What was Obama thinking?

Yet if you promise not to publish the names of some senior Israeli officials, you will be able to hear more than just glee at the downfall of Obama and his advisors.

“It took him a year to discover the obvious,” a senior Israeli official says. “What was Obama thinking exactly when he decided to skip a visit to Israel and preferred to deliver a speech in Cairo and laud the ‘holy Koran’ 15 times? Did he truly believe that bowing down to the Saudi king would help him enlist the moderate Arab world to the cause of restarting negotiations?”

Officials around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted that Obama will fail, because he showed lack of understanding to the fundamental positions of the players in the Arab court.

That is, Netanyahu and his advisors believe that the Arabs interpreted Obama’s accommodation of Arab positions as a weakness. Moreover, the Israeli side assumed that the Arabs will not play their part in the American effort to restart the negotiations, and that they are waiting for Obama to kick the Israelis out of the territories.

Obama’s main mistake in respect to the Israeli government stems from the assumption that a formula for freezing settlement construction could be worked out with Netanyahu, whether through the utilization of pressure or by hinting that Israel would be granted America’s help in defending itself from the Iranian threat only if it halts settlement construction (the so called “Bushehr for Yitzhar” formula.)

For the time being, we must admit that the American president’s frank declaration is not a common phenomenon on this side of the Atlantic. However, those who think they could take comfort in Obama’s honest confession and continue to do nothing in order to end the impasse may be proven false.

The tactic of building walls and disparaging “American naïveté” may turn out to be disastrous.