Diplomacy in the Middle East is a thankless business. Headway can be made on one issue, only to be cancelled by trouble breaking out elsewhere. It is virtually impossible to line up more than one duck at a time. The interest of this month’s unexpected surge of diplomatic activity in the region is that there is apparent movement on several fronts, almost simultaneously: Iraq and its Arab neighbours, Arab governments and Israel, and even Israel and the Palestinians.

The underlying factor is Arabs’ anxiety about Iran’s success in destabilising their troubled region. In Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, Iran has fomented political chaos by bank-rolling and arming radicals. The regime’s implacable stance on Israel has bolstered its standing among Arab publics, to the detriment of moderate Arab governments. There is a growing recognition among Arabs that they have the strongest possible interest in sorting out the problems in their neighbourhood. Doing nothing, and blaming Israel for everything, has been the Arab way, but there is now a more realistic attitude.

Israel, in turn, is explicitly threatened by the Iranian regime, bitter and frustrated about the refusal of Hamas to recognise its right to exist, and even more worried than its Arab neighbours about Lebanon’s slide back towards civil war. There is thus common interest in getting all the ducks in a row and making progress on all fronts at once — stabilising Iraq and Lebanon, advancing the prospects for an Arab-Israel settlement and unblocking Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The obstacles are considerable. Iraq’s isolation was eased by the Baghdad conference on March 10, but Arab promises to assist its beleaguered Government must now be matched by action. In Mecca last month, Saudi Arabia succeeded in getting Fatah and Hamas to agree to govern together; but the meeting failed to resolve the core problem, the continued refusal of Hamas to recognise Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence and accept previous interim peace agreements.

In that difficult context, it is no small achievement that yesterday Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, succeeded in persuading Ehud Olmert to hold regular fortnightly meetings with the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, going beyond day-to-day problems to survey the “general political horizon”. That was not all Dr Rice wanted; but it is all that, realistically, she could have expected. More striking was Mr Olmert’s unhesitating welcome yesterday for the proposal, by the new UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, to bring Israelis and Palestinians together in an expanded meeting of the Quartet — the US, UN, EU and Russia — to be joined by Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

That would be an historic step. It would be the first public meeting between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the government that has unexpectedly taken the lead in Middle East firefighting. The Arab League summit in Riyadh today is expected to reaffirm the peace plan sponsored by Saudi Arabia in 2002. To Israel, it offers Arab recognition in return for withdrawal to the 1967 boundaries, a Palestinian state and the return of Palestinian refugees. Then, Israel rejected the plan out of hand; now, while it rejects aspects, it is prepared to accept it as a basis for negotiations. A broad Middle Eastern settlement is a long way off; but its elements may at last be discernible.