Since the inception of the State of Israel when Harry Truman was president and up to the current incumbent, President Barack Obama, the White House has had 12 residents, only four of whom visited Israel: Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Obama, therefore, is joining a very exclusive club. Why is it that we have been looking forward to Obama's visit so much? Obama, who visited Cairo and Istanbul, knows the answer better than anyone else, so he rushed to visit Israel soon after his second term in office began. Our great friend Ronald Reagan could afford not to visit Israel even once in eight years. Obama cannot. Once he arrives, the American president will do what he does better than anyone else, except Bill Clinton charm his audience. But he will find that it is not so easy to do in Israel, even for a master rhetorician. The Israeli public is far less naive now than it was during Obama's first term. On second thought, maybe it is better that he is only visiting now. Obama needs a new ally to renew the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The Israeli public or so he hopes will be able to push the process out of its stalemate. The situation in the Palestinian Authority and in Hamas' kingdom in the Gaza Strip is so complex that Obama will need true magic to do so. Until he finds that magic spell, however, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will have to do. Some view Obama's visit as predominantly symbolic, although it can hardly be described as a tourist's visit, given the situation in the Middle East. The disintegration of Syria, especially in light of Tuesday's news that chemical warfare has come into play, and Iran's brazen nuclear race, turn any meeting between the U.S. president and an Israeli prime minister into an extremely important, even crucial, one. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is just as important, but at the moment it is a bit less urgent. A more sober Obama landed in Israel on Wednesday. The president who gave the world the slogan "Yes we can" understands now that some conflicts, like the one in the Middle East, benefit more from the realpolitik approach. In hindsight, he may not have made that first phone call after he took office to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. But he did, and that is why it is important for him to visit Israel now. The last time Obama visited the Middle East it looked a little different. Some would credit him for that, others would admonish him for the very same thing. The only question that needs to be asked now is whether or not the region is safer today. Since the age of Jimmy Carter, every American president has seen promoting the Middle East peace process as one of their main goals. As the architect of the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty, Carter set the bar high; Clinton followed with the 1993 Oslo Accords. But things have changed and those agreements are now the purview of historians. Obama, during his first term, also sought to carve out an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Back then he thought it could be done in no time. Today, he knows that just renewing the negotiations would be considered a feat.
