This is not the best of months, it seems, for Palestinians to undertake major steps because the record to date has not been very promising.

If nothing else, there has been the deadly events in the Gaza Strip when about 250,000 Gazans were commemorating the third death anniversary of Yasser Arafat, last Monday.

Seven supporters of Arafat's party, Fatah, were killed when surprisingly the police of its rival party, Hamas which is now in control of Gaza, opened fire on the rally. More than 100 were injured and about 400 Fatah supporters were arrested in this ugly encounter.

The most notorious day for the Palestinians, however, has been November 2, 1917 when the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, said in a classified document sent to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, that the British government "favour(ed) the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people... ."

Thirty years later, on November 29, the United Nations voted a plan for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with "the Greater Jerusalem area, encompassing Bethlehem, coming under international control." This came at a time when Jewish community hardly owned six per cent of the country.

The coincidence that a peace "meeting," sponsored by the Bush administration, will also be held later this month in Annapolis to settle the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict has left many in the Arab world feeling weariful and ominous.

Aside from this happenstance, there remains major stumbling blocks that need to be overcome before there can be some movement.

The bloody clashes in Gaza, despicable as they may be, have come as a reminder to the three key participants in the upcoming conference -the Bush administration, Israel and Palestine - that they cannot for long bury their heads in the sand.

Gaza is in the midst of a serious humanitarian crisis that must be tackled immediately and be included in any settlement. More to the point, the presence of Hamas in the West Bank cannot be dismissed summarily.

On the other hand, the focus of the conference still remains unclear. The Palestinians and Israelis were tasked by the Bush administration to draft a document that will spell out the tour d' horizon or a general framework for the upcoming negotiations. At the time of writing, this document still seemed far from complete or comprehensive.

But some movement, however, surfaced when Israel unexpectedly and without any explanation dropped its demand that the Palestinians comply with the first step of the Roadmap, namely, an "unequivocal end to violence and terrorism". 

Israel has never in the past declared its readiness to execute its all-important "parallel" obligation which is to "immediately dismantle(s) settlement outposts erected since March 2001" and "freeze all settlement activity including natural growth of the settlements." But in a last-minute gesture it has been reported that Israel is now willing to undertake this meaningless freeze.

But what is more disturbing is the absence of any reference to an Arab role other than the desired presence of senior Arab officials at the "meeting for few hours", as described by Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

What about the Arab Peace Initiative which expressed for the first time Arab readiness to accept Israel provided it, too, is willing to agree to a sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip along with implementation of international resolutions covering "final status" issues such as Palestinian refugees, borders and continued Palestinian presence in occupied East Jerusalem.

Of late, there has been an alarming crescendo of voices maintaining that the Annapolis meeting is actually a disguised attempt at creating an anti-Iran bloc in the region to facilitate an eventual strike against Tehran, as advocated by some Israeli officials and its supporters in the US and, lately, in Nicolas Sarkozy's France.

"Iran is choosing to destabilise the Middle East, pursue nuclear capabilities and threaten our allies, especially Israel," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Jewish meeting on Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee. Late last month, she had warned the House Foreign Affairs Committee that a two-state solution in the Middle East is in jeopardy.

"Our concern is growing that without a serious political prospect for the Palestinians that gives to moderate leaders a horizon that they can show to their people that indeed there is a two-state solution that is possible, we will lose the window for a two-state solution."

In fact, a conference will be held next week in London at the University of London where prominent Palestinian, Israeli as well as American intellectuals will argue for "A Single State in Palestine/Israel", or as one panelist put it, "Leaving the Cake Whole".