President Obama made news last month in advocating a borders-and-security-first approach to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and articulating an official view that the territorial solution should be a return to the 1967 lines, amended by mutually agreed land swaps. Those who contend that there was nothing new in the president’s comments fail to give him his due; whatever one thinks about the utility or wisdom of his approach, the president most certainly staked out new ground with these principles.





What received less notice was the absence in his remarks of any mechanism for implementing these principles – no new diplomatic initiative, no new peace envoy, no peace summit, no peace negotiations, not even a trip by the secretary of state. Nor was there any argument explaining the organic connection between his professed urgency for peacemaking and the obvious urgency of two other regional concerns: volcanic political change in Arab states and Iran’s threatening hegemonic designs. The president, it seems, was content to articulate a policy without a strategy.”

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