By Liu Zhongmin   

The Palestine-Israel issue is back on the agenda of the international community against the background of the US changing its Middle East policy.

President Barack Obama's speech at Cairo University on June 4 and Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu's foreign policy speech on June 14 have drawn worldwide attention.

Apart from Netanyahu, Obama also met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmet Gheit. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for the coexistence of Palestine and Israel on the basis of a "two-state solution".

These developments suggest that the Middle East peace talks might resume after being suspended for a long time.

However, Palestine and Israel are still facing a series of challenges to peace in the Middle East. The outlook for settlement of the Palestinian issue does not appear bright.

First, the strategic dominance of the US in the Middle East has been shaken. The US dominated the Middle East peace process during Bill Clinton's administration, when there were major breakthroughs.

But the peace process was almost marginalized after George W. Bush made anti-terrorism the top priority of Washington's Middle East policy.

Now, President Obama has restored promotion of the peace process as the policy priority in the Middle East. But can the US play a role as decisive as it had done in the peace talks between Egypt and Israel, and in the Oslo process between Palestine and Israel?

The global financial crisis has dented US hard power, and the Iraq War has squeezed it of soft power. The strategic dominance and the moral high ground of the US in the Middle East has been battered. In fact, many Middle East countries have cast doubt on American ability to play a key role.

That's why those concerned have adopted a wait-and-watch attitude to Obama's speech at Cairo University, which underscored US willingness to improve its relations with the Islamic world. Washington's Middle East policy has resulted in grave divergence on the "two-state solution" between the US and Israel .

It would be an enormous challenge for Obama to resist the influence of the Jewish lobby and change the rigid strategy that favors Israel. Second, the basis for Palestine and Israel to resume talks remains weak.

In Israel, after the right-wing dominated coalition assumed office, it refused to accept the "two-state solution". It repeatedly asserted the indivisibility of Jerusalem, expanded Jewish settlements, and wanted the Iran nuclear issue to be resolved first. Netanyahu's speech attached stringent conditions to the two-state solution, such as Palestine's demilitarization, reservation of "necessary measures" for Israel's security, and allowing "natural expansion" of Jewish settlements.

Both the Palestinian National Authority and Hamas are firmly against his proposals and the Arab world, too, is dissatisfied. Besides, as Palestinian-Israeli relations nosedived in the late 1990s during Netanyahu's first prime ministerial tenure due to his hawkish policies, the Palestinians may not trust an Israeli government headed by him.

On the Palestinian side, though Fatah and Hamas – with the mediation of Egypt – attended the fourth round of conciliatory talks in Cairo in April, little was accomplished. The two sides have serious disagreements over the goals and the methods for resolving the Palestinian issue, and the future polity of a Palestinian state. How to include Hamas in the peace process and achieve reconciliation within Palestine has become a major bottleneck in the Middle East peace process.

Palestinian-Israeli relations are not cause for optimism either. Distrust, hatred and bitterness have spread among the people in Palestine and Israel. The basic trust necessary for peace negotiations is missing. The situation in the Middle East makes the peace process complex and unpredictable.

Disputes within the Arab world, the struggles between the secularism and the fundamentalism, the religious and sectarian conflicts, the feuds between the Arabs and the Persians – all these are related to the Palestinian issue.

Gilles Kepel, a French scholar on the Middle East, identified three crises linked with each other in the Middle East: the crisis along the east coast of the Mediterranean with Palestinian-Israeli conflicts as the core and including Lebanon and Syria; the crisis around the Gulf combining with the struggle for oil and gas, as well as conflicts between Iran and Arabic countries and Sunni-Shiite disputes; and the crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Before promoting the Middle East peace process, there remain many difficult questions for the US to settle: Whether the US can withdraw its troops from Iraq without causing turbulence; how to deal with Iranian nuclear issue; how to improve relations with Iran and Syria; how to prevent Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran from forming an anti-Israel and anti-US coalition; how to reinforce the anti-terror efforts in Pakistan and avoid large-scale conflict between India and Pakistan etc. Whether Washington can deal with these problems shrewdly and properly will determine the fate of the Middle East peace process.

The author is a professor at the Institute of Middle East Studies, Shanghai International Studies University

(China Daily June 26, 2009)