Incendiary Middle East Diplomacy

There, done. President Barack Obama's Middle East trip bore fruit. Turkey proclaims itself justified and satisfied. Israel swallowed a bitter pill. And Jordan's King Abdullah, offered much-needed funds to help cope with the influx of Syrian refugees. During his trip a newly conciliatory President Obama found common cause with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; their legendary hostility was nowhere to be seen as President Obama skilfully obliged himself to the Israeli public.

Homage to heritage and tradition, the atrocity of the Holocaust and the fittingness of a Jewish homeland come to fruition all endeared him to the Israelis who gathered to hear him quietly incite Jewish youth to question the decisions made by their government if they deemed them not to be in the best interests of their country and their future.

Expect Prime Minister Netanyahu to have a conversation with President Obama's daughters to convey to them their father's liberal values are sometimes wanting. Or not.

There can be no doubt, however, that President Obama did well on this trip. It takes a degree of humility in an otherwise deservedly proud man to demonstrate that he occasionally backs the wrong horse. And that sometimes it is difficult to face a reality that manifests itself in uncomfortable presentations. He allowed as how he could never see his own children being the object of rocket attacks.

Just as, conversely, he would never wish his children to have to live under occupation. He did seem a tad obtuse speaking of cause-and-effect and perhaps confusing the two and getting them backward, but to his credit he spoke truth to an authority resistant to his own. Knowing that he would be praised in one sector and damned in the other. But the funding that America hands to the PA is a salve.

As for his skillful handling of the Turkey-Israel divide, all due credit redounds to him. Turkey's stubbornness proved greater than Israel's, and that is to Israel's credit. But while Turkey's long good relations with Israel resulted in a truncated reliance on Israeli hardware and technology that needed to be repaired, Israel was decidedly in a Middle-East volatility where its estrangement and isolation spoke extreme danger to its very existence.

As for the flotilla having been attributed as the cause of Turkey's official break with Israel; it had been pre-dated by Prime Minister Erdogan stalking out of an international meeting, shouting that Israel's operation in Gaza during the Cast Lead reprisal of constant rocket barrages represented a crime against humanity. It was that event that high-lighted a new estrangement between the two nations, that was exacerbated by the Mavi Marmara event.

And it was Turkey that should have been held responsible for the outbreak of violence when Turks known to have been involved in Islamist activities were permitted to set sail to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza strip ruled by Hamas whose charter instructs the destruction of Israel.  Video footage released to the international community unequivocally demonstrated that violence emanated from the Mavi Marmara Turkish presence, and that the Israeli sailors had no option but to protect themselves after being viciously assaulted.

However, desperate conditions sometimes require resolute decision-making, and Prime Minister Netanyahu took the advice that President Obama proffered after his own quiet consultations, along with those of John Kerry, with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. The insisted-upon apology was made, "for any errors that could have led to loss of life" on the part of Israel in meeting the threat that the Mavi Marmara posed. And the State of Israel "agreed to complete the agreement on compensation".

Because of the U.S. involvement in the fall-out of Syria's vicious civil war and its spillover into Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, of desperate refugees fleeing the revoluntionary violence, along with the threat of the war itself spreading to other countries and the spectre of chemical weapons reaching the hands of Islamists, the need for Turkey, Jordan and Israel to co-ordinate their response with the United States was urgent.

The trip accomplished quite a bit, in fact. And time will tell how much of a good thing that will turn out to be.