The new administration must restore intimacy and common purpose to the bilateral partnership.

At a moment when Russia, Turkey and Iran are carving up Syria, when the U.S.-orchestrated battle for Mosul seems stuck in neutral, and when America’s two leading Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are fighting their own debilitating cold war, how should one interpret the Obama administration’s decision to spend its closing days in office focused on carving a legacy of critiquing Israel under the umbrella of proclaiming to safeguard a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians? A few observations:

President Obama has been remarkably consistent in his view that Israeli settlement expansion is the principal obstacle to progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace. This view animated the president’s decision to disregard his predecessor’s constructively nuanced understanding with Israel on the issue as well as his ill-conceived demand for a total freeze on Israeli construction over the 1967 lines, including in Jerusalem. Both played a major role in producing impasse in peace diplomacy. Indeed, for all his protestations, President Obama is the first chief executive since President Johnson to register neither achievement nor even progress toward Arab-Israeli peace on his watch. That the Obama administration ends where it began, with a near-obsessive focus on Israeli settlement construction as the key to unlock the Middle East peace process, suggests that it learned virtually nothing from its experience of the last eight years.

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