The Obama administration gets its' indirect peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis which begin in mid May according to Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz.
Indirect talks begin in May
Obama also got some assurances from the Israeli government that there would be no "significant" building in East Jerusalem and he got the government to focus on the actual terms of the peace accord rather than talking for the sake of talking. So while, he didn't get a total freeze in east jerusalem, he got quite a bit, which means that now if the talks encompass all final status issues, the administration will learn Israel's positions on those final status issues. That is IMPORTANT.
Proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinians will start no later than mid-May, officials involved in efforts to renew the peace process said on Saturday.
On Thursday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas received an official invitation to the talks from U.S. President Barack Obama. In the message to Abbas, Obama acknowledged that he was unable to extract a commitment from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to freeze construction in East Jerusalem.
But the president expressed confidence that Israel would refrain from "significant" actions in the eastern part of the city during negotiations. By "significant," Obama appears to mean projects like the 1,600 housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of East Jerusalem that were announced during Vice President Joe Biden's visit last month.
Obama wrote that the proximity talks would encompass all the conflict's core issues including Jerusalem, as was agreed in the Annapolis Joint Declaration in November 2007.
Whether that's enough to get started, I don't know. The Americans seem to believe that if Netanyahu is intransigent in these talks, Labor's going to walk away and that would essentially dissolve Netanyahu's government.
So, some good news to consider and some bad news. I guess the way you look at this is sort of a 1/2 full or 1/2 empty situation.