Mediating in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute has been the touchstone of foreign-policy success for every American leader since Jimmy Carter brought Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin together at Camp David in 1978.

But after the Palestinian Authority was set up in 1994, the challenge for Washington has become increasingly formidable, although logically progress should have been faster. Now US President Barack Obama is trying his hand at bringing peace to the strife-torn Middle East. His only success so far has been to get Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to attend a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the UN Assembly’s annual session in New York.

President Obama had hoped that there would be an agreement to restart the final status negotiations but success has eluded him — no surprise, given Israel’s intransigence. By refusing to announce a freeze on the construction of new settlements in the West Bank — a key confidence-building measure — Israel has sent a clear signal to the Palestinians and the Americans that it is not willing to negotiate a change in the status of the Arab territories that it has occupied. This is
disheartening for Mr Obama who has been insisting on a freeze for some months now.

President Obama is seeking to bring the two sides to the negotiating table in the hope that the issue of the settlement freeze would be discussed. The American leader plans to keep up the pressure on both sides through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Middle East special envoy George Mitchell. But it is difficult to be optimistic under the circumstances, especially if it is kept in mind that freezing settlement activities would be relatively easier to accomplish than the other daunting items on the agenda such as the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the borders of a future Palestinian state.

These have greater implications for Israel’s future than the settlement freeze which is a political issue that Mr Netanyahu is exploiting in order to win the support of the rightwing fundamentalist parties.