Mitchell flew into Israel on Saturday night and met with Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, for 90 minutes. He saw Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, today and will meet Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas tomorrow.
Mitchell's team will handle the talks, while Biden's visit is reportedly focused on trying to win Israeli support for the US administration's policy on Iran and on discouraging Israel from any military action against the Iranian regime over its nuclear ambitions.
Abbas won the support of the Arab League and today the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to go ahead with the talks. Yet they represent a partial climbdown for the Palestinian leader, who for a year has insisted there will be no talks with Israel without a full halt to the construction of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. However, construction continues, with Israel offering only a limited, temporary halt that expires in a few months.
In a speech on Saturday in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, Abbas warned the peace process had "almost reached a dead end. The Israeli government continues to procrastinate to gain time and strengthen its control of the occupied territories to prevent any realistic possibility of establishing an independent, viable … state of Palestine," he said.
The Palestinian leadership wants an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem. However, Netanyahu says he will not give up East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 war, occupied and later annexed ‑ a move not recognised by the international community. He also insists on holding on to large Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank and says Israel must maintain a key presence in the Jordan valley, along the border with Jordan.
Some Israeli commentators were doubtful about the new diplomacy and said the gap between Israeli and Palestinian leaders was too wide to bridge. "If the talks are held in the planned indirect format, they are not going to lead anywhere," wrote Shimon Shiffer, a columnist in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. "They are going to lead neither to increased trust between the leaders nor to final status arrangement talks in the near future."
The diplomacy comes at a time of heightened tension. There have been several days of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at the Haram al-Sharif, or the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Old City. There has been criticism of an Israeli announcement about more houses planned inside East Jerusalem settlements and on Friday a 14-year-old Palestinian boy was critically injured when he was shot in the head with an Israeli rubber-coated bullet during a demonstration in Nabi Saleh, in the West Bank, against Israeli confiscation of village land.
In Jerusalem on Saturday night, more than 2,000 Israelis and Palestinians held a protest against the eviction of Palestinian refugees and the growing presence of rightwing Jewish settlers.