Daniel Levy

If Obama begins to grasp the tribal, fluid and divided nature of Israeli politics and how to impact Israeli voters and their leaders (including Yair Lapid, the new leader of the Ashkenazi middle-class tribe), then this visit might be worth something after all.

President Obama will continue to navigate the shifting geopolitics and earthquakes in the region with patience and pragmatism. But he will do so without a confidant in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office for as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is its occupant.

The 2012 elections may well prove to be a watershed in Israel-U.S. relations. Israel's chauvinist turn is increasingly out of sync with America's values, Netanyahu is no longer a useful ally, and Obama has new global priorities – and a war of choice with Iran is not one of them.

It is time for Israel to engage in the exercise that Palestinians have begun, and to ask what it is that we really want for ourselves.

Israel's strategic environment - notably the capacity it provides to avoid making choices and to disguise the status quo as progress - is about to change.

Israelis might consider sending thank-you bouquets today to the national soccer teams of Switzerland and Greece. It is thanks to them that Israelis will have to choose between getting behind Brazil, England, Ghana or whomever, as the World Cup kicks off.

It is the human and civil rights community, the New Israel Fund, the demonstrators at Sheikh Jarrah and the few brave public figures who have joined them - including David Grossman, Moshe Halbertal and Ron Pundak - who are now the standard-bearers and source of hope in this decisive phase of the struggle for Israel's future.

Is the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership, which is currently proposing to seek United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 border, about to shake up the Israeli-Palestinian paralysis in a game-changing way?

The much derided and scorned Obama team now has a tricky interlocutor, in this case Israel?s leader, who is enthusiastically embracing their target (endgame two-state negotiations) as his own.

During recent Iran post-elections riots, Israeli pundits have indulged in an orgy of self-righteousness, while revealing an awful lot about their ignorance of Iranian affairs.

Israel now has a friend in the White House who is willing to hold a mirror up to the hard realities of political power.

The leaderships in both Jerusalem and Ramallah appear to share one common goal: finding a comfort zone, a place where the peace process can continue ad infinitum, and hard decisions can be avoided.

If Livni wants her vision of two states to be both credible and meaningful, she needs to come up with a game-changer.

On paper, government guidelines always talk about peace. On the ground, though, governmental actions just further entrench the infrastructure of occupation and expand settlements.

Israel must do more than extend a cease-fire − Israel must allow Gaza to breathe, to live on more than international handouts and to reclaim its dignity.

A list of four of the more urgent issues in which Israel has a keen interest, and which are likely to force themselves onto the Obama team transition agenda and its early days in office.

The Livni Initiative would serve one additional and important goal: It would prove that Israel can still display bold and courageous leadership despite its dysfunctional and increasingly discredited political system. Over to you, Tzipi.

Don't expect preventive diplomacy to be swift or simple - but Israel would be making a terrible, even fatal, mistake if it attacked Iran.

The decision by the state to outsource so basic a national security function as the IDF with barely an eyebrow raised, is the real problem.

Complicity in Israeli settlements and occupation carry a heavy toll for America's standing in the region and beyond.

It would require a little hubris, but next week Olmert could help shape Middle East policy for Bush?s last year.

Any Israeli leader serious about ?stopping? Iran should tear up those speaking notes about 1938 and have a quiet diplomatic word in Uncle Sam?s ear.