Benjamin Kerstein;

Elected to enact sweeping, revolutionary change, especially in the Middle East, Obama’s efforts thus far have been an embarrassing failure. Netanyahu shows no signs of making preliminary concessions, Abbas is threatening to resign rather than face negotiations with Israel without a complete settlement freeze, and the Arab states show no signs of making any gestures toward normalization. Faced with humiliation on all fronts, Obama is currently busy trying to placate all sides, telling both us and the Palestinians what he thinks we want to hear, while convincing no one of his sincerity.
Less than a year into his term, then, Obama is presented with two potentially disastrous scenarios. First, he may come out of this looking weak, feckless, and incompetent in one of the areas he promised to be most effective and influential. The damage to his political standing and prestige could be immense. Second, and more importantly, his image (and, I suspect, self-image) as an omnipotent healer and messianic agent of change, already badly compromised, could be shattered completely. Given that his meteoric political rise was based on little more than that image – a fact of which he must be at least subconsciously aware – such an outcome would place not only his foreign policy clout but his entire presidency in jeopardy.
Given all this, it is not unthinkable that Obama may have concluded that the only way out of this impasse of his own making is to make an unexpected, game-changing move; one that would both remake the map of the Middle East and cement his reputation as the harbinger of a new politics and a “new world,” as he put it in his Cairo speech. Recognition of a unilaterally declared Palestinian state is precisely the kind of Hail Mary pass he may be looking for. It would bring him the adoration of his far-left base and the Arab nations, as well as many European politicians; it would turn him into the hero who defied the dreaded Israel Lobby; and it would write his name into the history books as the man who ended a century-old conflict. There might even be a second Nobel Prize in the offing, this time for actually accomplishing something. One imagines that such temptations may well be difficult to resist.

h/t Ben