TORONTO — The new U.S. government headed by President Barack Obama should pursue peace in the Middle East on a realistic basis, says former American ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, left.

In a teleconference with journalists last week, he suggested that previous U.S. diplomatic efforts to achieve a rapprochement between Israel and the Palestinians were simply too ambitious.

The interview was sponsored by the Israel Project, a non-profit organization devoted to educating the public about Israel.

Indyk, a two-term ambassador to Israel during the years of the Oslo peace process and the Clinton administration, described Obama’s appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East as an unmistakable signal that he intends to try to defuse the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But in a warning, he said that the Obama administration should lower its sights by not aiming for unrealistic “transformational” objectives.

Indyk – the author of a newly published book, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East – noted that the prospects for a Mideast breakthrough are presently slim.

“The landscape out there is pretty bleak,” he observed, comparing the current situation to the more hopeful Oslo era. “The circumstances are different today.”

The Palestinians are split into seemingly irreconcilable Fatah and Hamas camps, while Israel’s recent general election virtually split the country in half politically speaking.

As a result, Indyk said, hopes for a two-state solution are “fast evaporating,” with both Israelis and Palestinians no longer believing that a peace agreement is necessarily possible.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration should not sit idly by. “We need to push on,” he declared. “We have to try to generate a positive dynamic to change the landscape.”

He added that Israel’s future can only be guaranteed by real peace and security.

For Israel and the Palestinians to succeed in peace talks, there must be national unity on both sides, said Indyk, who is currently director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute.

A narrow right-wing government in Israel will be unstable and thus hard-pressed to move forward in negotiating  peace, he said.

Still, the leader of the right-wing Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be careful not to antagonize the United States should he form Israel’s next government. As a sop to Washington, Netanyahu will probably ease conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank.  

More likely, he will try to resume peace talks with Syria, which were broken off nine years ago, renewed last year through Turkey’s mediation and then suspended yet again.

Indyk said he’s not sure whether Syria will ever accede to Israel’s demand to sever ties with its allies, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.

But he expressed certainty that Syria will not resume talks with Israel unless there is progress on the Palestinian front.

He urged the United States to lay the groundwork for Israeli-Syrian talks by engaging Syria.

In a critique of the previous Bush administration, Indyk said that its attempts to isolate Syria were unsustainable and “did not make a lot of sense.”

Indyk said that a recent Arab League peace initiative should be considered by Israel because it represents “an important shift” in Arab attitudes toward the Jewish state after the “three nos” of the 1967 Khartoum Arab summit.

Calling the Arab League initiative “a 23-state solution,” he said that Israel would be making peace with all the member states of the Arab group if it accepted its proposals.

Returning to the Palestinian question, Indyk warned the United States not to  deal directly with Hamas. Such contacts will undermine its moderate rival, Fatah, enable Hamas to claim a huge victory and “finish off” Palestinians who wish to make peace with Israel.

As an alternative to U.S.-Hamas talks, he said it would be far more appropriate for Arab states to engage Hamas so that it accepts Fatah’s authority and its role as a negotiator with Israel.

Indyk declined to say whether Israel should negotiate with Hamas. But he pointed out that the Israeli government already has de facto relations with Hamas by virtue of Egypt’s current efforts to forge another truce.

He said that Israel would be justified to keep the Gaza Strip’s border crossings closed if Hamas continues to smuggle weapons through tunnels and fires rockets at Israeli communities.  

Striking a gloomy note about Iran’s nuclear program, Indyk said, “It’s hard to believe that [Iran’s] program, at a minimum, will be suspended. I’m not optimistic.”

Due to these and other reasons, he said, the United States should engage Iran in direct talks.