There is no doubt that the two public remarks President Barack Obama made before young Israelis and Palestinians on the same day but in two different locations — Jerusalem and Ramallah — last week were “memorable”. He both exhibited a new position and avoided repeating or highlighting some old stands.

A lonely heckler met his comment in Jerusalem, delivered to a large, young, Israeli audience, which seemingly included some 2,000 Arabs, but he was hardly intelligible on international television and the president dismissed the interruption comically, a reaction which was applauded loudly.

The president never repeated a remark he made several years ago that Jerusalem must never be divided. Neither did he call on Israel to halt settlement construction, as he had done previously, but he used the word “occupation”, a term hardly used by American officials and the media in describing the growing Israeli presence in West Bank settlements, now estimated to house half a million colonisers.

He urged his enthusiastic Israeli audience to empathise with their Palestinian neighbours living under occupation, saying: “Put yourselves in their shoes — look at the world through their eyes …. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents, every single day.”

In other words, he added, if Israeli settlements continue expanding, it will be “very difficult to square with a two-state solution”.

It was clear that Obama wished to avoid, on his first visit as president to Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and Jordan, the infamous Israel wall that divides Israel from the West Bank.

His choice was to travel aboard his helicopter to visit the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus is believed to have been born, in Bethlehem, a step that irked the Palestinians. But by the grace of God, as one Palestinian put it, a sandstorm reportedly compelled Obama to travel by car the short distance between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, passing through the obnoxious 760-kilometre-long separation wall.

One would have expected Obama to follow in the footsteps of president Ronald Reagan who had challenged the Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, during a visit to the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987, when he famously said: “Tear down the wall.”

It was demolished two years later.

If Obama did not wish to imitate a Republican president, he could have, since he was in the Holy Land, copied what Joshua, the prophet, did in nearby Jericho where, with the help of priests who had made “a long blast with a ram’s horn” he prompted the locked residents of Jericho to “shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city fell down flat … .”

The visit of the American president was lacklustre.

His only big achievement was the surprise Turkish-Israeli reconciliation.

What Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, may discover is that his Turkish counterpart is very much unlike the one he knew before the two countries’ fallout over the Israeli attack on the Turkish flotilla that was heading to the besieged Gaza Strip.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had insisted in the terms for reconciliation that Israel end its embargo of Gaza, will also be visiting the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah and the two are said to be planning a trip to Gaza.

Whether the upcoming visit to Gaza and the talks that Secretary of State John Kerry had in the region at the end of Obama’s Mideast tour will yield any serious negotiations is too early to tell.

The stumbling block that remains is Israel’s refusal to halt its expansionist schemes in the occupied Palestinian region and the failure of Abbas’ Fateh and Hamas, now led by Khalid Mishaal, to reconcile.

The only hope remains with the American president, who has seemingly improved his relationship with the Israeli leadership.

In the meantime, he ought to resurrect some even-handedness, the favoured policy of past American administrations, a position Kerry seems capable of undertaking as he recently demonstrated in Afghanistan.

Israel cannot afford to remain isolated for much longer in the Middle East.

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.

Correction

In this column of March 22-23, the first leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation was erroneously reported as having been Yasser Arafat when it was, in fact, Ahmad Shuqeiri. At the same time, the cost of the Iraqi war was reported to be $60 billion. Department of Defence’s direct spending on Iraq totalled at least $757.8 billion, but the complementary costs at home, such as interest paid on the funds borrowed to finance the wars and a potential nearly $1 trillion in extra spending to care for veterans returning from combat through 2050 brought the cost, in a 2013 update, up to $6 trillion.