Leaders of the two nations and one almost-state involved in the tripartite meeting, to be held Tuesday, have made a great effort to portray the meeting between Israel, the Palestinian authority and the United States as little more than coffee and a photo-op. Because money is tight everywhere, it is reasonable to ask Hamas to spring for Starbucks and the Polaroid since Hamas is the beneficiary.

The Hamas benefit all starts with US President Barack Obama standing in Cairo before the Arab world making his demand that Israel freeze settlement construction on land that Palestinians claim they need for a future state.  The badly weakened and disheartened rival of Hamas, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, suddenly had a very popular leader of the world’s superpower in his corner and seized his moment to show strength. Abbas went public and demanded that Israel halt the bricklaying or he would not attend the meeting.  Israel kept on stacking bricks and haggled over a definition of “freeze.”

The White House attempted to extract a promise from Arab states to take tentative steps toward normalized relations with Israel and got what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Monday characterized as a “resounding failure.” According to Dan Diker, Sr. Analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, without something Israel wants like Arab normalization there is “no pressure point on Israel .”  The people who do have leverage on Netanyahu are the right wingers who hold together his majority in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament).  So, Netanyahu gave the right wingers what they want: more settlements. Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, approved plans for 455 new housing units in the West Bank .  Netanyahu also promised to finish 2500 partially completed units.  A final show of defiance came from the Netanyahu’s media advisor, Nir Hefez, over army radio Monday when he said, “You never heard the Prime Minister say that he will freeze settlements. The opposite is true.”

Palestinian factions achieved rare unity and demanded that President Abbas snub the US , Israel and the meeting. However, with his divided constituency President Abbas, has no ability to stand up to the US President.  Monday afternoon Abbas boarded a plane to New York , his word and backbone broken. A Palestinian journalist, who requested anonymity, told me, “This is the best recipe to kill the last hope Mahmoud Abbas had as our President. He lost it big time.”

Abbas’ rivals in Hamas are now in the luxurious position of discrediting the process and players which are expected to bear no fruit. Their Prime Minister, Ismayel Haniya, called the talks “useless.” If he is proven right, if Abbas comes away from this meeting as weak as he is going in, Hamas gets awarded a public relations bonanza.  They can criticize the path of the moderates; show that President Abbas has gotten nothing but humiliation from putting his faith in the US administration. Radicalism, violence and kidnapping haven’t gotten them much, but Hamas leaders can say that has at least forced Israel to negotiate on their terms.

Log in to the strategy room Fox News.com: 10 AM Eastern on Wednesday. We’re going to go round and round about the fallout from this meeting, live from Jerusalem. Shoot me your comments and questions via twitter @miketobinfox.