Q. Last week you discussed the problematic nature of both the Israeli settlement freeze and the parallel Arab gestures to Israel that the Obama administration is trying to elicit. Can you expand as to where you believe we stand on the broader Obama plan for the Middle East?

A. There is a good chance that the coming weeks will produce an American-brokered Israeli-Palestinian meeting to re-launch negotiations and also open US-Iranian diplomatic negotiations for the first time in 30 years. These are two key aspects of the administration's new approach to the region where it will be able to cite at least procedural progress.

Indeed, across the greater Middle East, a lot is happening at American instigation. Yet, following the map from east to west, the overall impression is that it is too early at this stage to judge the extent to which administration-initiated changes constitute concrete movement in the right direction.

In Afghanistan, the American and allied buildup is far from delivering a major defeat to the Taliban; even presidential elections there have not gone smoothly. The country's historic record of defeating any and all invaders hangs like a dark cloud over the US drive to attain a decisive victory. With the situation in Pakistan almost as problematic, the fundamental goal of eliminating the Islamist terrorist base that launched 9/11 remains distant, while public opinion in the US and its NATO allies is increasingly questioning the war's rationale.

Iran, as noted, has agreed to talks. But its readiness to put its nuclear program on the table is not at all clear, while the Iranian domestic political situation appears to mitigate against compromise.

In Iraq, the US withdrawal proceeds apace. But the domestic political situation America leaves behind is far from tranquil, with the Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish communities at loggerheads over a host of issues and Iran, in particular, vying to expand its influence. When the US sits down to talk with Iran, stability in Iraq has to be high on the agenda alongside nuclear issues.

Washington is also making a concerted effort to stabilize the Iraqi-Syrian border as a means of reducing jihadist infiltration into Iraq. This is a by-product of the rapport the US is trying to develop with Syria regarding a host of regional issues, including Lebanon and the renewal of Syrian-Israeli peace talks. Despite Iraqi accusations to the contrary, Syrian-based Iraqi Baath party activists apparently were not involved in the horrendous Baghdad car-bombings a few weeks ago. Infiltration from Syria into Iraq has been radically reduced, though not eliminated. Still, US officials are reluctant as yet to reward Damascus by recommending renewed Syria-Israel peace talks.

That leaves Israel and Palestine. A ceremony at the upcoming UN General Assembly to inaugurate renewed negotiations for a two-state solution is at this point probable but not definite. There are still settlement freeze issues on the Israel-US agenda, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has to be persuaded to join the talks despite his reservations over the depth of PM Binyamin Netanyahu's commitment to the freeze. Abbas understandably fears his public image will suffer if he is perceived to have acquiesced in anything less than a genuine freeze.

Nor is the extent of Arab confidence-building gestures yet certain. An indication of the infighting among moderate Arab leaders over this issue was provided by a recent New York Times op-ed by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal arguing vehemently against US requests for concessions to Israel at this juncture.

Finally, beyond the general sense that renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations should concentrate initially on territory and leave aside the thornier "existential" issues such as refugees and the Jerusalem holy places, the American Middle East policy team is apparently not yet looking far beyond this hard-won achievement to ask the next set of questions: how willing will Netanyahu and Abbas be to make concessions, and how will both survive politically if and when they do make concessions? The administration has persuaded Netanyahu that it in no way seeks his downfall--only a two-state solution. But, like its predecessors, it has no magic formula for neutralizing the toxic interaction between Israeli politics and an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Q. The New York Times carried a long article about the West Bank settlers that argued that by and large they would not use force to oppose being evacuated to make room for a Palestinian state. Will removing, say, 80,000 settlers from the West Bank heartland be that simple?

