More evidence emerges today of the change in the American political scene regarding settlements and occupation that I have been writing and speaking about in numerous forums for more than a year now. This dramatic shift is the essential backdrop to President Obama’s Middle East trip that begins today.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency notes that, “Even as it publicly stakes out a hard-line position against Israeli settlement expansion, the Obama administration is avoiding serious criticism from most U.S. Jewish groups and pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers. Key pro-Israel Jewish Democrats have backed the president on the importance of an Israeli settlement freeze while also suggesting there is room for a compromise between the Netanyahu government and the White House. Meanwhile, the major Jewish centrist organizations — including the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and AIPAC — have refrained from issuing statements criticizing the Obama administration on the issue."

Nathan Guttman of Ha’aretz has a similar story today, observing accurately that, "For the first time in America’s decades of jousting with Israel over West Bank settlements, an American president seems to have succeeded in isolating the settlements issue and disconnecting it from other elements of support for Israel.” He writes that when Prime Minister Netanyahu visited members of Congress following his meeting with President Obama, " he was ‘stunned,’ Netanyahu aides said, to hear what seemed like a well-coordinated attack against his stand on settlements. The criticism came from congressional leaders, key lawmakers dealing with foreign relations and even from a group of Jewish members. They included Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee; California Democrat Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, and California Rep. Henry Waxman, a senior Democrat.” Guttman adds, "according to the congressional aide, lawmakers rejected Netanyahu’s call for Palestinian reciprocity on terrorism as a precondition and kept pressing him on the need to stop building in settlements.”

And Ha’aretz also reports that, " The U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, will arrive in Israel next Monday night. He will meet with Netanyahu the day after in a bid to obtain clarifications regarding the U.S. demand to stop construction in the settlements and on the principle of two states for two peoples.”

These gestures by President Obama and the members of Congress in question are not cost-free. They are significant, bold and serious steps, breaking with traditional approaches and eschewing both the lowest common denominator and the siren song of doing nothing. As the President has his meetings in Saudi Arabia today and his speech in Egypt tomorrow, everyone in the Arab and Muslim world who deals with or listens to him should bear in mind that this is someone who has changed the political landscape in very short order and entirely for the better. It has been years if not decades since the Arabs and the Palestinians, and everyone who is interested in peace and stability in the Middle East, has been presented with such dramatic opportunities to work with American policy and achieve important results.

Obama is acting in the American national interest, but he is doing so in a more enlightened manner than some of his predecessors. The Palestinians, the Arab states, Israel and the other key actors need to do the same: proceed now on the basis of their rational self-interest over the long run. Obama has laid down a new standard for being constructive and serious in pursuit of long-term national interests with regard to peace in the Middle East and it is up to everyone else now, not sometime in the future, to live up to this new standard of responsibility.