All parties downbeat ahead of Mideast summit

US President Barack Obama will Tuesday use his diplomatic leverage to get Israeli and Palestinian leaders together in the same room, but the White House has no illusions of an imminent breakthrough.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas for the first time since taking office in March at the three-way encounter, at a time when peace moves are stalled, despite intense US efforts.

Obama will first meet Netanyahu and Abbas separately on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly gathering, before bringing them together in a highly visible sign of his high personal commitment to peace brokering.

Ever since the meetings were announced in a White House statement on Saturday, Obama aides and Israeli and Palestinian officials have taken pains to stress that wide gaps are unlikely to be bridged.

"We have no grand expectations out of one meeting except to continue, as the president talked about from his very first day in office ... the hard work, day-to-day diplomacy, that has to be done to seek a lasting peace," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday.

Israeli government secretary Zvi Herzog was equally downbeat on army radio, saying, "conditions are not ripe for a formal relaunch of negotiations."

A Palestinian official said on condition of anonymity the talks were only taking place because his side didn't want to disappoint the Americans.

"That does not mean a resumption of peace talks."

So, Tuesday's meeting will be less a discussion about the key final status issues including Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the borders of an eventual Palestinian state or the status of Jersualem and Palestinian refugees, and more a bid to bring initial contacts closer.

"The expectations have plunged lower than the Dead Sea" said David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East policy.

Nevertheless, he said that the three-way link-up to break the ice between Netanyahu and Abbas was still worthwhile.

"This is a necessary first step, it's an important first step."

"It makes things possible that were not possible until now," said Makovsky, co-author with Obama's Middle East advisor Dennis Ross of the book "Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East."

Obama, who vowed, unlike ex-president George W. Bush, to engage in the Middle East early in his presidency, had hoped a deal on opening talks would already be sealed after exhaustive diplomacy by peace envoy George Mitchell.

But Mitchell was unable to convince the hawkish Netanyahu government to agree to the complete freeze on settlement expansion that Washington has called for and the Palestinians have demanded as a condition of starting talks.

Arab states have also snubbed Obama's call for concessions, for instance allowing overflights of Israeli commercial aircraft, as a sweetener for Netanyahu's government to contemplate talks with the Palestinians.

Obama, who is facing a flurry of testing problems at home, and a clutch of brewing foreign crises, is taking somewhat of a risk with his fungible political capital by holding the meeting at all.

Some observers, key members of the Bush administration included, argue that the symbolism of the presidency should only be brought to bear when a critical moment is in sight -- not merely as a way of kick-starting talks.

But Obama's aides say that only with consistent, focused US engagement at a high-level will Israelis and Palestinians ever move towards a consistent process of dialogue.

The president's aides argued at the weekend that getting a meeting at the UN was in itself an achievement, considering that it is only eight months since Israel's war in Gaza.

Gibbs added Monday: we're looking to continue to build on progress. I think part of that progress is getting the three parties, including the United States, together."

Critics of the Obama approach will likely argue however that Washington risks falling into a familiar trap in Middle East peace making: stressing "process" -- in this case, getting the two sides together -- rather than tangible results on key issues.