Ahead of his current trip to the Middle East, US President Barack Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell made what might have been construed as a positive step in Israel's direction. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Mitchell said that he and Obama wish to restart peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians immediately.

The reason Mitchell's pronouncement might have been interpreted as a move in Israel's direction is because until he made his call for negotiations, recent pronouncements on Israel and the Palestinians by the president and his senior advisers have given the uniform impression that the US no longer favors a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Through their obsessive focus on Israeli building activities in Judea and Samaria, Obama and his advisers have sent regional leaders the message that they define their role here not as mediators, but as agents for the Palestinians against Israel. Consequently, far from giving the sense that they seek a peace deal that will be acceptable to Israelis and Palestinians alike, they have convinced the Israelis and the Palestinians - as well as much of the Arab world - that the US intends to coerce Israel into accepting a settlement that sacrifices Israeli security and national needs on the altar of maximalist Palestinian ambitions.

This is the view that Fatah leader and putative Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas expressed in his interview with The Washington Post last month ahead of his visit with Obama. As Abbas put it, the Americans "can use their weight with anyone around the world. Two years ago they used their weight on us. Now they should tell the Israelis, 'You have to comply with the conditions.'"

Abbas added that he will "wait for Israel to freeze settlements," and that until he receives this and other Israeli concessions, "we can't talk to anyone."

In other words, in light of the administration's apparent hostility and uncompromising stance toward Israel, Abbas sees no reason to negotiate anything with the Israelis.

So, too, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal made clear on Tuesday that he sees the Obama administration as a potential ally for his Iranian-controlled genocidal jihadist movement. Mashaal has four good reasons for viewing things this way. First, in his speech in Cairo, Obama accepted the Arab view that Israel is an alien entity to the Middle East which owes its legitimacy to the genocide of European Jewry by Europeans in Europe, and which has the moral standing of white slaveholders in the antebellum American South.

Second, Obama has pledged $900 million in US taxpayer funds to Hamas-controlled Gaza and is pressuring Israel to support Gaza economically in spite of the fact that Hamas continues to attack southern Israel with rockets and to expand and diversify its arsenals.

Third, the Obama administration is abandoning its predecessor's bid to isolate Hamas by pressuring Fatah and Egypt to offer Hamas full partnership in a Fatah-Hamas unity government which would work to cement Hamas's international legitimacy.

Finally, in light of the White House's silence after Sunday's attempted attack on the IDF by a Hamas-affiliated terror group in Gaza, Mashaal is operating under the impression that nothing Hamas does will divert Washington from its collision course with Israel. With Obama in charge, Hamas believes it can attack Israel with impunity.

So with Israelis and Palestinians now joined in their belief that Obama is looking for a fight with Israel rather than a negotiated settlement, it was encouraging to hear that Mitchell is planning on forcing the Palestinians to the negotiating table with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government.

Unfortunately, within hours of his arrival in Israel on Tuesday, it became clear that Mitchell's statements about negotiations were nothing more than spin. He reiterated that the US has no intention whatsoever of budging on its uncompromising positions that no Jewish construction anywhere past the 1949 armistice lines is legitimate; that Israel must begin moving toward a mass expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria; and that the IDF must drastically curtail its counterterror operations in Judea and Samaria. That is, Mitchell demonstrated that like the Palestinians and the Saudis, the Obama administration's idea of a resolution of the Palestinian conflict with Israel involves a complete Israeli surrender to all Arab (and now American) demands while trusting our security to the tender mercies of Palestinian terrorists.

MORE DISTURBING than Mitchell's positions are his marching orders from Obama. Unlike previous presidential envoys who have come to Israel every few weeks and then disappeared when reality proved stronger than their peace fantasies, Obama has ordered Mitchell to cast reality to the seven winds and set up a permanent forward command post in Jerusalem directly subordinate to the White House.

To fulfill his writ, Mitchell has appointed four deputies - all known for their open sympathy for the Palestinians and their hostility to the Netanyahu government. They are Mara Rudman, of the George Soros-financed Center for American Progress; Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton, who is now building a Fatah army in Jordan which he recently reportedly acknowledged will turn its American-financed guns on Israel within a few short years if Israel refuses to establish a Jew-free Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria; Fred Hoff, one of the greatest champions of a US-Syrian rapprochement and of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights; and David Hale, the architect of the current US policy of rebuilding the Hizbullah-infested Lebanese army. Hale will be permanently stationed in Jerusalem in a large office suite that will house Mitchell's operation.

Aside from overseeing his deputies, Mitchell has also been charged with leading a new administration program aimed at undermining Israel's ability to make independent military and intelligence decisions. Back in 2008, when Obama's National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones served as then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's special adviser on Israeli-Palestinian security issues, he authored a report calling for the US to assess what Israel's "real" security interests in Judea and Samaria are and to limit US support to Israel to filling those necessarily minimal interests. Jones's report, which rejected all Israeli claims in Judea and Samaria and underplayed the strategic significance of Palestinian rejection of Israel's right to exist, was viewed as deeply hostile toward Israel, and the Olmert government prevailed on the Bush administration to set it aside.