ANALYSIS-Militants dismiss Middle East peace push

BEIRUT, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Hamas and its allies in the Middle East suspect the United States and Israel will use next week's peace conference to whittle away at Palestinian national rights and prepare the ground for a possible attack on Iran.

But the Palestinian Islamists and their Iranian, Syrian and Lebanese Hezbollah partners may not act directly to sabotage the U.S.-led diplomatic drive, confident it will run into the sand.

They believe Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and U.S. President George W. Bush are all too weak internally to achieve a breakthrough at the Nov. 27 talks on Palestinian statehood in Annapolis, Maryland. "If anything, Annapolis will just be another confirmation for this resistance axis of Arab defeatism and the complete futility of the peace process," said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

Hamas, which won elections in January 2006 and forcibly took over the Gaza Strip in June, is not invited to Annapolis. Nor is Iran. Syria is on the guest list, but insists it will attend only if the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights are on the agenda.

"If Annapolis is an opportunity to support Olmert and put pressure on Abbas to make concessions at the expense of Palestinian rights...this of course will create anger," Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal told the BBC in Damascus this week.

Hamas, locked in a deadly power struggle with Abbas's Fatah faction, rejects Western calls to recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept existing interim peace accords. Meshaal said Bush had launched the "road map" Middle East peace plan five years ago as a prelude to invading Iraq and was now "relaunching this project, not because he wants to make peace in Palestine, but in preparation to strike at Iran".

The United States, which has tried to foster a conservative Sunni Arab alliance against Iran's alleged nuclear and regional ambitions, is hoping for broad Arab representation at Annapolis to help protect Abbas's flanks against his radical critics.

"This meeting will bring nothing but harm for Palestine," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday. Its aim was "to connect all Arab countries to the Zionist regime".

Washington expects the conference to start talks leading to Palestinian statehood, but the two sides remain poles apart on borders, security, settlements, Jerusalem and refugees.

WAIT-AND-SEE

Despite the angry rhetoric, Hamas and other militant groups, hard-pressed by the dire impact of economic curbs on Gaza, are likely to adopt a wait-and-see approach, analysts said.

"Maybe in the later stages, if negotiations are getting serious, they may intensify rocket launching from Gaza, transfer rocket technology to the West Bank or try to mobilise public opinion against the talks," Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, told Reuters.

"But they don't want to take a gamble if the conference is going to collapse anyway," he said. They would also be cautious until Syria, which hosts their leadership, had taken a stand.

Hamas vowed last month to convene a counter-conference of groups opposed to Israel and the United States in Damascus, but Syria delayed the meeting and has announced no new date for it.

Syria is now weighing whether to go to Annapolis and reduce its international isolation, or stay away and avoid possible damage to its pan-Arab credibility and ties with non-Arab Iran.

"Attending without any promise of retrieving the Golan would weaken Syria domestically and regionally," said Saad-Ghorayeb.

If the Syrians did show up, this would affect the behaviour of militant groups close to them, analysts say.

"The picture of Syrians sitting at a table with Israelis and negotiating the Golan would have a ripple effect in a region where rejection of Israel's right to exist is gainning ground," a report by the International Crisis Group said this week.

Syria, unlike Hamas, Iran or Hezbollah, has accepted the need to make peace with Israel and has repeatedly offered to restart talks with the Jewish state that broke down in 2000.

Hamas, whose 1988 charter calls for Israel's destruction, has offered a long-term truce with its enemy in return for a viable state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"Nothing on the horizon makes us optimistic that the conference will succeed," wrote Ahmed Youssef, an adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, head of the dismissed Hamas-led government.

The Hamas-Fatah feud casts doubt on the legitimacy of Abbas's government and on his ability to deliver on anything he agrees with the Israelis at Annapolis or later. Failure would further undermine his authority, even within his own faction.

"This is Abbas's last gamble," said newspaper editor Atwan. "If he doesn't come back with a tangible concession from the Israelis, you could have the radicals in Fatah emerging."

Since the last U.S.-hosted Middle East peace talks collapsed in 2000, the region has been shaken by a Palestinian uprising, the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, turmoil in Lebanon and tension over Iran's nuclear programme.

Asked if a new deadlock would spur more militancy, Lebanese political scientist Hilal Khashan said: "The region is already radicalised. The momentum for radicalisation is there anyway." (Editing by Dominic Evans)