Andrew Sullivan makes a good point on a positive outcome of the Administration’s failure to restart meaningful peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians:

We have seen a laborious, frustrating, endless attempt to get the Israeli government to get serious about stopping settlements and work on a peace deal. The constant humiliations at the hand of Netanyahu, the contempt shown the US by Netanyahu’s coalition partners, the massive bribes just to get Israel contemplating a minimal settlement freeze, the Pavlovian way in which Israel’s reflexive supporters have done all they can to stymie any movement … well, it’s been an exhaustive experience, hasn’t it?

But here’s the point: it has proven to almost everyone that nothing serious can get done between the current Israeli polity and the promising, if still inchoate, nation-builders in the West Bank. Obama has not asserted this; he has demonstrated it. And this is the key difference between Bush and Obama. Bush constantly declared things to be so. Obama waits until everyone sees it for sure.

This patience, moreover, does not go nowhere. Failure leads to new terms for success. And what Obama has done is get Netanyahu unwittingly to make the global argument that a peace settlement cannot be won with Israel’s support and cooperation –  but can only be imposed somehow from outside. The two years of trying so clearly to make the old model work has … proven the old model is finished. Now watch the U.N.

So, what should the US  do next? In my opinion: nothing. Certainly not another attempt “to bring the parties together.” The peace talks have become a tool to legitimize Israeli occupation. It provides Jerusalem with a diplomatic umbrella and it has a negative effect on the internal Israeli political dynamic, by providing centrist parties like Labor and Kadima an excuse to sit in coalitions with right-wing partners.

The last two years have showed that even a well-meaning American president is limited in his ability to apply pressure on Jerusalem. They have also showed that without such pressure, reaching an agreement is practically impossible. The reasonable conclusion is to let the Israeli political leadership face the consequences of its decisions: stop trying to force it to move forward, but at the same time, stop saving it when it finds itself in tough corners (i.e. Goldstone, flotilla, UN resolutions, EU decisions, etc.)