Should read:

No Democratic administration (and most Republican ones) would not have governed as we have over the last eight years.  Obama is no different.  

BooMan, Oslo was dead well before George W. Bush came along. In any case, it was a sellout of the Palestinians, and it did not fail, it had exactly the results the Israelis and their supporters intended. It was a great success for Israel and a disaster for the Palestinians, just as it was intended to be. Many of us, including far better people than I, recognized that reality from the beginning and never supported Oslo. (And by the way, if you have not read Hanan Ashrawi's book you should do so. It clarifies a lot. What a shame she has been so sidelined.)

The success of Hamas in the elections had everything to do with Palestinians looking for an alternative - any alternative - to the thuggish, corrupt Fatah collaborators, who had always served themselves and their U.S. and Israeli masters far more than they had the Palestinians. That, and not Bush's failure to support the already-long-dead Oslo and other phony "peace processes", was the reason that so many, including large numbers of secular and Christian Palestinians, preferred to vote for Hamas.

"Fatah is the only partner that is useful"? Useful to whom? Certainly not to the Palestinians, and they have not been ever since they discovered how to feather their own nests with "peace process" after "peace process".

And what useful partner have the Palestinians EVER had in Israel (or, heaven forbid, the U.S.)? None, of course, because Israel's long-term goal is as it has always been, to cause the Palestinians to slowly but surely disappear, and the U.S. has never seriously challenged Israel's right to pursue that goal. Those Palestinians are so stubborn, though aren't they? The old die, but the young do not forget, and they have sumud. They do not give up.

Sooner or later Israel will have to talk to Hamas, and the sooner the United States gets its fingers completely out of the pot and allows better-suited parties to move in the sooner this will happen. The best thing Obama could do would be to stop the pretense that the U.S. is any kind of "honest broker" and let those take over who can honestly and with integrity support the rights and interests of both parties, and put real, genuine pressure on Israel to seek peace rather than more and more and more conquest.

The Palestinians have been ready for decades. The Arab League has for six years been offering Israel everything it claims it wants, and for six years Israel has been refusing to even discuss it. Syria has shown willingness to make peace since Hafez Al Asad's time, and Israel has demonstrated clearly that illegally holding onto someone else's territory means more to it than peace. So, it is not Israel and the U.S. that do not have a useful partner.