After a comparative lull in the Middle East conflict, yesterday’s Israeli offensive effectively halted months of painstaking diplomatic efforts to revive a long-stalled negotiating process. It also presented Barack Obama, America’s next president, and Hillary Clinton, his incoming secretary of state, with their first serious foreign policy test.

The collapse earlier this month of a Gaza ceasefire treaty brokered by Egypt last June gives Obama an early glimpse of the numbing stalemate that has defied the best negotiating efforts of half a dozen of his predecessors.

Although the president-elect and his national security team will not take office until January 20, governments across the Middle East will be scrutinising Obama’s every response for indications of his approach to the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Obama was asleep in a rented beachfront mansion in Hawaii when Israel launched its attack. On Friday afternoon the president-elect had slipped away from the press corps monitoring his Christmas holiday and taken his two young daughters to see a sea lion show at a local park.

Yesterday morning he awoke to the grim reality that awaits him as president. A family holiday was suddenly transformed into a Middle East policy discussion as Obama received telephoned security briefings and discussed his response with senior aides.

For Obama and Clinton the attacks will force an urgent appraisal of the Middle East question after months of verbal sparring earlier in the year over which of the two Democrats was best equipped to handle a Middle East crisis.

On several occasions during the presidential primaries Clinton had questioned Obama’s foreign policy experience; one campaign advertisement suggested she was better equipped to respond to “the 3am call” signalling trouble.

Obama’s decision to appoint his former rival as secretary of state sent shockwaves throughout the Middle East, as Israelis and Palestinians tried to decipher the candidates’ often conflicting policy statements for clues as to how the new administration intends to proceed.

Although Obama has been portrayed as antiwar and pro-diplomacy and is seen by most Arab governments as a vast improvement on George W Bush, the president-elect made clear as a candidate that he was committed to Israel’s defence. During a summer visit to the Israeli outpost of Sderot, which the Palestinians inside Gaza routinely pepper with rocket fire, Obama sympathised with the Israeli authorities attempting to control the attacks.

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that,” Obama said at the time. “And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.” Israelis have been further encouraged by Obama’s key appointments, from his vice-presidential running mate Joe Biden, long a prominent supporter of Israel, to his choice of Rahm Emanuel, a leading Jewish congressman, as his White House chief of staff.

Yet Clinton’s emergence as the successor to Condoleezza Rice has injected several notes of uncertainty in regional appraisals of the new administration. Clinton is widely viewed in the region as likely to pursue the unfinished peace-making business of her husband.

After eight years of painful and highly personal diplomacy, Bill Clinton was betrayed in 2000 by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, who at the last minute refused to sign an arduously negotiated peace deal.

Bill Clinton’s parting advice to Colin Powell, who took over the State Department under President George W Bush, was “don’t you ever trust that son of a bitch”.

When Hillary first visited the Gaza Strip with her husband in 1998, she toured refugee camps and expressed sympathy for the Palestinian plight. Yet since she became a New York senator she has become much more hawkish on foreign policy, to the dismay of some Arab leaders.

Israel, meanwhile, faces elections of its own in February with no clear outcome in store. A weak coalition government that is dependent on extremist votes for survival will be in no position to make serious concessions.

For now Obama is reduced, like much of the rest of the world, to watching images of Palestinian destruction play out on his television screen.

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