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POLITICO: Why Israelis and Palestinians will meet:
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27347.html#ixzz0RdFwJ7Ns.A day after U.S. special envoy George Mitchell left Israel with no deal on a resumption of peace talks in the region, the White House announced Saturday that President Barack Obama will meet Tuesday in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. That meeting will be immediately preceded by separate meetings between Obama and each leader, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement.
The announcement changed the Mideast headline from “stalemate” to “breakthrough” as the Obama administration enters a week in which foreign policy takes center stage, with the president appearing at both the opening of the United Nations General Assembly and the G20 economic meetings in Pittsburgh.
But all parties say it's unlikely the Tuesday meeting will be accompanied by a long-sought announcement on the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. That requires still more negotiations.
It's a meeting that seems to have come about in large part because of pressure on all sides to talk, as well as concerns about who would get blamed if they didn't — Netanyahu for resisting U.S. demands to halt settlement activity, Abbas for refusing to come if settlement activity hadn't ceased, Arab governments for stalling on good will gestures to Israel until it achieved peace with the Palestinians, or Obama for pushing preconditions for talks that he couldn't get the parties to agree to.
"It seems like a good move for all three parties to hold this meeting, although I doubt they'll be a lot of substance in the trilateral meeting," says the American Task Force for Palestine's Hussein Ibish. ....
"Obviously, if there had been no meeting after Obama had called for it, the president would've been embarrassed. ..."
Abbas and Netanyahu had their own reasons for wanting the meeting to proceed. "The Palestinians simply cannot afford to do anything other than support Obama, especially since he is carrying the settlement freeze issue forward as far as it can go with the Israelis through Mitchell." ...
For their part, the American negotiators have kept their cards close to their chest. The White House and State Department have held back from describing the substantive disagreements that still have yet to be bridged. ...
Israeli officials indicated that Netanyahu was prepared to attend the three-way meeting with Obama and Abbas – his first apparent meeting with the Palestinian, one official said – but were still somewhat skeptical of the whole thing and are resisting announcing the resumption of peace talks at the meeting. Netanyahu “is not necessarily unhappy but we would prefer to get this behind us and focus on the real thing- Iran,” one Israeli official said on condition of anonymity. ...
Also want to draw attention to this interesting debate within the Obama administration:
One reason the Obama administration hasn’t yet shared its thinking on the process for how to proceed on peace negotiations, sources say, is because of continued discussions within the administration over how they should be sequenced.
“Very roughly, [the State Department] continues to focus on Mitchell who continues to focus on the settlements and wants to nail down that issue before moving on,” one Washington Middle East hand said on condition of anonymity. While National Security Council Middle East strategist Dennis “Ross at the White House and others want to get out of the settlement issue as soon as possible and move quickly into permanent status talks ASAP.
"I think State and Mitchell will in fact have a role in structuring the talks, but I think the initiative is coming out of NSC and the White House, partly as a bureaucratic maneuver and partly because they genuinely want to get away from the settlements issue that they feel was a mistake and the trap, and actually a quagmire, and get into permanent status talks where they can try to achieve some kind of time horizon at the very least.”