A few weeks after his defeat in the 2004 US presidential election, John Kerry arrived in Israel and met at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with a group of Israeli and Palestinian journalists in an effort to understand the situation on the ground. Those were the toughest days of the Al Aqsa Intifada, with suicide bombers blowing themselves up in the heart of Israeli cities, and the IDF working full force to put a stop to it. Still, at this meeting there was an air of hope and optimism.

The Palestinian leadership had just been replaced, and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) had been elected as Palestinian president in place of Yasser Arafat. Unlike his predecessor, Abbas was known as a pragmatist who supported the two-state solution and eschewed violence and terrorism. Back then, Kerry heard from us — Palestinians and Israelis — on how we viewed the possible resolution of the conflict and especially what we saw as the obstacles to reaching a peace agreement.

On Wednesday, I listened attentively to Secretary of State Kerry’s speech. What he presented were the same ideas he heard back then, ideas that were already familiar well before then to anyone dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There were no surprises. Kerry set out principles that any reasonable person who wishes to reach a two-state solution understands and knows will form the basis for any future negotiations between the parties. Or, as Fadi Elsalameen, a Palestinian who lives in Washington and is known as a sharp critic of Mahmoud Abbas, put it, “the speech was based on facts, made perfect sense and had zero political relevance.”

Read the full article at Times of Israel.