It’s hard to get the Israelis and Palestinians to agree on much, but Barack Obama managed to find common ground between the two.  Smart diplomacy?  More like Inspector Clouseau.  Both sides said that Obama’s attempts to bully them left them insulted:

Neither Palestinian nor Israeli leadership commented on their attendance at next week’s UN summit, but with the US envoy boarding a plane back to Washington – and the upcoming Jewish and Muslim holidays lasting through the weekend – time appeared to be running out to reach a compromise.

“The Americans thought they would come in here and push us around at the beginning of the week. But they didn’t get what they wanted and now they are the ones left looking embarrassed,” said one Palestinian official involved in the talks.

Speaking to an Israeli news network just before the holiday weekend, Mr Netanyahu said about the peace talks: “If it will be, it will be. If not, not. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t put conditions on the talks.”

The failure to reach a compromise marked a major setback for US President Barak Obama, who has made the Middle East peace process a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

To some extent, this is the nature of the conflict and the American role in it.  Neither side wants to budge, or to be seen as budging.  This is especially a problem for the Israelis, which now has a right-leaning government after the previous centrist and left-leaning governments made public concessions — and got paid back with war.  Obama is not the first American President to discover that small talk and big nudges get you nowhere.

He is, however, the first to make Israel bear the brunt of those nudges publicly.  Obama has encouraged the Palestinians to remain obstinate on the no-expansion condition by making that one of his own conditions.  Obama has had to back away from that demand after getting all but a “hell no” from the Israelis, who want to have the room for vertical expansion in the settlements, if not horizontal expansion.  However, after Obama publicly demanded an end to settlements, the Palestinian leadership feels that they can’t be seen as more flexible than the US, which leads us to the current impasse.

Besides, what’s the rush? Other than the normal rush to settle conflict to gain peace, there seems to be little substantive reason to demand talks at this juncture — except that Obama desperately needs a foreign-policy victory.  His appeasement of Russia and his backstabbing of Poland and the Czech Republic has infuriated people across the West, and his health-care debacle has dragged his political clout down to microscopic levels.  After insulting the Israelis for the last few months with his demands, Bibi Netanyahu has absolutely no incentive to toss Obama a lifeline now.

This appears to be another lesson in on-the-job training for Obama.  Hopefully he learns from it, but considering his foreign-policy fumbles thus far, it doesn’t seem as though he’s learning much at all.