There has been little enthusiasm for the results of the Annapolis Summit.  Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were bounced into a bland agreement designed to meet the needs of their ‘patron', the United States of America.

All the parties have struggled to get what public relations benefit they could from the start of yet another ‘process’ of earth-shattering ennui for the non-specialist. Secretary of State Rice dealt with Israeli security concerns by appointing retired General Jones, former NATO Supreme Commander in Europe, as Special Middle East Security Envoy. The very need to provide such a comfort factor indicates that something important changed in the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv this week.

Perhaps the most significant development took place a day later. Remember that Ehud Olmert arrived in Washington not so long after a personal tour of many of the other significant players in the international community. 

He will have been in constant touch recently with the political offices of countries, from the UK to Russia, that have always been keen to stress their support for Israel's right to exist. So, anything Olmert said to his people on his return from Annapolis would, very definitely, have been considered in the light of whatever passed for consensus in this same international community.

The message that he brought back to Israel was that failure to reach a settlement with the Palestinians would lead to a ‘South Africa’-type struggle that might result in the end of the Jewish State. Wow!

Truly remarkable stuff. It implicitly positions the right wing, especially Netanyahu and the associated ‘hawk’ element in AIPAC, as little better than ethnicists or racists fighting the logic of history. Olmert has, overnight, conceded some serious moral high ground in a rhetorical move that indicates the political bankruptcy of the mentality that had led to the 2006 Lebanon invasion.

Olmert seems to want to claim a place as a visionary looking to deal with a Palestinian Mandela (a very unlikely role for Abbas). More to the point, you can hear behind this the co-ordinated messages of allies and friends - "this cannot go on, you no longer have the necessary moral authority to command our uncritical support, you are making the problem of insurgency worse, you must find a way to get your people to understand that things have changed ..."

Unfortunately for the allies, even if Olmert is himself so persuaded, the vipers’ nest that is factional Israeli coalition politics means that he cannot speak for his community in the way that, say, F. W. De Klerk could do.

Olmert may have been strengthened by the announcement that Israeli police did not have sufficient evidence to bring a criminal case against him on alleged corruption but he is still under investigation in two other cases. These police investigations do not indicate that he is guilty of anything but they do indicate that he can be undermined domestically on grounds other than his policies. His is a very weak base from which to effect a political revolution.

Even so, what he had to say may have significance far beyond the ability of the man to be the agent of change himself. Olmert’s apparent fear was that liberal and democratic values in the West would lead inevitably to an irresistible call for equal rights within Israeli territory for Palestinians under occupation and that this would remove the dominance of the Jewish majority.

This fear is not going to impress hardliners but you can almost hear Western diplomats developing this argument as the only means of helping Olmert sell something that is otherwise unpalatable. Ghaddafi has argued for a secular republican state for both Arabs and Jews under one law and this is hard to argue against from first democratic and liberal principles - but this is not what Zionism is about. Olmert is trying to tell Zionists that the two-state solution is the only alternative to the Ghaddafi model which would spell the end of the Zionist dream.

Already the Israeli Government (in an air of panic) has sent emissaries to former Soviet Jews in Central Europe to persuade them to locate to Israel. Getting numbers up is buying time and it represents the defensive strategy of all powerful ethnic groups with internal minorities who have higher birth rates and time on their side. But not so many Jews as formerly are going to be keen to abandon liberal democracies in the West for the strife-ridden Middle East.

There is only one way to interpret all this – that the balance of power within the West has moved firmly against traditional defensive Zionism and that ‘reform’ Zionism will have to concede something to buy time to survive - or risk becoming a pariah state within a couple of generations. It means that the ethical terms of trade in international affairs are changing and that merely being democratic in comparison to one's neighbours is no longer good enough - Israel will have to be as democratic as its allies to earn their support.

Olmert claimed (in order to persuade his domestic audience) that the Jewish power base in the US would move against Israel rather than accept discrimination against Palestinians. This, of course, is nonsense or, rather, the Palestinians would have to so completely eschew their liberation theology that no excuse was left for most political Jews to ignore their rights. The Palestinians are just not going to make it that easy for Olmert.

What he also means (but cannot say) is that, in his opinion, if Israel does not adapt to new conditions, the global Jewish community will split into liberal-left and nationalist factions. Jewish power in Western politics depends on its staying united against perceived external threats and yet Jewish politics are, by their nature, intense, factional and intellectual.

The current squabbles within Labour Friends of Israel, the perpetual infighting in the Israeli Cabinet and the factionalism this writer observed in the 1990s within the Labour Finance & Industry Group all indicate something that is highly indicative of (though obviously not exclusive to) Jewish politics - its internal competitiveness.

Only shared threat or shared aspiration can hold together factions that would otherwise be metaphorically tearing each others' throats out. Already there are signs that quarrels are breaking out over policy towards the Peace Process throughout the diaspora. These will intensify as the Peace Process starts to require compromises that go far beyond what security 'hawks' consider acceptable. If liberal Jews and 'hawks' no longer agree on the nature of the threat and on the solution to what threat they do perceive, they will start to turn on each other.

This, in itself, could break the dominance over US political life of AIPAC. This is the ‘feared’ split in the ruling order’ to be found in any revolution. American politicians might struggle free of an uncomfortable relationship. Israel might even start to lose its role as sole natural focus for international Jewry. The cry that to criticise Israel is to be antisemitic may no longer be Holy Writ on Capitol Hill.

This is all about Zionism. The Zionist vision is less than 150 years old and it only became truly dominant in Jewish thinking as a result of the Shoah narrative. Zionists still hate to be reminded that in the 1930s, some strains of it had fascist connotations and that one faction even briefly tried to 'cut a deal' with the Nazis. Certainly, to be Jewish is not necessarily to be Zionist and the conflation of the two only became politically ‘essential’ after 1945.

What was created in 60 years could be undone in half that time so that it is as a thinking Zionist that Olmert is trying to get his people to bow before what he thinks is the inevitable - the maturation of Israel away from an ethnicist nationalist ideology that no longer entirely holds water in the modern world. This is now a matter of buying time to establish Israel as the predominantly Jewish State in a multicultural Middle East.

The biggest effect of Annapolis may thus be surprising one – a political power struggle in Israel that either swings it sharply to the Right or brings into a new relationship with moderate Arabs and the Peace Process.

It is impossible to say now which tendency will win out, but the possible coming split in Jewry is not going to be confined to Israel. It will spread across the Western Jewish political community. Whoever loses in Israel will still try to retain a power base in the diaspora.

These are going to be fascinating times for observers of the politics of an articulate and sophisticated community deeply embedded within several different Western political communities and with narratives of awesome complexity.

Above all, this surprising irruption into political revisionism must be interpreted in the context of growing pressure on Israel from its 'friends' to stop being the problem in a war against a threat that is now far bigger than any theoretical Arab attempt to push it into the sea - that of insurgency.

Until the Palestinian issue is sorted out, the region will not see the system of state co-operation that is necessary to unravel this wider insurgency. Denial of Palestinian rights merely ensures a degree of state support for the insurgents and splits the international community. Since military or security solutions to 'state sponsorship of terror' are no longer on the agenda (though the 'hawks' will disagree), deals have to be struck.

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