HOWZAT

Where does this start? For the purposes of this trip it started with the Obama administration proving its good faith — by drawing a firm line against all expansion in illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank. At first much of Washington assumed this was familiar boilerplate, not seriously meant. But Binyamin Netanyahu discovered on his recent trip to Washington, to his evident shock, that Obama actually meant it.

Not only that but according to Haaretz, the Israeli paper, the leading lights in Congress were on board as well: “ ‘Even the most conservative institutions of Jewish American life don’t want to go to war over settlement policy,’ said David Twersky, who was until recently the senior adviser on international affairs at the American Jewish Congress. ‘They might say the administration is making too much of a big deal of it, but they will not argue that Jews have the right to settle all parts of Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel]’.”

Whether this realism lasts is a big question. Neoconservatives are up in arms that anything be asked of Israel before Iran is confronted. But Obama seems to understand that for the United States to be taken seriously in the region, it needs to demonstrate early on that it is prepared to be more even-handed than in its recent history. Acknowledging Palestinians’ suffering and grief over their displacement from what they once saw as their own country is a prerequisite for attempting to engage those who wield real power in the region.

Of course, if Obama is bluffing, his bluff will be called. But he does have leverage over the Netanyahu government — the United Nations veto, military aid — and, simply by gesturing gently towards it, he may make a new realism take hold in Jerusalem. Left to its own devices, without a regional deal, Israel faces a bleak future in which demographics force it to leave Judea and Samaria without security or to become a minority Jewish country that operates on an apartheid model. No one can want that. It is hard to see Israel surviving past my lifetime unless it adjusts swiftly, with help and support from its friends.

When you see how many delicate balancing acts are required to pull the grand bargain off in the region, scepticism is entirely justified. But I don’t believe Obama is naive about the difficulty of the task. He knows that unless a real attempt is made to avert peacefully a catastrophic nuclear arms race in the region, to save the Israelis and Palestinians from themselves and to reconstitute the image of America in the psyches of a vast young generation of Muslims, we face a darkness that could spread very fast globally and engulf us all.

There are a lot of constantly shifting balls in play — the Iranian electorate, the Syrian elite, the US Congress, the Iraqi military, the Israeli governing coalition. Each one could derail everything on its own. Yet this young president presses forward with the kind of self-confidence and assurance not seen in the region in decades. He knows, I sense, that even if he fails, the message of Cairo will endure in the minds of many young Muslims for much of their lives. Mere words? So were Reagan’s and Kennedy's.

Perhaps the fruit of those words — of that respect and engagement — won’t be felt for another generation or so. That merely underlines why they matter and how vast Obama’s ambition truly is.

www.andrewsullivan.com

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