During seven hours of meetings in New York on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to unblock the negotiations although Clinton aides said the talks were productive.

"We're trying to create the conditions for the negotiations to resume. That is what (Thursday's) meetings were about and that is what our activities going forward are focused on," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said Friday.

Crowley said President Barack Obama's administration would follow up on Thursday's talks but did not immediately say how it would do so.

Direct negotiations broke down weeks after their launch in Washington on September 2 when an Israeli moratorium on new settlement construction in the West Bank expired on September 26.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas has refused to return to the table until the moratorium is reimposed.

In Jerusalem, sources said late Saturday the Israeli cabinet is set to discuss Sunday whether to impose a new settlement freeze in the occupied West Bank for 90 days in return for US security measures.

However, the freeze would not include building in East Jerusalem.

"They (the Obama administration) have certainly run into a roadblock with the way that they're proceeding," Nathan Brown, a Middle East specialist at The George Washington University, told AFP on Friday.

"They had a real strong emphasis just on getting direct bilateral negotiations started between Netanyahu and Abu Mazen (Mahmud Abbas) and got those briefly and now that prospect seems to be receding," Brown told AFP.

"And the emphasis right now seems just to be on trying to revive those," he added.

The Obama administration gave no details of Thursday's talks but Brown assumed that Clinton tried to come away with some kind of formula for a settlement freeze that would allow Abbas to return to the negotiations.

But he added: "It's not clear to me that even if they do get the two sides to the negotiating table, they are anywhere close to an agreement."

One problem is that Abbas could not implement a peace agreement, even if he got one, because the Palestinians remain divided, he said.

Another, he said, is that Netanyahu's right-wing coalition government would reject an Obama-backed deal that calls for the creation of a Palestinian state more or less along the boundaries that existed before the 1967 war.

"Whether (such a deal) is acceptable to Netanyahu and whether he could assemble a new government that would support it is not clear," Brown said.

A coalition with the centrist Kadima party would be a possible move, Brown and other analysts say.

Marina Ottaway, head of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said it appeared Netanyahu did not want to budge on settlements for fear of breaking up his coalition.

She could not exclude the possibility, however, that Netanyahu's hard line on settlements may be a ploy to win increased military aid and other US concessions as the price for risking the collapse of his coalition.

If Netanyahu is serious about preserving his right-wing coalition, she said, then the White House may contemplate putting on the table its own proposal to end the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"What the proposal could do is to narrow down the scope of negotiations to something very specific and very concrete. That could be a game-changer in that sense," Ottaway said.

"Is Obama willing to do it at this point?" she asked.

Aaron David Miller, a former US Middle East peace negotiator who is now with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been critical of the Obama administration's Middle East diplomacy from the start.

He said the administration has used up too much energy on settlements rather than on resolving the core issues of Israel's security, borders of a future Palestinian state, the status of Palestinian refugees and the future of Jerusalem, which both sides claim as their capital.

"It's a tricky situation, but it's not as if we're on the verge of a major break. We're at the beginning of a process that is going to be a very prolonged, messy, excruciating and painful one," he said.

"It's been an enormous waste of energy and time," he added.

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News