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On Monday in Beirut, nothing will happen. Yet again. George Mitchell, the special envoy of US President Barack Obama for the Middle East, will visit Beirut on Monday, and nothing will happen on the front of the region’s peace process, just as largely nothing has happened in the nearly 10 years since Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, was elected president.

This might sound like an accusation, an implication that the US alone is somehow to blame for the lack of progress in creating peace between the Israelis and Arabs; that’s not exactly right – the fault of all that is wrong in the Middle East does not lie only with somebody else, despite the many loud claims one might hear to...