“Let us, for a moment, imagine what it might have been like in mid-February, 2009, if Barack Obama, then a new president, perhaps a transformational president (he was, after all, the first African-American elected to the job), decided that, in foreign policy, he would focus on the deadlocked Israeli-Palestinian negotiation and, miracle of miracles, produce a breakthrough. Miracles have been known to happen in that part of the world.

Instead of opening his Mid-East diplomacy with a cutting critique of Israel’s cantankerous settlements policy, often considered the third rail of Israeli politics, instead of traveling first to Egypt, where he delivered a warm speech, opening his arms to the Arab and Muslim worlds, but ignoring Israel, which proved to be a stunning blunder, instead of allowing, even encouraging, a discomfiting coolness in Israeli-American relations, instead of monopolizing America’s foreign policy rather than leaving some of the legwork to his secretary of state—instead of all this, if Obama did then what he appears to be doing now, four wasted years later, the Israelis and the Palestinians might be engaging in serious, face-to-face negotiations on a peace treaty by this time. Who knows?”

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