This is, I suppose, the “Cairo Effect” — the term Obama’s spinners gave to the president’s mystical powers to change the dynamic in the Middle East by simply giving a speech to the “Muslim World”:

US President Barack Obama is “doing nothing right now” to restart the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said in an interview published Tuesday. “I hope he’ll take a more important role in the future,” Abbas told the Argentine daily Clarin during a visit to Buenos Aires. The Palestinians “are waiting for the United States to put pressure on Israel so it respects international law, so it takes up the road map” towards peace, he said, according to publication’s Spanish translation. “It can do two things: put pressure on the Israelis so they reject settlements, and put pressure so they accept withdrawing to the 1967 borders.”

In other words, Obama has only reinforced the Palestinians’ inclination toward obstructionism. And the Israelis? They’re not about to agree to either of those “two things,” so the parties won’t be processing peace any time soon. Seems that the Cairo speech, and everything that followed, wasn’t very “smart” diplomacy-wise.

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