Gross exaggeration

While it is yet unclear if Abbas will remain true to his word, some believe the construction moratorium debate is grossly exaggerated.

"This issue occupies the headlines as the primary obstacle, but it isn't so in the long term," Gilad Sher, the co-chief negotiator at the Camp David peace summit in 2000, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

"What the current talks are trying to achieve is a meeting aimed towards a profound discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's core issues, Jerusalem, refugees and borders," he said.

Sher, who also served as a delegate to the 1995 Interim Agreement negotiations under the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, said he estimates both sides will devise a formula that "they can live with."

"On the one hand, (this formula) will calm Netanyahu's hard- liners in the government and the settlers' leadership. On the other hand, it will be one which the Palestinian leadership can live with, at least in the initial stages of restarting the talks, " Sher said.

The U.S. president, Sher said, would not have ordered "such a festive commencement" of the peace talks "just to stumble on the first expected obstacle."

Asked whether Netanyahu and Abbas had perhaps already reached a silent agreement on a compromise when they first met in Washington and are now resorting to rhetoric intended to calm domestic pressure, Sher told Xinhua that such a possibility cannot be ruled out.

"Buying time"

Prof. Hillel Frisch, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan's University's Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, holds a radical and refreshing view of the current talks.

He maintains that current peace talks are aimed at enabling both sides to "buy time and provide a sense of progress and stability."

"The Palestinian insistence on a total freeze of construction aims to ensure the future status quo of the two states for two peoples solution," said Frisch, adding "the Palestinians are afraid that until that point is reached, any Israeli expansion in the West Bank will affect the future Palestinian state."

"In addition, achieving a comprehensive construction freeze will give the Palestinian leadership a big boost in its struggle against Hamas," the professor added.

Frisch is careful in predicting how Netanyahu will heed Abbas' demand for extension of the moratorium.

"Prophecy is a fool's game," he said, "but I think Netanyahu will eventually commit to a total construction freeze in small, isolated communities while limiting construction within the large settlement blocs in accordance with natural (population) growth needs."