by David Harris
JERUSALEM, May 18 (Xinhua) -- It is now one year four months and 21 days since the last official talks between Israelis and Palestinians. During those 506 days the parties have repeatedly blamed one another for that breakdown and the failure to reboot negotiations.
Indirect peace talks are expected to resume on Wednesday but Israelis and Palestinians alike are still expressing serious reservations about the chances of their success.
The Americans, meanwhile, are pinning their hopes on special envoy Senator George Mitchell. United States President Barack Obama believed his appointee can bring the same calm to the Middle East that he delivered to Northern Ireland.
U.S. HOPES
The parties have agreed the parley will begin in indirect fashion. Mitchell will shuttle between Ramallah and Jerusalem meeting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and their respective top negotiators. From time to time the conversation will shift to Washington but all the while the parties will not meet face to face -- at least not for public consumption.
The Americans hope that will change fairly quickly and when sufficient trust is built up they will return to the same type of face-to-face talks in which they have been involved over the last two decades.
"The U.S. administration probably needs to have achieved face- to-face talks before the Netanyahu administration moratorium on settlement construction expires in September," said Gilbert Kahn, a professor of political science at Kean University in New Jersey.
The Arab League has given its blessing to the process but along with the Palestinians has said that if there is no major progress by the time the West Bank building freeze comes to an end there is no point in continuing the peace process.
"Absent face to face at that time there will probably be little leverage to use against the Israelis to continue the moratorium. The problem here is that the Palestinians know this as well," Kahn said.
While most of the focus of Obama's Middle East policy is on his overseas objectives there are also domestic factors to take into account.
Even though the power of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington is thought to be dwindling, it is still a force to be reckoned with. There has also been considerable consternation in the pro-Israel camp regarding Obama's Middle East policy. This was underlined when the Obama team went on a public offensive against Israel after Israel embarrassed Vice President Joseph Biden by announcing interim approval for a new housing project in a Jewish suburb of East Jerusalem at the very time that Biden was in the city.
"He has certainly begun to allay some -- but by no means all -- of the anxieties of Jews in the United States concerning his approach to the peace process after the brouhaha that occurred during the Biden visit," said Kahn.
The U.S. academic expects the White House to announce before the mid-term elections that Obama will visit Israel.
