitude to move them along. As genial and optimistic as ever, Tony Blair, the former British prime minister appointed last month as the world's special envoy to the tortuous peace talks, was in Israel and the West Bank last Monday and Tuesday on a preliminary fact-finding mission.

So, the portents in this troubled region are, for once, a little more positive than negative.

As polls have consistently shown, most Palestinians and most Israelis seek peace and think the best way to achieve it is a two- state solution. There are many reasons why this shared goal has proven so elusive, starting with the profound suspicions that exist about the true intentions of those who in many cases literally sit on the other side of the fence.

There are still a lot of elephants in the tiny living room that is Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The granddaddy of all the elephants is Hamas which runs the tiny, heavily populated Gaza enclave and has more support in the much larger West Bank than its Palestinian and non-Palestinian enemies have dared to admit.

The Islamic Resistance Movement, to use Hamas' official title, has loudly opposed everything that those bent on compromise said last week.

These radical Islamists continue to speak ludicrously about the benefits that it claims that Palestinians can gain from cleaving to a conservative religious line and from terrorism even if these attacks ensure that they have little contact with the rest of the world.

Another big elephant is the Jewish settler movement, an energetic bunch which also claims to have God on its side, but which does not have a big constituency among secular or ultra-Orthodox Israelis. Only a few days ago the settlers were marching again on abandoned settlements in Gaza and the West Bank and boasting, not for the first time, about plans for new outposts and expanded settlements in what Israelis call Judea and Samaria.

The Western goal has been to isolate Hamas because it refuses to renounce violence and denies the Jewish state's right to exist and use aid and other confidence-building measures to buttress Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is liked by most Palestinians but is seen as weak.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is disliked by most Israelis as well as being seen as weak, has encouraged the international effort to quarantine Hamas. He has tried to promote support for for Abbas and his secular Fatah movement by handing the President long-frozen Palestinian tax funds and by freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as well as calling off a manhunt for scores of others who have declared their willingness to lay down their arms.

The winds of peace that have been blowing strongly against Hamas may soon buffet the settlers, who have been supported by a succession of Israeli governments. U.S. President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, both said this month that Israel's future is in its Galilee and Negev and not in most of the West Bank where several hundred thousand settlers live.

Olmert, like a generation of politicians before him, has been in a quandary about what do with those settlers who live outside three large blocs near Jerusalem that every political leader here has insisted Israel must keep. There have been broad hints that much of the West Bank will eventually be abandoned and that a crackdown against some of the hardcore hilltop outposts there is being contemplated.

What the many Israelis who oppose the settlers are dreading if there ever is an order to evacuate the West Bank settlements is a repeat on a much, grander scale of the highly divisive protests that accompanied the withdrawal in 2005 of about ten thousand colonists from Gaza.

For his part, Abbas has indicated he is going to try an end run on Hamas by manipulating the rules to make it very difficult for Hamas to repeat the parliamentary majority it won in elections 19 months ago.

However, as Abbas, Blair and Olmert know, the elephants in the living room are far from being endangered species. Hamas and the settlers will each use their enormously different ways to try to break the furniture if they do not get what they want.

Credit: National Post