US President Barack Obama hit the mark when he acknowledged that the Middle East peace process has not moved forward; that “we overestimated our ability to persuade” the Palestinians and Israelis “to start engaging in a meaningful conversation;” and that “what we did this year didn’t produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted.” But in the Time magazine interview marking the first anniversary of his inauguration, Obama’s next comment was odd: “If we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.”

The Palestinian-Israeli problem is over 60 years old, has been impervious to numerous peace initiatives, has withstood multiple changes of leaderships, and Obama was somehow caught off guard?

At the UN General Assembly last September, Obama felt it necessary to tell his audience that he was not naive about how hard it would be to make peace in the Middle East. But perhaps he was. His speech in Cairo in June, aimed at Muslims around the world, for a while induced a state of near euphoria among observers who had been fierce critics of the foreign policy of President George W. Bush. He repeated his support for Palestinian aspirations for freedom. And he repeated that America “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

Both Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated unequivocally at the time that Israel should stop building settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The reality with which Obama and Clinton are grappling, though, is that Israel continues to expand its settlements. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given every indication that he is in no mood to stop the outposts. This is bad. What is worse is that the Obama administration is yet to give any indication that it can or would make him stop. A settlement freeze, we are now told by Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell, was never an American precondition for talks between Israel and Palestinians.

Because of this unprecedented comedown, one completely rejected by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, several months could produce only a brief, cold public handshake at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan between Abbas and Netanyahu.

Obama obviously misread the scale of the difficulties. He admirably plunged into the Middle East faster than any of his predecessors and certainly, no reasonable person should have expected a solution in his first year. But Obama opened his push for peace with calls for a complete halt on Israeli settlement building in the West Bank without anticipating that Israel would not deliver. The result is Abbas’ recent, blunt rejection of the latest Mitchell shuttle to resume peace talks without an Israeli settlement freeze.

The Middle East, as Obama told Time, is “as intractable a problem as you get.” Never were there truer words but Obama overestimated the problem as well as himself. He is good at making speeches but his fine words have not been translated into concrete action.

The belief is that Obama remains committed to trying to broker a Mideast deal but it’s unclear what he could try next. One thing is sure: These are serious times. It’s not the time for rhetorical flights of fancy. Obama has suffered because of the expectations his own words have aroused.

RIYADH: The Council of Ministers on Monday denounced the Israeli move to construct more Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying it would obstruct efforts to restart the Middle East peace process.

The Cabinet meeting, chaired by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, commended the European stand, which rejects Israel’s illegitimate settlement policy.

The European Union has urged Israel to reconsider plans to build new apartments in East Jerusalem. The EU said it was illegal under international law to construct further settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

During the Cabinet meeting, King Abdullah briefed the ministers on the outcome of his talks with King Abdallah of Jordan, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Sudanese President Omar Bashir, adding that they focused on strengthening Arab unity.

He said Arab leaders had identical views on major issues in the region. He emphasized the need to intensify efforts to reach a just and comprehensive Middle East peace settlement and set up an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

Culture and Information Minister Abdul Aziz Khoja said the Cabinet meeting made a number of important decisions. It decided to keep the Saudization rate for the contracting sector at 5 percent for another two years. The meeting also approved Saudi Arabia’s coastlines on the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf.

Is it any wonder that the Palestinians are insisting on a full settlement freeze before renewing peace efforts?

The latest Palestinian stand has put a damper on a recent US call to revive talks with no preconditions, but what should Washington or anyone else have expected? If the Obama administration is unable to force Israel to freeze Jewish settlement building, it will be foolhardy and naïve to expect the US, whose Congress is tightly controlled by the American Israel lobby, to give up the spoils of the 1967 war and allow for the creation of a genuine and viable Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

The new US plan, as broached by State Secretary Hillary Clinton, says that first agreeing on the borders of a future Palestinian state would help solve the problem of settlement building. Her call for a viable Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines is a crucial starting point for the Palestinians. But the caveat that a future state should reflect subsequent developments means that some Israeli settlements on occupied land will remain.

Round One of the Obama’s administration’s push for peace in the Middle East didn’t work. What about Round Two, as announced by Clinton? Changes in the new administration’s Middle East policies in 2009 were so slight as to be indistinguishable from those of Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush.

