Many people wonder why Barack Obama has proved so ineffectual in his aim of reviving two-state talks in the Middle East. They do not have to look far for an answer. In the last 10 days, Washington has been treated to two unusual interventions on Israel, one of which briefly captured the airwaves, the other largely sank without trace. It should have been the other way round.

The first, from Helen Thomas, 89, the “dean of the White House press corps”, caused deep offence. Ms Thomas said Israeli Jews should “go home to Poland, Germany, America – and everywhere else”. For a couple of days her explosive remarks competed for air-time with the deadly Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla. Yet few were surprised she was so breathtakingly prejudiced. By the end of its run, her (now defunct) weekly column had few readers.

In contrast, Washington largely overlooked a memo by Tony Cordesman, the (normally) influential national security thinker, in which he said that Benjamin Netanyahu's government was rapidly turning into a “strategic liability” for the US. “It is time Israel realised that it has obligations to the US, as well as the US to Israel, and that it becomes far more careful about the extent to which it tests the limits of US patience and exploits the support of American Jews,” he wrote.