President Barack Obama watches as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (right) shake hands at a trilateral meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, N.Y, Sept. 22, 2009. Official White House photo by Pete Souza

Can Obama bring the magic to the Middle East negotiating table?

President Barack Obama is having a big week – after declaring an end to the American combat mission in Iraq on Tuesday, the busy-bee president will turn his attention to an even longer standing problem: As-yet unattainable peace in the Middle East. On Thursday, the White House and the US State Department will play host to Israeli and Palestinian leaders for the first direct negotiations between the two in 20 months.

According to MSNBC, the “longshot” talks are aimed at forging a two-state solution in one year; but expectations are low, especially after a Palestinian gunman opened fire on an Israeli vehicle near the West Bank city of Hebron on Tuesday, killing four people. That same day, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas arrived in Washington for preparatory talks with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, MSNBC claimed, “has spent months coaxing the parties back to the bargaining table”.

Netanyahu: Israel’s right-wing prime minister is hampered by a fragile coalition government, but has recently come round to the idea of a demilitarized Palestinian state and says he is will to take political risks for peace.

“Low expectations” may hardly describe how little hope some have in this peace process making any headway. Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli justice minister, wrote at Bloomberg, under the headline “Obama’s Israeli-Palestine Talks Will Fail”, “If there were even the slightest chance of the talks succeeding, I would say it was worth making one more attempt. However, in this situation, there is almost no such chance, whereas the grave implications of failure are both clear and painful.” Beilin continued, “I call upon the U.S. administration to hurry up and change the goal of the talks. They should deal with what the parties are prepared to implement, and not with what they are forced to do as a result of American pressure: open negotiations on a partial and temporary agreement.”

Abbas: The Palestinian leader may be willing to engage Israel and is facing international pressure to do so, but some are concerned that he lacks the political clout after losing the Gaza Strip to Hamas Islamists.

But it’s not only Israelis viewing the talks with “dread”. In an op-ed for The Guardian, Palestinian activist Ghada Karmi lamented, “There is a real danger that the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks due to starton September 2 in Washington could yield a botched deal that falls far short of the needs of international law or elemental justice, and sets back the cause of Palestine for decades, if not for ever. Fortunately this will not happen as long as Israel’s obduracy can be relied on to save the Palestinians from such an outcome.” Karmi argued that the agreement currently on the table is in no way just to Palestine: “The aim is a two-state settlement, which will supposedly end the conflict. The parameters are familiar from past (and, failed) peace proposals, and grossly unfair to the Palestinians.”

Not everyone is quite as pessimistic. In his column this week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, while conceding that the Middle East peace talks are “Mission Impossible”, noted, “President Obama deserves credit for helping to nurture these opportunities.” Even so, he added, “But he, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and the newly elected leaders of Iraq need to now raise their games to a whole new level to seize this moment — or their opponents will. Precisely because so much is at stake, the forces of intolerance, extreme nationalism and religious obscurantism all over the Middle East will be going all out to make sure that both the Israeli and Iraqi peace processes fail.”