A. I don't think so. I agree that the vast majority of settlers, including the ideological settlers who live in the West Bank heartland and who will definitely have to move to make room for a Palestinian state, will not use their plentiful weapons against soldiers and police who come to remove them. But out of, say, 80,000 settlers whose homes are on the line, a few thousand are extreme enough and anarchistic enough in their attitude toward the state and its instruments of power to consider using force. The "modest" version of this sort of resistance is the stones, buckets of acrid liquid and attacks on police vehicles and even police horses that we saw in Gaza in 2005 and, a year later, at the Amona outpost in the West Bank. But some of the young outpost dwellers are undoubtedly capable of worse.

Still, this is not the most serious aspect of prospective settler resistance. Multiply the 8,000 removed from the Gaza Strip by a factor of ten, recognize that a majority of the West Bank heartland 80,000 will resist in some way, if only passively, and then ask whether the state of Israel is able from both a logistic and a public standpoint to field a large enough security force to remove the passive resisters, let alone the active ones. (A minority of settlers who are not ideologically motivated and live in low-cost urban settlements in the Arab heartland like Kiryat Arba, would leave in return for financial compensation.) In Gaza, most of the "dirty work" was left to the relatively small Israel Police and Border Patrol, which have not been infiltrated to any serious extent by settlers and other religious Jews whose primary allegiance is to the messianic settlement vision. But this is not the case in the IDF, where a recent survey showed that as many as one third of serving personnel would refuse orders to evacuate settlers.

When that large a proportion of the army either threatens to refuse orders or looks for other reasons to be excused from "settler duty", and when any discussion at the command level regarding tactics and timing of the dismantling of an outpost is instantly leaked to the extremist settlers so they can rally their own forces in opposition, the response of the IDF is to look for ways to avoid settlement-related tasks lest it suffer serious damage at the level of internal morale and cohesion. The post-Gaza performance of the IDF military justice apparatus and Israel's civilian judicial system in dealing with those who disobeyed orders or used force to stop the withdrawal four years ago has made matters worse by preferring compassion over deterrence in judging them. Even youth who attacked soldiers in Gaza have--in the name of national unity--been permitted to join the army when they reached conscription age.

The IDF's solution is to point to the paramilitary Border Patrol with its largely career (rather than conscript) cohorts and 16 reserve companies, all made up to a large extent of Druze and non-religious Jews, as the ideal force for settler removal. The Border Patrol is conceived as half IDF and half Israel Police and its forces train in crowd control and other skills that soldiers usually don't learn and certainly don't like to learn or practice. This makes sense. But even the Border Patrol might not suffice to remove 80,000 settlers, some of whom would turn to violence in view of the levels of emotion and hatred likely to be unleashed by a large-scale settler removal from the West Bank.

Nor is the notion of settlers remaining behind to live inside a Palestinian state a viable idea. Even those very few settlers who today speak approvingly of this idea back off when reminded that they would quite naturally have to live under Palestinian law, open their settlements to their Palestinian neighbors, accept protection by the Palestinian police and forego any settler dwellings built on land taken illegally from private Palestinian owners. More likely, a handful of extremist settlers might insist on staying behind as a provocation, in order to try to ignite Jewish-Arab warfare inside Palestine. Certainly, Jewish-Arab bloodshed would result if Israel elected to leave behind obstinate settlers.

Still, the problem is not insurmountable. One way to deal with it is piecemeal, turning sector after sector over to the nascent Palestinian state, thereby reducing the number of settlers to be evacuated at any given time. Once this process begins, some remaining hardliners might succumb to heavy financial inducements.

Finally, there remains the option of an international force. Such a force is usually discussed in the context of a two-state solution as a means of providing support for Palestinian law-enforcement, patrolling demilitarized areas, manning border stations and generally reassuring Israelis that territories they withdraw from won't be used to launch aggression. But its services could also conceivably be invoked for assisting in the dismantling of settlements and escorting settlers back to sovereign Israeli territory.

All those Israelis, Palestinians and third parties involved in the upcoming negotiations--which we are told will deal first with borders and territory, meaning the fate of settlements--might wish to keep this in mind.