As the new year begins to the depressingly familiar noise of war in the Middle East, a pregnant silence is all that can be heard from Barack Obama.

This is, of course, only proper. The President-elect has political decorum and the prerogatives of diplomacy on his side. Every day his spokesman patiently reminds reporters clamouring for a hint of direction that there is only one President and that he is, if only now for the next 18 days, George W. Bush.

But it is an especially intriguing sort of silence. The whole world is waiting impatiently for Mr Obama to start making good on his promise of change. Of all the issues that have separated the US from the rest of the world during the Bush presidency, the Israeli-Palestinian one might span the largest chasm. Europeans and Arabs have simply not been able to believe at times the virtually unyielding pro-Israel line that the US has taken since 2001, whether over Jewish settlements, Ariel Sharon's security fence, the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 or the present fighting with Hamas, or on any number of lesser but pointed issues.

There are lingering hopes in Europe and much of the Middle East (suspicions in some parts of America) that the new president will seek to rebalance US policy. No one really thinks that Mr Obama is about to “get tough” with the Israelis, as some fantasists would have it, but it is surely plausible that the new administration will change tack. Or to put it another way, surely it's implausible that the new Democratic administration could possibly take the same approach as Mr Bush and Dick Cheney? Uncertainty about the tone and direction of US policy in the next four years is heightened by what might be called the Obama Middle East Enigma.

To put it bluntly, there is a suspicion (or a hope in most foreign parts) that Mr Obama, given his druthers, and without the need to genuflect before the exigencies of domestic American politics, would be predisposed to a much more balanced approach to US policy than has been the case for the past eight years.

What exactly this “balance” means is not always clear. The anti-Israel crowd think that it might include anything from a tougher rhetorical opposition to settlements and Israeli military intervention to, in their wildest dreams, sanctions against Israel if it fails to do what is deemed necessary to bring peace to the region.

It is hard to find anything in Mr Obama's public positions to support such a contention. He has not noticeably deviated from the basic line of his predecessor. In his one important campaign address on the subject, he was strongly supportive of Israel when he spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

In case you are inclined to dismiss that as mere necessary politics, he seemed to go much farther on his trip to the Middle East last summer. In remarks that directly identified himself with the cause of the current fighting in Gaza, he expressed strong personal solidarity with Israeli citizens under attack from Hamas rockets. In the US Senate he has a solidly consistent record of supporting Israel.

So where does the suspicion that he is a closet Israel-bashing, Palestinian-supporting peacenik come from?

Doubtless there are some who still think that the President-elect is in fact a Muslim, who will reveal his true loyalties after the inauguration.

Back in the real world, there are some slightly less mad concerns (or hopes) raised by his past associations. Most common is the claim that some of the people he has relied on for advice about foreign policy in general and the Israeli-Palestinian issue in particular are at the most pro-Palestinian end of the US policy spectrum.

He has been close, for example, to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser to President Carter. Mr Brzezinski has been one of the staunchest US critics of Israeli policy over the past 20 years.

Then there are other advisers who attract questioning scrutiny, such as Robert Malley, a member of President Clinton's national security team, who was highly critical of Israel's efforts during the peace process negotiations in the 1990s.

These critics of Israeli policy will undoubtedly continue to argue their case but there is scant evidence that they will have much influence in the Obama administration's policy formation.

The President-elect seems to have ensured that the key foreign policy jobs in his administration will go to people who are much more orthodox in their views.

Hillary Clinton may once have embraced Suha Arafat in her early days at the White House but since then she has been a successful New York politician who has hardly flinched from an ardently pro-Israel line, and actually proclaimed during her abortive presidential run last year that Iran would be “obliterated” if it attacked Israel.

General James Jones, Mr Obama's national security adviser, has spent much time in the Middle East in the past two years assisting Condoleezza Rice and seems to have undergone no discernibly radical shift in thinking.

Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama's chief of staff, is as forceful and enthusiastic a proponent of the Israeli cause as there is in Washington.

In any case, a sharp change in direction in the Middle East is not going to be high on the new President's agenda.

The challenges confronting him - put simply, rescuing the US economy from a possible depression and winning wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - won't leave much time for eye-catching new initiatives on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. And that's before he has to decide how to deal with the emerging Iranian nuclear threat.

It's probably reasonable to assume that Obama Middle East policy won't be a carbon copy of President Bush's. And if anything can really be achieved by rhetoric, you can just about guarantee that the new president will achieve it.

But those who think that, at least, a return to the pre-Bush days of US policy may be at hand should remember this.

Mr Obama's administration will be staffed with many veterans of those frustrating years. The Clinton Administration tried about as hard as any government has to produce a settlement - and failed.

With an economy to rescue and American power in the world to be saved, there is unlikely to be much appetite for going down that track again.

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