Lip readers have been able to understand the private words exchanged between politicians in sight of the television cameras, but out of range of microphones. If only there were mind readers who, just as easily, could work out what was going on inside President Barack Obama’s head yesterday, on his visit the West Bank.

What for instance did he think, when he read the banner hung outside the Bab Al Shams Palestinian protest camp in Jerusalem “Obama: you promised hope and change, you gave us Colonies and Apartheid”? Did he reflect on the four wasted years of his first term, during which the extraordinary hopes raised in the Arab world by his seemingly ground-breaking Cairo speech, were dashed utterly? Did he consider how Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu had deployed the US Zionist lobby to spin a new web of influence and deceit around Capitol Hill and the White House, so ensuring that even if America’s extreme economic woes had allowed him the time to focus on the Palestinian issue, he would have found himself imprisoned?

To reiterate that Israel has “no greater friend” than the United States may have been obligatory but there was a caveat that hovered after this statement, which unfortunately remained unspoken. Obama could have gone on to say that sometimes, even good friends had to accept “tough love,” to take on board advice that they would rather not hear from their buddies. Maybe the president gave that advice to Netanyahu in private, but most in the Arab world will not be holding their breath. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of course will have given his American guest a warm welcome, but Obama can have been left in no doubt that most Palestinians have lost virtually all faith in his willingness, to say nothing of his ability, to put the peace process back on track and drive negotiations toward a just and lasting two-state solution.

When the US leader said that the condition for peace “must be a strong and secure Jewish state where its security concerns are met, alongside a sovereign and independent Palestinian state,” his words sounded hollow, if only because the Arab world has heard them all before. The strong and secure Jewish state is constantly having its security concerns met, and then some, by Washington. The concerns of the Palestinians for a sovereign and independent Palestine seem as far away as ever. Indeed Obama’s visit to Abbas, was the occasion for a demonstration of just how un-sovereign and captive the Palestinians actually are.

It must be wondered if the president was made aware that, in advance of his arrival in Ramallah, the telephone system went down. This, it must be assumed was a deliberate act by the Israelis on the grounds of security. There are two things that Obama ought to learn from this. First, it is a naked demonstration of the degree of throttling control that the Israeli security and intelligence machine exerts over the Occupied Territories. What passes for normal life among the subject Palestinians, only happens when the Israelis permit it. They can disrupt it whenever they wish, at the flick of a switch.

And second lesson that Obama ought to learn from this assertion of Israeli power is more subtle and he and his people may have missed it. It is that by taking down the communications system, the Israelis were clearly trying to impress upon the president, the high degree of risk that he and his party, including his new Secretary of State, John Kerry, were being exposed to, by venturing into “bandit” Palestinian territory. Such a stunt is deplorable.

Unfortunately, with predictable short-sightedness, militants in Gaza chose Obama’s Ramallah visit as the occasion to fire four rocket towards Israel territory, thus lending credence to Netanyahu’s inevitable argument to the Americans, that the Palestinians were not to be trusted and were ultimately interested only in the destruction of the Israeli state. The fact that two of the rockets misfired and landed in Gaza itself, suggests that they were not fired by a mainstream militant group. On the positive side perhaps, it gave Abbas the opportunity, in speaking to Obama, to condemn violence against civilians from wherever it came. Would a presidential mindreader have seen Obama remembering the savage Israeli assault on Gaza that began on the eve of his first entry into the Oval Office?

Obama’s mistake in Cairo was that he imagined that the rhetoric that won him the White House would also win a Palestinian settlement. He now has four more years to substitute fine words with real action.