On the afternoon of December 14, 2016, Ron Dermer, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, rode from his Embassy to the White House to attend a Hanukkah party. The Obama Administration was in its final days, and among the guests were some of the President’s most ardent Jewish supporters, who were there to bid him farewell. But Dermer, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, did not share their sense of loss. For the Israeli leadership, the Trump Presidency could not come soon enough.

Netanyahu believed that Barack Obama had “no special feeling” for the Jewish state, as one of his aides once put it, and he resented Obama’s argument that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was a violation of basic human rights and an obstacle to security, not least for Israel itself. He also believed that Obama’s attempt to foster a kind of balance of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East was naïve, and that it underestimated the depth of Iran’s malign intentions throughout the region.

Obama was hardly anti-Israel. His Administration had provided the country with immense military and intelligence support. He had also protected Netanyahu in the United Nations Security Council, when, in 2011, he issued his only veto, blocking a resolution condemning Jewish settlement building. And Obama opposed efforts by the Palestinians to join the International Criminal Court, after Netanyahu shouted over the telephone to the President’s advisers that “this is a nuclear warhead aimed at my crotch!” (Netanyahu’s office disputes the American account of the call.)

Some of Netanyahu’s supporters believed that the Prime Minister bore comparison to Richard Nixon, whose anti-Communist credentials gave him the political capacity to open the door to diplomatic relations with China. Dennis Ross, an adviser on Middle Eastern affairs during Obama’s first term, frequently told the President and members of the national-security team that there were two Netanyahus—the “strategic Bibi,” who was willing to make concessions, and the “political Bibi,” who pursued his immediate electoral interest. Ross made the point so often that, during one exchange in the Oval Office, Obama stopped him with a palm in front of his face: he had heard enough.

Over time, Obama and his advisers came to believe that Netanyahu had been playing them, occasionally feigning interest in a two-state solution while expanding settlements in the West Bank, thus making the creation of a viable Palestinian state increasingly difficult to conceive. By Obama’s second term, his aides no longer bothered to mask their frustration with the Israelis. “They were never sincere in their commitment to peace,” Benjamin Rhodes, one of Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers, told me. “They used us as cover, to make it look like they were in a peace process. They were running a play, killing time, waiting out the Administration.”

The relationship between Obama and Netanyahu grew more poisonous every year. In 2012, Obama’s team suspected that the Israeli leadership backed Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign. Tensions between Susan Rice, Obama’s national-security adviser, and Ron Dermer were so fierce that they never met alone. The Administration became convinced that Netanyahu, after years of threatening to use force against Iran, was bluffing, that he was really trying to goad the Americans into taking a harder line and even launching strikes of their own. One of Obama’s advisers was quoted as calling Netanyahu a “chickenshit,” causing a diplomatic uproar. Not everyone close to Obama regretted the epithet. One of the President’s top aides told another, “The only problem with the quote was that it wasn’t strong enough. It should have been ‘chickenshit motherfucker.’ ” By the spring of 2015, after Netanyahu delivered a theatrical speech to Congress condemning the Iran nuclear deal, Obama was “officially done pretending,” Rhodes said.

An era seemed to be ending. The 1993 Oslo Accords and subsequent negotiations had raised hopes among Palestinians that they would get a state comprising Gaza, the West Bank, and, as a capital, some part of East Jerusalem. But after years of settlement building, a second intifada, instability throughout the region, and the rise of absolutism on both sides, a paralyzing mistrust took hold. Although around half of Israelis and Palestinians still want two states, neither side believes the other will move forward in good faith.

Late in Obama’s second term, Secretary of State John Kerry brought to the White House a stack of maps of the West Bank that were prepared by the State Department and vetted by U.S. intelligence agencies. Kerry spread out the maps on a large coffee table. As Frank Lowenstein, one of Kerry’s top advisers, put it to me, the maps allowed him to see “the forest for the trees.” When the settlement zones, the illegal outposts, and the other areas off limits to Palestinian development were consolidated, they covered almost sixty per cent of the West Bank. “It looked like a brain tumor,” an official who attended the session told me. “No matter what metric you’re using—existing blocs, new settlements, illegal outposts—you’re confronting the end of the two-state solution.”

Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, had lost all faith in the Administration’s efforts. “You’ve been telling me to wait, and telling me to wait, and telling me to wait,” a former official recalled Abbas saying to Kerry during one particularly tense exchange. “You can’t deliver the Israelis.”

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In late September, 2016, Obama flew to Israel for the funeral of Shimon Peres, the former Prime Minister, who shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin for his part in the Oslo Accords. The signs of a shifting political climate were clear. Abbas attended the funeral, but he wasn’t acknowledged by any of the Israeli leaders in their remarks. After the service, veterans of the negotiations gathered on the terrace of the King David Hotel, in Jerusalem, for an impromptu lunch. Martin Indyk, the former U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, told the group, “This is the wake for the Oslo process.”

When Obama and the American delegation arrived back in the U.S., they learned that the Israeli government had approved the building of a new settlement in the West Bank. A top Obama adviser said that the move amounted to an unmistakable “F.U.”

And so, unlike the melancholy well-wishers who shouted “We love you, Mr. President!” to Obama at the White House Hanukkah party, Dermer saw the election of Donald Trump as an opportunity. Trump’s team promised a markedly more compliant policy where Israel was concerned. Later that day, Dermer went to another Hanukkah party, where he was far more welcome, just down Pennsylvania Avenue, at the Trump International Hotel. As Dermer told me, “We saw light at the end of the tunnel.”

The Israelis did have one lingering fear. They worried that, before Obama left office, his Administration would attempt to punish them at the U.N. Security Council. Israeli spy agencies had picked up on discussions about possible Security Council resolutions, ranging from a condemnation of settlements to a measure that would enshrine in international law so-called “final status” parameters, locking in Obama’s position on the two-state solution. Israeli officials say that intelligence reports submitted to Netanyahu showed that Obama and his team were secretly orchestrating the U.N. resolutions—a charge that the Americans later denied. Just after Trump’s election victory, Dermer expressed his anxieties about a possible resolution to Vice-President Joe Biden and told Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, “Don’t go to the U.N. It will force us into a confrontation. It will force us to reach out to the other side.” The “other side,” in this case, was the President-elect. (McDonough declined to comment, but officials close to him disputed Dermer’s account.)