A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Philip Gourevitch and I interviewed Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, at a New Yorker event on stage, at Joe’s Pub. We hoped for a round-the-world survey of expansive and off-the-cuff honesty, but, as it turned out, there was only so much candor that diplomatic propriety would allow. Rice, from Syria to Rwanda, strictly adhered to the made-in-Washington talking points. She even pronounced herself “happy” that she was still U.N. Ambassador, even after losing a bid to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. (I am sure she was “happy” beyond words to have been the hate-object of a cynical gaggle of right-wing senators who exacted some post-election revenge on the President by punishing her for the disaster in Benghazi.) It was frustrating but not unexpected. You had to admire Rice’s discipline—and even how, at the end of the discussion, she robbed some French fries from a guy in the audience who was eating, flagrantly, at the lip of the stage.

You also had to admire the watchfulness of the White House. About thirty minutes after leaving the theatre, I got out my phone to catch up on my messages. There was one from a White House official who had noticed that I’d been “quoted” on Twitter saying that President Obama was not likely to spend any political capital in his second term to help bring about a Palestinian state. The quote was extracted from a question I had asked Rice about what might happen in the Middle East. Was a two-state solution really dead? Would the Obama Administration—with all it faced in the world—risk anything to initiate a renewed peace process?

What both Rice and the White House official made clear was that President Obama would not be bringing any plans to the Middle East on the trip that he is presently completing. But, at the same time, they both insisted that no one should jump to the conclusion that just because a two-state solution has never been more difficult, more seemingly out of reach, Obama would ignore it. The official emphasized Obama’s “strength of feeling” about the issue, and cautioned that no doors were closed.

As it turns out, Obama’s trip to Israel, Palestine, and Jordan accomplished precisely what the Administration wanted. They began by setting expectations at a minimum; “Operation Desert Schmooze” was the running joke among the press entourage. On one level, the trip was a kind of diplomatic and emotional rescue mission—an atmospheric mending of a troubled personal relationship between Obama and the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and, more, a soothing of the sensitivities of Israelis who noted, with worry, that Obama had travelled widely in his first term—but not to Israel.

From the Palestinian point of view, a far more jaundiced and disillusioned one, Obama was, at best, signalling a reëngagement; their legitimate question is to what degree. There have been no serious talks in three years. If Obama came to the region simply to soothe Israeli feelings and to pay lip service to a peace process, this was going to be seen in Palestine as a severe disappointment at best. And for anyone looking for a real diplomatic initiative, this trip was just that: a disappointment. Obama was all embrace: no pressure, no initiative, no insistence—just as Rice and that White House official had forecast.

But the trip, for all its limitations, is worth unpacking because it is one of those events that could turn out to be deeply significant—or merely a few days of hot desert wind.

The set-piece speech on Thursday (written with particular help from his young adviser Benjamin Rhodes) was vintage Obama—deft, nuanced, broadly empathetic, a kind of mirror-image of the Cairo performance, in June, 2009, that got him a Nobel Prize for Peace. Just as he gained, in Cairo, a huge measure of sympathy in the Islamic world (at least for a while) by recognizing Arab grievances and Western mistakes, in Israel he soothed anxieties about American commitment. When Obama first came to office, a high-ranking Israeli official declared to me that Obama “has no special feeling for us.” This speech erased all such wariness.

Obama repeatedly assured his audience of its own national legitimacy, of the historical legitimacy of Zionism and the American intention to assure an Israeli future. In the same spirit, he made clear the American determination to prevent a nuclear Iran and the American aversion to Hamas, to Hezbollah, and to any other group, national or supra-national, that denies Israel’s right to exist: **“**Make no mistake: those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere. Today, I want to tell you—particularly the young people—that so long as there is a United States of America, Ah-tem lo lah-vad.”(“You are not alone.”)

Obama also went out of his way to show rhetorical sympathy with the broadly held notion that Israel has, under Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert, made important peace initiatives toward their Palestinian opposites only to meet with rejectionism. Agree with that or not—and it leaves out a great deal—this is a common Israeli narrative.

But beyond winning over his Israeli audience, what was Obama prepared to do about a peace process? “Peace is necessary,” he told his audience at the International Convention Center, in Jerusalem. “But peace is also just.” In diplo-speak, he was short on the “deliverables.” His harshest talk was not harsh at all. He criticized the building of settlements, but he was no longer making strict or detailed demands about halting such construction.

So what would Obama say about Palestine? I admired Ben Ehrenreich’s recent New York Times Magazine piece from the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, in the West Bank—just as I have admired Lawrence Wright’s work for this magazine in Gaza, Amira Hass’s articles from the West Bank in Haaretz, Taghreed el-Khodary’s work for the Times in Gaza—precisely because that brand of reporting and writing gets at the realities of Palestinian life not through high-handed and uninformed opinion or second-hand speculation but through a keen attention to the people themselves. And so it was also good to hear Obama, after going to such lengths to demonstrate his understanding of Israeli opinion and realities, pivot and call on his audience to empathize with the day-to-day realities of Palestinians, whose “right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized”: