The limelight this week was on U.S. President Barack Obama who made his debut at the United Nations in New York brokering his first summit of Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Tuesday and delivering his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. (Read more here.)

Reviews of his performance are in from the Middle East and they are not in the main favorable.

The first round of reviews analyzing the three-way summit, noted Obama’s usage of “restraint” over “freeze” – withdrawal of a demand for a full stop on West Bank settlement expansion. They maintained a pessimistic attitude towards the U.S. president, questioning his ability to revive peace negotiations. Israeli newspapers ran headlines such as “The Road to Nowhere,” “The Cold Summit,” and “Obama-Show”.

An op-ed in Yedioth Ahronoth called the meeting “artificial,” and a photo opportunity organized to “create an image of leadership and commitment to securing an Israeli-Palestinian deal”.

“The trilateral summit, or more accurately its photos, was meant to demonstrate leadership ability and personal commitment by the president to prompting revolutionary changes in Israel’s ties with the Arabs. Here you go, the president managed to bring together leaders who did not want to do it,” wrote Eytan Gilboa, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University. “Yet the forced summit, in New York and not at the White House, during the UN’s General Assembly and not as an event in and of itself, served to demonstrate the president’s weakness rather than his power.”

A columnist at the Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper, saw the summit more as “a farewell souvenir photo” . Pointing to Obama’s election campaign, his record as a master of strategic politics, and various policy issues he is juggling at the moment, Rami G. Khouri forecast no rapid developments. “More likely, I suspect, will be the emergence of a slow process where Obama clears other pressing concerns from his desk – health care and the economy should be on a good course by December – before turning to the Middle East again, probably with a different set of characters in the picture,” he wrote.

Israeli pundits viewed Obama’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly as proof again of Obama’s inability to pursue in the Middle East peace process with fortitude. An analysis of the speech in the Jerusalem Post, called it “half-full,” while columns in the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz pointed at Obama ‘s lack of a “realistic defining concept,” voiced the need to address Hamas, questioned his strength in light of his failure to follow through on a settlement freeze, and called for “a move forward … to real action”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has welcomed Obama’s call in his speech to resume negotiations with the Palestinians “without preconditions” but both Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas continue to demand a change in each other’s negotiating positions in order to achieve successful talks, such as Netanyahu’s demand for Israel’s recognition as a Jewish state.

Read our factbox to see how Obama is doing on world stage this week and our analysis of Obama’s possible future course of action.

(PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama (C) watches as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas shake hands during a trilateral meeting in New York September 22, 2009. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

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