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President Obama called Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday to commend as courageous their decision to resume peace talks that the US is striving to portray with an optimistic outlook.

Naysayers on all sides insist there is no way that this latest round of peace talks will succeed when so many others failed, and there has been a flurry of commentary explaining why these talks are predisposed to end in much the same way as the others. But the US has been aided by a slew of prominent voices in the US and Israel arguing the opposite. 

Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Palestinian chief negotiator Saab Erekat came to Washington this week for the first of what is expected to be several rounds of talks. They agreed to meet again in two weeks, USA Today reports, and the negotiating team has set a timeline of roughly nine months to craft a solution that will create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. 

The arguments for optimism are not necessarily based on altruism. As º£½Ç´óÉñ's Ben Lynfield wrote earlier this week, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas may have sent representatives to Washington primarily because neither wanted to risk "being cast as rejectionists." And some watching the negotiations posit that the desire to not be blamed for the talks' failure might be enough to keep both sides engaged, although the gap between their demands is daunting. 

Aaron David Miller, who has worked for several US secretaries of State and is a former Middle East negotiator, makes the same argument in an commentary for Politico. 

The push toward peace, at least on the Israeli side, could also be motivated by the belief that Israel is rapidly approaching "the point of no return" – the point at which neither two viable states nor a single, predominantly Jewish state are possible, writes Rachel Bessette on Open Zion, a publication of the Daily Beast focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel's security establishment, much vaunted within Israeli society, is the unexpected source of the increasingly insistent warnings, she writes.

Ms. Bessette writes that the former intel chiefs "are not giving up hope" and that it is "extremely significant that these voices are not backing down."

Emily Hauser, also a contributor to Open Zion who has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, writes in a column titled "The Case for a Less-Guarded Optimism" that some crucial differences make this time feel different: Everything is on the table for negotiation – all the "final status issues" – and there is a deadline.