The meeting in Annapolis, Md., slated to get under way today, is shaping up to be a case study of what happens when you call a peace conference with high expectations and then reality intrudes. Yet Annapolis can still be consequential — if Israelis and Palestinians take bigger risks and the Bush administration takes a more forceful, hands-on role than we've seen to date.

I've planned my fair share of negotiations, conferences and summits, so I know a little about success in this department and quite a lot about failure. Such events are usually good for two things: opening a process, as in Madrid (October 1991), which launched unprecedented Arab-Israeli negotiations; or closing a process, as was the case with the Wye River Summit (October 1998), which produced an agreement on security for Israelis and gradual withdrawal from the West Bank for Palestinians.

Annapolis initially was intended to produce something in between: a set of understandings about how the core issues - Jerusalem, borders and refugees — would be resolved. Quickly confronted with big gaps and tight political constraints, however, the United States had to downsize its ambitions.

Still, there is opportunity. The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have demonstrated that they like each other and can do business together. Few people know that, in the last three months, Olmert and Abbas have had more serious discussions about the core issues than any — repeat, any - Israeli prime minister and Palestinian Authority president have ever had. Throw in U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's determination and the enormous amount of work previously accomplished on the core issues, and they just might get somewhere.

True success, however, will depend on the weeks or months of negotiations that will follow Annapolis. Israelis and Palestinians will have tough choices to make, but so will the U.S. in its role as facilitator and broker.