As the Israeli and Palestinian delegations sit down to dinner this evening in the ornate splendour of the eighth floor of the State Department there will be a sense of déjà-vu all over again.

For just as the impressive dining rooms of the State Department are disguised in an otherwise ugly 1940s concrete building, so many observers will in for be for a pleasant surprise. Defying high expectations to provide Palestinians with the dignity of statehood, or Israelis with security and safety, is not going to be a challenge facing this latest diplomatic effort.

Indeed, simply keeping the parties talking for longer than the short few weeks that the last abortive attempt managed in September 2010 will be seen by some as success. And that was before the tumult of the Arab Spring, including the chaos in Egypt and carnage in Syria.

For US secretary of state John Kerry, success will mean resolving the core paradox between the negotiating room and the facts on the ground, keeping the process secret, and managing to keep the parties talking when the inevitable bumps in the road occur.

To do this he will be drawing on the experience of a former US ambassador and a former British prime minister who have experience from the most difficult of political negotiations in both the Middle East and Northern Ireland.

For reasons of history and politics, the US will always be the lead on the political negotiations and that is no different this time around, with Kerry tapping well-respected President Clinton-era diplomat and Middle East expert Martin Indyk to spend the long hours in the room with the parties.

The talks will start with procedural issues such as format and frequency, before hopefully moving on to the core issues. These initial rounds will be conducted with the negotiating teams of justice minister and talks veteran from the Olmert era Tzipi Livni plus Netanyahu confidant and lawyer Isaac Molcho for the Israelis. The Palestinian team will consist of veteran negotiator Saeb Erekat and Abbas aide Mohameed Shtayyeh.

This groundwork is important, as are goodwill gestures such as the Israeli government’s decision to release a number of Palestinian prisoners and making changes to their operations in the West Bank and Gaza as the Quartet of the United States, United Nations, Russia and the European Union has repeatedly called for.

Over the last six years, Tony Blair as Quartet representative has worked on preparing the Palestinians for statehood. That is, building capacity, reforming the security forces and driving economic development. This is an essential part of the jigsaw and has been a historical stumbling block in providing confidence to the Israelis that a Palestinian state can thrive.

Progress has been made here. Improvements such as movement and access within the West Bank; driving economic development in Jenin by opening the area up to Israeli Arabs; changing of Israel’s closure regime on Gaza; and enabling large-scale Palestinian investments in the ICT and housing sectors and facilitating the installation of a container scanner at Allenby to increase trade.

But Blair would be the first to say that these changes need to go further and faster, and the reality is that it is very tough to get transformative change to the Palestinian economy going without a political negotiation. That’s why today’s resumption of talks matters.

Kerry cannot be faulted for the personal vigour with which he has pursued this issue since taking office in January, working closely with Tony Blair. From Washington to Rome to Jerusalem, the two have repeatedly debated, discussed and decided how the old challenge of matching the aspirations of the negotiating room with the reality on the ground can be matched.

Based on this collaboration and shared understanding of how the issues will be solved, John Kerry recently stressed how important the economic piece would be in terms of finding a lasting and sustainable solution. Kerry has been a key advocate of Blair’s plan to ‘to develop a healthy, sustainable, private sector-led Palestinian economy that will transform the fortunes of a future Palestinian state’ in support of the negotiations.

Kerry spoke in Jordan this May about the importance he put on the former British prime minister’s work, saying ‘there is no question whatsoever that the powerful combination of investment in business and investment in peace.’

Although the essential parameters of a deal with regards to borders, security, refugees and Jerusalem are well known, success will come down to carefully crafted language that, for example, means land swaps for one side show a commitment to the 1967 lines and for the other side recognises the reality on the ground, viz settlements.

So what reason is there to believe this time may be different? The millions of Israelis and Palestinians, who would be the principal beneficiaries of any deal and who remain committed to a two-state solution but have lost faith in their political leaders, will not be sitting by the television waiting for a breaking news whoosh to indicate a deal.

That is no bad thing. Low-key talks, with the different parties not testing their ideas in the media, may well frustrate the media and those from the international community not in the room, but could probably be the best way to ensure the full potential of two viable states is realised.

Today’s meeting is therefore a welcome start. Only when we see the talks happening at a leadership level between prime minister Netanyahu and President Abbas should we start to think this isn’t just another episode in a long-running serial with a plot we’re all too familiar with.

But in the meantime we should neither allow the cynicism of past failed attempts nor the weight of expectation to derail what will always be a very delicate starting point.

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Matthew Doyle was an adviser to Tony Blair, including in his role as Quartet Representative, from 2005-12

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Photo: State Department/Public domain