Type of Content
Approved Story
1
Format
Region
Why now? What's the Obama administration playing at? Isn't it all a bit too little and much too late?
There's been much scratching of heads since the US took the unusual step of allowing a resolution condemning Israel's settlements policy to pass the UN Security Council last week.
And since John Kerry's speech on Wednesday, Obama's critics have spoken out against the president and his secretary of state for something they see as an unwarranted betrayal.
The former US diplomat Elliott Abrams, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, called the speech "the last defence of a policy that has achieved nothing except damaging bilateral relations".
Others suggested that while there was nothing remotely original about the solutions Mr Kerry offered - anyone familiar with recent decades of Arab-Israeli diplomacy will have recognised the formulas on settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, etc - the timing rendered the whole exercise futile.