President Barack Obama is leaving office in one year’s time. On his record he can include changing the rules of the game in current international relations toward an assertive collective diplomacy in coordination with major world powers — Russia, China and the European Union — leaving the use of force as a last resort. Obama has put an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, achieved a historic agreement curbing Iran’s nuclear capacity and, it seems, is making progress on arranging the sharing of power in Syria.
But there is one area in which the Obama administration failed to make progress: resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His efforts were blocked by the Israeli settlement policy and by the weakness of the Palestinian Authority (PA). In his recent foreign policy review on Jan. 22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Secretary of State John Kerry did not say a single word about this issue.