WASHINGTON AND NEW YORK — President Obama, exasperated by the disappointing course of Mideast peace efforts, urged Israelis and Palestinians on Tuesday to reapply themselves, even though eight months of intensive American engagement has failed to return the parties to the negotiating table.
Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at a New York hotel ahead of a United Nations session, stepping personally into the process and offering an unusually blunt message.
"Simply put, it is past time to stop talking about starting negotiations, and time to move forward," Obama said beforehand.
Coming a day before Obama's scheduled address to world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly, a successful first set of Mideast talks would have set a positive tone for a speech that is expected to focus on international cooperation.
But after the three-way meeting, U.S. envoy George J. Mitchell acknowledged that Obama's presence had not helped the Israelis and Palestinians bridge major issues, and others described the outcome as lackluster.
"We knew this wasn't going to be easy," said Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader who returned empty-handed last week from the latest of a long series of trips to the region.
In an effort to breathe vitality into the process, Obama announced that a new round of preliminary talks would take place in Washington, signaling how much his administration has riding on the effort.
"We cannot continue this same pattern of taking tentative steps forward and then stepping back," Obama said. "It is absolutely critical that we get this issue resolved."
Obama provoked a wide reaction before Tuesday's meeting by using language that appeared to ease a long-standing administration demand that Israel halt the expansion of Jewish settlements on land Palestinians claim for a future state. Instead, Obama called on Israelis simply to "restrain" growth in the West Bank.
Administration officials insisted later that the U.S. position on Jewish settlements had not changed. But the shift in language was widely interpreted by Palestinians and Israelis as a sign the Obama administration was jettisoning a U.S. stance that had alienated many Israelis and their U.S. supporters.
Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority prime minister, speaking of the altered wording, said, "It will be a problem not only from the point of view of the Palestinians, but from the point of view of the international community."
