The focus at present on the Middle East, particularly the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, has virtually disappeared. More directly, the position of the Palestinians, led by the Palestine Liberation Organisation, has hardly been noteworthy in the United States media.

But an Op-Ed written by Palestinian ambassador in Washington, Maen R. Areikat, appeared in the popular online American newspaper, the Huffington Post, in which he protested that successive US administration’s “have done very little to stop the expansion of the (illegal Israeli) [colony] enterprise”.

Americans are nowadays obviously more involved in their upcoming presidential elections, where some Republican leaders have regrettably sounded racist or sectarian. Likewise, Europe has been dealing with the influx of Arab refugees from strife-torn Syria and Iraq, where [Daesh or the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] has challenged Arab and European governments.

A headline in last Sunday’s New York Times has exposed an unexpected turnaround in Israel. It read: ‘Israel is moving away from the vision of its largely secular founders’. Religious Zionism, according to Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, an Israeli research centre, regards the illegal Israeli colonies in the occupied West Bank where some 600,000 Israelis live as “its most important creation in this generation”, but nowadays, “there is a growing sense that they are the true future of Zionism, because secular Zionism has been in decline for decades”.

A few days after this surprise revelation, US President Barack Obama took the unprecedented step of visiting a mosque in Baltimore, which, in the words of the Washington Post, was “to repair the increasingly frayed relationship between American Muslims and their fellow citizens”. This belated visit, the second by an American president to a Muslim house of prayer, in the midst of what the Post described as “a climate that in recent months has unnerved many American Muslims and surprised senior White House officials”, and during a presidential campaign marked by “inflammatory and anti-Islamic rhetoric” by Republican presidential hopefuls, especially Donald Trump, who has suggested a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US.

For the record, however, former US president George W. Bush had visited the Islamic Cultural Center in Washington six days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, where he declared, “Islam is peace” and “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam”. Obama’s appearance, the Washington Post noted, was “extraordinary for its contrast to a stirring address delivered in the first months of his presidency ... speaking in Cairo” to more than one billion Muslims for a “new beginning” with the US. But seven years later, in Baltimore, Obama’s aims, the Post pointed out “were far more modest in (his) spare and modest speech”.

But the memorable stance of Obama, whose father is a Muslim, told American Muslims that day: “If you’re ever wondering whether you fit in here, let me say it as clearly as I can, as President of the United States: You fit in here — right here.” He added, “You’re right where you belong. You’re part of America, too.” To the surprise of many, Obama, in turn, took the unprecedented step of attending a ceremony last month at the Israeli Embassy to posthumously honour four persons — two Americans and two Poles — for saving Jews during the Holocaust.

But, regrettably, Obama failed to come up with any ideas that would help in confronting antagonism against Muslims such as introducing high school students to the three faiths — Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Another key issue, which is disappointingly overlooked by the Obama administration, but underlined by Palestinian Ambassador Areikat, has been the Israeli “[colony] enterprise” in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that “swallows up Palestinian land”. More seriously, he continued, it “destroys the social and economic fabric of Palestinian society, breeds violence similar to what has been taking place in recent months, and, above all, jeopardises the creation of a viable, contiguous and sovereign Palestinian state”.

The failure of Obama, to seriously follow up on his earlier promises, and Secretary of State John Kerry, with his long-winding peace negotiations with the Israeli side, will certainly diminish the image of this American administration.

George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com