Like all US presidents, Obama promised to seek a just and lasting peace. Unlike others he evinced empathy with the Palestinian cause. His opening gambit seemed good: A freeze on all Jewish settlement in the occupied territories to resuscitate a comatose peace process. Obama was right to focus on settlements, but the climb-down was inexplicable after Washington came up with no Plan B when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused.

Last year, all the parties got bogged down in the details of a settlement freeze. This time the endgame remains the same but the starting point has changed. Washington is now pushing the parties to go straight to talks about anything save the settlements. Many Palestinians refuse to give the latest ideas from Washington the benefit of the doubt. How can they when Netanyahu says every morning that settlement expansion will continue?

It is imperative to find a way around the impasse and get the talks started. Security, refugees, water, evictions, demolitions and the siege of Gaza are all elements that must be tackled, and the US is saying they should be addressed first. The US is formulating an offer to the PA whereby the Obama administration will see to it that a territorially contiguous Palestinian state would see the light within two years. But in the absence of credible guarantees clearly defining the endgame by the end of the period, the Palestinians might reach a situation where there would be nothing left to negotiation as Jewish settlement expansion devours whatever was left intact of the West Bank, especially East Jerusalem.

Instead of a settlement freeze, Obama appears to be pressing a two-year time frame for negotiations that will allow Netanyahu to colonize what remains of East Jerusalem and the West Bank according to his map. Justice to Palestinians and international legitimacy should be the guiding principles in this respect and Arab Peace Initiative meet those conditions admirably well.

Israel says it is about to initiate a major “strategic” shift in its battle with the Palestinians. It has conducted a successful test of a short-range rocket interceptor that will now be rolled out along its border with Gaza in the coming six months. The “Iron Dome” system will, it is said, defend against rockets fired by militant Palestinians into Israel and also against mortar rounds. At a later date, the rocket shield will be deployed along the border with Lebanon.

There was, of course, nothing “strategic” about the Hamas rocket bombardments. These primitive missiles, completely lacking guidance systems, were fired off into Israel with little idea of where they would land. That they sometimes caused civilian casualties was, according to the UN Goldstone inquiry into the three-week 2008 Gaza bombardment, a war crime, equal in principle but certainly not in effect to Israel’s ruthless destruction among the helpless, crammed in Palestinian population. The Qassam, Grad, Oghab and Fajr-3/Ra’ad rocket attacks were hardly strategic but rather a forlorn, desperate and largely ineffective tactic. That they caused even a few civilian casualties was always indefensible. Worse, they were used by the Israelis to justify ruthless and extensive butchery in response. Some 1,400 Palestinians, including 412 children were slain, against 13 Israelis.

For Israel, however, the Iron Dome system clearly represents a change of strategic balance in the same way that the Russians believe that the US missile shield affects the global balance of nuclear weaponry. Together with its existing long-range missile interceptors and its planned shield against medium-range missiles, Israel will soon apparently have cover against rocket assault from anywhere in the Middle East. Moscow fears that the proposed US missile shield will allow Washington to launch a strategic atomic strike and then defend itself against retaliation. Precisely the same analysis must be applied to Israel with its undeclared and illegal nuclear arsenal.

The long-standing bleat of Zionist propaganda about the “helpless little Israel” is on the threshold of being exploded. Israel is about to be seen as far from defenseless. Indeed, with the deployment of Iron Dome the story has changed for all the world to see. Hamas hotheads can, of course, be expected to challenge the new technology. But if the shield works, even against multiple salvoes of rocketry, the maximum range of which is just 28 miles, the only point in Hamas continuing to launch missiles will be to force the Israeli military to use up its expensive new technology.

Iron Dome, however, brings another important change, about which the Israelis have no doubt agonized. It is that if Hamas and indeed Hezbollah rocket attacks can be interdicted and therefore cease, the Israeli military has robbed itself of its standing excuse to assault the captive population within the occupied territories or try and drive again into southern Lebanon. In Gaza especially, any future ground incursion, bombardment or aerial attack will now be seen for what it really is, cold-blooded murder and oppression among a captive and oppressed population.