A. Even after we allow for the president's understandable emphasis on domestic issues, the lack of mention of Israel-related peace process issues is striking. Obama dealt briefly but pointedly in his address with other Middle East issues: Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Iran and Iraq. That he did not devote even a sentence or two to the administration's efforts to reconvene Israeli-Palestinian peace talks or the likelihood of convening Israeli-Syrian talks appears to reflect one or both of two possibilities.

One is that the administration assesses that the prospects for a breakthrough in Israel-Arab affairs in the coming months are very low. This would correspond with Obama's "Time" interview on the occasion of completing his first year in office, where he acknowledged having overestimated the prospects for progress and underestimated the political impediments on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. Accordingly, Obama wanted to avoid boosting expectations by keeping mum in his state of the union address.

A second, not necessarily contradictory reading of Obama's speech is that he is signaling Israelis and Arabs that they are in the process of falling off his agenda. He did not quite offer the White House phone number as did Secretary of State James Baker some 20 years ago, but perhaps his intention is not that far off: an ultimatum to Israel and the Palestinians to get their act together or risk losing American interest.

Obama sent brief but important messages regarding two other Middle East issues in his speech. He dealt with Iran in the same breath as North Korea, even though the former is not, or at least not yet, a nuclear power while the latter is. And he offered Iran only isolation and punishment--it "will face growing consequences"--without a hint of lingering readiness for engagement. 

And turning to Iraq, the president said clearly, "this war is ending, and all our troops are coming home". This is of course the fulfillment of an important campaign promise. Obama did not mention the ongoing signs of instability in Iraq: terrorist attacks, Iranian machinations and manipulation of the political system and the upcoming elections. If things work out there as the US withdraws troops and the situation stabilizes, Obama will get credit for the withdrawal but his predecessor, George W. Bush, will take credit for having defanged and democratized Iraq. If things don't work out well and the US still pulls out--Iraq fragments and exports terrorism, Iran and other neighbors intervene, the Kurdish autonomous enclave in the north is endangered--the failure will be seen to have taken place entirely on Obama's watch. 

A. This new document is a follow-up to one published last August by the PA: a landmark blueprint entitled "Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State", which presented a two-year plan for building the security, economic and governance institutions of a Palestinian state. In presenting that plan, PM Salam Fayyad, its principal author, declared that if peace negotiations did not progress sufficiently within the following two years while the Palestinians succeed in their state-building enterprise, they would appeal to the United Nations for recognition as an independent state. Fayyad did not hesitate to compare his project to that of David Ben Gurion during the "Yishuv" period that preceded 1948: the Israelis had a state-in-waiting ready for the UN decision to create a Jewish state; now Palestinians would do the same.

The Fayyad plan is important, for three reasons. First, under Fayyad the PA really is creating the institutions of a functioning state. Second, this success follows repeated Palestinian failures at state-building since the 1993 Oslo agreements. And third, there is no peace process, meaning that the Fayyad plan is currently the only game in town.

The new PA document, "Palestine: Moving forward. Priority Interventions for 2010", lays out each and every state-building project for the current year, its cost and the availability of funds to implement it. Upgrading public service and building infrastructure and government institutions are projected to cost over $5.5 billion, with only half this sum in the Palestinian coffers or even pledged and only 54 out of 201 specific projects currently funded. Some of the unfunded projects are in East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, where in any case the Israeli and Hamas governments respectively prevent implementation. 

Typically, the funded projects include "building a national archives system", creating an administrative training institute for civil servants, "constructing and rehabilitating security headquarters" and "establishing a Palestinian barcoding system". A lot of international donor development funding has been poured down the drain of Palestinian corruption and inefficiency and Palestinian-Israeli war in the past 17 years. But the Fayyad plan appears to be money very well spent.

What happens if those institutions of state really are put in place before final status negotiations are completed (or even started)? A unilateral Palestinian attempt to obtain international recognition of statehood could end up being either a constructive or a destructive move, depending on the reaction of Israel and (especially in the UN Security Council) the United States. It would be far better for Israel and the PLO to negotiate a two-state solution by then, thereby avoiding the risks of a Palestinian unilateral step. But for better or for worse, a lot of Israeli-Palestinian history has, over the decades, been determined by unilateral steps.

A. Hamas is currently not doing well. The assassination last week in Dubai of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas operative who abducted and killed two Israeli soldiers in the 1990s and was more recently in charge of channeling Iranian arms and funds to Hamas in Gaza, indicates that whoever carried out the killing had deep intelligence penetration of Hamas leadership circles. Egypt, which has been rounding up Islamist terrorist operatives and is building an underground wall to stop arms and other smuggling between Gaza and Sinai, has essentially ended all its mediation attempts between Hamas and Fateh (concerning a unity government) and between Hamas and Israel (prisoner exchange and ceasefire) and is blaming Hamas militancy for these failures.

Hamas and its leaders are also losing ground in Palestinian opinion polls as the Gazan population comes to terms with Hamas' failure to provide the basic necessities. Hamas' hard-line positions have prevented both reunification with the PLO/ West Bank and a prisoner exchange that would see hundreds of Hamas prisoners returned by Israel to their families in Gaza. On the other hand, Hamas' efforts over the past year--since Operation Cast Lead last January--to restrain more extreme Islamist organizations from firing rockets into Israel have prompted criticism by al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad that it is tacitly "collaborating" with Israel. 

The Egyptian underground wall will not be completed for around a year. If by then Hamas' isolation and Gazans' misery continue, Hamas is liable to face a more or less complete cut-off of any but the most minimal supplies of food and medicine permitted by Israel to the Strip. This could bring about a "moment of truth": either Hamas softens its negotiating positions in order to find a modus vivendi with Israel, Egypt and possibly West Bank-based Fateh as well, or it launches a new round of violence against Israel in the hope that "stirring the pot" will somehow improve its fortunes. Two additional factors that could push Hamas leaders' decision-making in the direction of renewing violence are hard-line policy demands from Tehran and the possible advent of renewed Israeli-PLO peace negotiations that are not to the Islamists' liking.