BEIRUT: US President Barack Obama's high-priority Middle East peace drive has run into predictable quicksands, even as other foreign policy challenges in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan clamour for his attention.
Israel has rebuffed Obama's request for a complete freeze on settlement construction, while Arab states, whose own peace offer has gathered dust since 2002, have brushed off his calls for goodwill gestures toward the Jewish state.
Sceptics point to a rightwing Israeli cabinet more focused on threats from Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas than on making peace with Palestinians mired in rivalry between Islamists ruling the Gaza Strip and their Fatah foes in
the West Bank.
Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave Obama a status report which appeared to confirm widespread doubts inside and outside the region that progress is possible.
"This represents a clear failure by a president who tried to bring about change and, a year on, admits he has failed," Yossi Beilin, an Israeli architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, said.
Washington still hopes to relaunch peace talks that stalled in December if it can forge a deal on their terms of reference.
But Israeli officials say the Americans envisage talks based on decades-old UN Security Council resolutions that each side interprets differently - an unpromising recipe for success.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, with evident distaste, bowed to US pressure to talk of negotiating the creation of a Palestinian state, but only if it is demilitarised and if Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
Palestinians see this demand as prejudicing the claims to return or compensation of refugees displaced in the 1948 war over Israel's creation, and as undermining the status of Israeli Arabs who make up a fifth of its population.
They, and many Arabs, are also aggrieved that Obama now asks only for Israeli restraint on expanding settlements, which are illegal under international law and threaten the viability of any Palestinian state, instead of the freeze he earlier sought.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose credibility has been strained by his own policy zigzags and vulnerability to US pressure, rules out renewed negotiations before an Israeli settlement freeze, as mandated in a 2003 US-backed peace plan.
Conflict
James Dobbins, director of the Centre for International Security and Defence Policy at the RAND Corporation in Washington, said the chances of advancing were slight. "The Israeli government doesn't really want a settlement on the basis that most of the international community could support, let alone the Palestinians," he said. "And the Palestinians, although they might want a settlement on those grounds, probably couldn't carry their population."
Whatever else is preoccupying Obama at home and abroad, he is unlikely to abandon the quest, said James Pickup, a former colleague of the president's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell.
But Obama's diligence and determination may bring that solution no closer, said Rob Malley, the International Crisis Group's Middle East and North Africa Programme Director.
Malley identified an aspect largely ignored in previous talks over borders, settlements, Jerusalem and refugees.
"There is deep down an emotional, political, psychological conflict between Israelis, who feel their right to have a state in what Jews consider their ancestral homeland has never been truly recognised, and Palestin-ians, who sense that all these negotiations are ultimately designed to erase their own history and their own claims that are born out of 1948."
