When Tony Blair first mooted the London talks last year the atmosphere in the Middle East did not inspire much confidence that they would be successful. As recently as last Friday, when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a Tel Aviv nightclub, the prospect of Israeli retaliation held the key to whether the conference would be successfully held or not. It was clear the intention was to sabotage both the Israeli-Palestine peace summit held in Sharm-el-Sheik earlier in February and yesterday's meeting. The mission failed.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was in London yesterday; so were US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan and some 20 other leaders. The Israelis were not represented at the one-day conference but were reported to be studying its progress closely.

The gathering not only boasted a great deal of political weight. They promised advice and the financial and economic help needed by the Palestinian Authority to conduct in-depth reform of all its structures. The ultimate objective was to help with the creation of a viable Palestinian state in the context of a secure Israeli state with the latter's existence guaranteed.

Much has changed in the Middle East since the Iraqis braved the bullet and went to the ballot, the first electorate in the region to freely elect its government for decades. They did this in defiance of an insurgency within, aided from without by fundamentalist groups for whom the unfolding process is anathema. The Lebanese cry for independence from Syrian tutelage, or occupation, has further engendered cautious optimism about events in the Middle East.

The Palestinians themselves, of course, have been to the polls and voted in Mr Abbas as their leader. Excitingly for the political process that is coming into existence in Palestine, the legislature that came into being in the wake of elections threw out the Prime Minister's choice of ministers. The political class wanted new faces, new ideas, an end to corruption. The days of Yasser Arafat are over.

All this has been noted by the international community and, more significantly, by Israel, which was why the latter refrained from taking any military action after the Tel Aviv bombing last week. This was a strong departure from the tactics it employed throughout the four-year intifada, a departure helped no doubt by American pressure.

Peace is being given a chance... and a spur by the London conference where it was realised that peace without a wide front of help for Palestine to restructure itself - socially, politically, economically, financially - would merely be a charade.

Mr Abbas must be hoping, as must the international community, that however distant the light at the end of the tunnel, the London conference will take the Israeli-Palestinian problem one step further away from violence and a step forward in the direction of a permanent two-state solution. His host, Mr Blair, recognised the event as a "moment of opportunity", Ms Rice as "a moment of hope". It was both and it now becomes more urgent that the moment develops into an era the like of which has never been seen by the protagonists who are creating it. Only evil men and evil governments will try to obstruct the process.