It is unfortunate that President Barack Obama visited only Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and Jordan, when this week marks the 10th anniversary of the disastrous American war on Iraq where, as a result, some 5,000 US soldiers were killed and the US government is paying about $12 billion a year, and is expected to continue paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as US service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

To date, the Iraq war has cost the US some $60 billion.

Of course, hardly any visible American remorse is expressed to the Iraqi people who are still in a tinderbox as a result of the ill-fated American intervention during the Bush presidency and of Iraq’s growing factional war among various religious sects there.

Additionally, this week marks the 10th anniversary of the death of an admirable American peace activist, Rachel Corrie, a member of the International Solidarity Movement, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, while taking part in a non-violent movement to prevent the Israeli army’s demolition of Palestinians’ houses.

Corrie came to Gaza as part of her senior-year college assignment to connect her hometown with Rafah in a twinning programme.

There are low expectations, in the US and the Middle East, from the unprecedented visit by the American president, in part because there are no indications that the Israeli government is serious about negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians who, until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, were in full control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which constituted about 22 per cent of their original homeland.

It would have been more logical for Secretary of State John Kerry to be the first to go to Israel and assess the chances of resuming Palestinian-Israeli peace talks in order to pave the way for an Obama visit. But since the result of the recent Israeli elections diminished the status of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose bloc lost many candidates, he had to look for new partners to join his coalition government.

Kerry, who is now accompanying the president, will be going to Israel next weekend to follow up on whatever was discussed.

Another low-key objective for Obama was to mend his supposedly cool relationship with Netanyahu and other Israelis, since after his first visit to the Middle East during his first term he did not include a stopover in Israel.

Whether he will be successful now is too early to tell despite public efforts to assure Israelis that Obama is on their side.

Jeffrey Goldberg, described in the Israeli left-leaning newspaper Haaretz as “one of the most influential journalists in the United States” and who interviewed Obama several times, told the paper: “I think what many Israelis don’t understand is that Obama, from one angle of approach, is probably the most Jewish president the United States has ever had.”

Goldberg, who had immigrated to Israel when he was younger and had joined the Israeli army, cited Obama’s relationships with various Jewish groups. He is said to have been influenced by Reform rabbis and liberal Jewish lawyers in his hometown, Chicago, and at Harvard University.

“In a certain way,” Goldberg said, Obama “could be placed in the spiritual and moral mainstream of American liberal Judaism”.

The prime minister, who has avoided discussing the relationship with the Palestinians during the election campaign and in negotiations with other party leaders before announcing his new Cabinet, suddenly declared two days before Obama’s departure for Israel on Wednesday: “We extend our hand in peace to the Palestinians …. Israel will be ready for a historic compromise that will end the conflict with the Palestinians once and for all.”

But how can he do that with a Cabinet that has extremist members is unfathomable.

Members of the new Knesset include the Jewish Home Party, which rejects any concessions to the Palestinians, and Netanyahu’s diminished bloc, Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu, is also dominated by hardliners. And to top it all, his new defence and health ministers are well-known sympathisers of the illegal Israel settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that now number about 500,000.

In an editorial, the Los Angeles Times said last Tuesday that the “chief purpose [of Obama’s visit] seems to prove to Israelis that he supports them by visiting the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem and saying the right words at the grave of Zionism’s founding father, Theodor Herzl”.

Obama will not be visiting in Ramallah the grave of Yasser Arafat, the founder of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, nor the Israel-built wall separating Israel from the West Bank. This and other indications have prompted the paper to observe that “others wonder aloud whether the time for a two-state solution has come and gone”.

The American president has to tread softly but firmly during his current visit.