If “the moment is now” to push Mideast peace prospects, as President Barack Obama asserted in Cairo, it may unfold with the administration looking to find a peacemaking role for Syria and exploring possibilities for dealing with Israel's longtime foe, Hamas. Obama raised expectations of progress at a particularly perilous point in the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict. He faces a divided and hawkish Israeli government, a fractured Palestinian governing authority, a stubborn Iranian influence in the region and no obvious way forward to a lasting peace. On Friday the president announced that he was sending his Mideast peace envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell, back to the region to follow up on “a whole host of negotiation points.” The State Department said Mitchell will meet with Israelis, Egyptians, Jordanians and Palestinians next week. He also intends to visit Syria, which would mark the highest-level US visit there since Obama took office in January. Obama has explained his goal – a reinvigorated peace effort – but left unclear how he will get there. “This is a real problem, that the administration has identified a rhetorical policy, one that right now has no legs,” said Aaron David Miller, a foreign policy expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars who served for two decades in the State Department as a senior Mideast policy adviser. Obama has been clear about at least one element of his strategy: forcefully and publicly insisting that Israel needs to live up to a commitment to freezing the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In the short term, Obama faces long odds of getting what he wants from the Israelis. Israeli analyst Gerald Steinberg said it's unlikely that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can make significant concessions. “I'd say during the next couple of months or longer than that, you'll see some very intense negotiations where Obama and Netanyahu try to get a mutually effective vision they can implement,” said Steinberg, head of political science at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv. But while Netanyahu may dismantle some unauthorized West Bank settler outposts and remove some checkpoints, Steinberg said, it would be difficult for him to loosen the embargo on Hamas-ruled Gaza or make other major concessions without the risk of splintering his largely hardline coalition government. In Jerusalem, Israeli officials said Friday that the government plans to allow construction inside existing West Bank settlements to accommodate growing families – in direct defiance of Obama's demand. It's not altogether clear what Obama believes he can achieve by pressing the Israelis on settlements. “Even if the Israelis are at fault – and in this case they are, by continuing to expand settlements – the question is, what is the strategy? What is the overall objective that the president is trying to achieve?” Miller asked. “If he's trying to achieve an agreement, then he has to have an approach to demonstrate how being tough with the Israelis on settlement activity actually gets him to the negotiating table and then to an agreement,” he added. “It may be ... that the president right now doesn't care about reaching an agreement” if he has been advised that he will never get a viable deal as long as Netanyahu is prime minister. At the same time, Obama is forging ahead on Syria, where US relations have been in decline for years. Syria held indirect talks with Israel last year mediated by Turkey. But the discussions were halted during the Israeli offensive on Gaza in December and January. Syria has since said it was ready to resume indirect talks with Israel's new hardline government as long as they focus on a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau captured from Syria in the 1967 war. Syria and ally Iran are strong supporters of Islamist groups like Hamas. One possible motive for Obama's outreach to Syria could be to get the Syrians to pressure Hamas to meet international demands, including that it accept Israel's right to exist. Obama has followed the Bush administration's policy of not talking directly to Hamas, which the US regards as a terrorist organization. But in his remarks in Cairo on Thursday he seemed to suggest some basis for believing that the Islamist movement might be drawn into the peace process. “If they are serious about delivering a Palestinian state, then they should renounce violence, accept the framework provided by the previous agreements, recognize Israel's right to exist,” Obama told reporters in Cairo. “That still leaves enormous room for them to negotiate on a whole host of issues.” Nathan Brown, a professor of political science at George Washington University, said Friday that while Obama's language on Hamas has been similar to that of his predecessor in the White House, his tone is gentler. The approach by former President George W. Bush was to spell out conditions for Hamas to meet and wait for them to respond. “With Obama (in Cairo) it was almost as if he was negotiating with them in public,” Brown said, adding that he believes a focus on Hamas will be among Obama's next moves.
