When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert meet in the West Bank town of Jericho today to “try to narrow some of their differences,” there are not many in either of the camps or among their well-wishers outside who expect a spectacular breakthrough.

It is not that the two are not sincere in their desire to find the magic wand that will spare their people further bloodshed. But unfortunately for them and their people, they are meeting at a time when their mandate to speak for all their people are under challenge. The writ of Abbas, though elected president, does not run in Gaza. When the commitments he makes on behalf of the people of Palestine will carry no weight for part of his own constituency, what weight will they carry for Israelis?

Olmert is not in any better position. Under siege after his Lebanon debacle, he is keeping just one step ahead of the wolves baying for his political blood. There is no guarantee that by the time the peace conference scheduled for the fall arrives, he will be there to keep his promise to “discuss issues of substance.” Still weaker is the position of the prime mover behind the push to hold a peace conference to signal a “new commitment” to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are not many in the region, or in the wider world, who believe that President George Bush will show, in his last 17 months in office, the evenhandedness to work for the two-state solution he evoked in 2002 and has persistently ignored since then.

All these are reasons to scale down optimism about peace returning to the Israeli-Palestinian front anytime soon. There is also the feeling, born of experience over many decades now, that Washington’s sudden spurt of enthusiasm for Middle-East peace must have, as always, an agenda. It is the carrot that Washington hopes will get the Middle East working overtime to further that agenda. At present it is Iraq. Washington needs the help of Iraq’s neighbors to stay in, or even get out of, the country it destroyed.

All these not withstanding, it is in the interest of the region, Arabs as well Israelis, that today’s meeting succeed in creating hopes of the decades-old logjam breaking to allow peace moves to begin in earnest. Both must realize now that policies based on calculations of short-term gains have made the problem harder to solve. The efforts now being made by America and Israel to get Palestinian backing for Abbas and Fatah as their representative would not have been needed if they, the Bush administration in particular, had not gone out of their way to humiliate them and make them irrelevant. Earlier, every time America turned up its nose at Arafat and refused to talk to him, they acted under the belief that peace would come walking on Arab humiliation. As they realize now, they were wrong.

Future meetings, today’s including, will succeed only if it is conducted on the principle that peace, if it is to last, should bring honor to all and dishonor to none.