At the meeting of the full Brighton and Hove City Council last Thursday, there was a debate and vote on a notice of motion on Iraq. Unfortunately, the notice of motion makes no mention of a fundamentally related issue, the failed Middle East peace process and the urgent need to restart it and resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

I am writing in my individual capacity to make my views clear on what is probably the most important foreign policy issue of domestic politics in two decades.

Tony Blair has spoken about the need for "a firm commitment to action and

a massive mobilisation of energy to get the peace process moving again". I fully agree. To date though, the Middle East policy of the Bush administration has been characterised by, on the one hand, a hard-nosed determination to "take out" the Iraqi dictator come what may and, on the other, spectacular failure to bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table to reach a just peace.

A coherent policy on the Middle East has to walk on at least two legs, one to deal with the aggressive expansionist ambitions of the Iraqi dictator and the other to deal with the gaping wound of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If the "special relationship" between the UK and the US means something on Iraq, it must also be made to mean something on the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Yet the latter is the more difficult challenge.

The UK and the US worked closely on the Northern Ireland peace process and that relationship was productive because there was a readiness on the part of Britain to bring both conflicting parties into a process of negotiation and compromise. I do not see President Bush is ready to use the undoubted pressure the US has at its disposal to bring the Sharon government to the negotiating table.

Israel has been used to presenting itself as an island of Western democracy in a sea of Arab feudalism. But ever since the rise of Likud and Jewish fundamentalism, that image of the "warrior democracy" has been fading away. Israel is a state built on the dispossession of the Palestinian people. This, of course, is known nowhere better than in the Arab world.

Islamic fundamentalism also militates against a negotiated settlement but the main initiative and responsibility must rest with the most powerful: Israel and the US.

-Coun John Ballance, Labour member for Tenantry ward, Brighton