Bombs blow US diplomacy to shreds

Clinton calls for Palestinians to take action as visit by special envoy is postponed to allow mourning

Expressing shock and anger over the Jerusalem bomb attack, President Bill Clinton urged the Palestinian authorities to take "concrete steps" to increase security and called for a "deepened determination" by both Palestinians and Israelis to pursue peace. Mr Clinton appeared in the White House briefing room unannounced yesterday to make public his response.

Less than an hour earlier, it had been announced that a visit by the US special envoy, Dennis Ross, planned to start today, would be postponed. Declining to commit himself to a time-scale for reinstating the visit, Mr Clinton said it would wait until after "an appropriate period of mourning".

The coincidence between the attack and the resumption of US attempts to revive the peace process was alluded to by the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who expressed disappointment that "at a crucial time, when we were just on the verge of getting the talks back on track that this should happen". US officials declined to speculate whether there might be a connection between the two, with the bombings deliberately timed to scupper the peace moves - the first public foray by the US into the Middle East for three months.

US involvement, which had been stalling since the beginning of the year, appeared to have been put on indefinite hold in April after Mr Clinton persuaded the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to come to Washington and failed to convince him to abandon plans for new Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The meeting, billed as a low-key summit, went almost unreported when it ended in failure.

By May the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, admitted the peace process had broken down. "We're all very frustrated at the moment," she told a Senate committee. "We have seen a breakdown in a process that we all applauded." She later described this as one of the biggest disappointments of her first months in office.

At the same time there were sporadic signs that Europe, and other Middle Eastern countries, notably Egypt, were trying to fill the gap left by the US, and that the US absence might force the two sides to reach some way of co-existing by themselves. Since then Mr Clinton and Mrs Albright have been criticised in Washington for appearing to neglect the peace process and allowing Israeli-Palestinian relations to deteriorate. Mrs Albright has been repeatedly asked why she has not embarked on the same shuttle diplomacy that her predecessor, Warren Christopher, engaged in.

The sensitivity of these accusations within the administration was clear yesterday, when Mr Clinton answered a question about Mrs Albright's apparent neglect of the problem by taking it personally. Indicating that much work had been going on behind the scenes, he responded: "I think the suggestion that we've not been personally involved is just false ... But I know of no example in recent history where peace is made by third parties trying to be helpful, making public statements alone."

He went on: "I believe the way I am doing this is the most effective way. But you should not conclude for a moment that the White House has not been intimately and intensely and continuously involved in this peace process, particularly as it has got more difficult."

The question of Mrs Albright's direct involvement has been problematic since the Washington Post revealed in February that Mrs Albright - the child of Czech immigrants who was brought up a Roman Catholic - came from a Jewish family and lost relatives in Nazi concentration camps. While she insists that the time has not yet come for her to engage in shuttle diplomacy herself, some believe that her Jewish roots (about which she appears ambivalent) have diminished her capacity to be accepted as an honest broker.