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(PhatzNewsRoom / Politico) — AMMAN, Jordan — The White House insisted there would be no huge breakthroughs on President Barack Obama’s first trip to Israel as president — a promise Obama kept.

He made some progress in key areas — not hard to do given how little Obama accomplished in the region during his first term. But building on those steps would require the kind of sustained involvement Obama seems hesitant to do.

Obama did seem to improve his standing significantly with the Israeli public and patch up his bruised relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That’s probably a prerequisite for progress on Mideast peace, even if there’s nothing to show for it right away.

Here are POLITICO’s takeways from Obama’s visit to the region.

Bibi and Barack patch it up

For Obama and Netanyahu, it was definitely not love at first sight in 2009. But during the president’s three days in Israel, they finally seemed to build some rapport.

Netanyahu, who’s old enough that his first run as prime minister was when Bill Clinton was president in the 1990s, also leapt at every opportunity to pick up on Obama’s youthful charisma. When Obama stripped off his suit jacket and strode across the Tel Aviv airport tarmac in his shirtsleeves, proclaiming, “I’m a young man. I like to walk,” Netanyahu quickly stripped off his suit coat, as well. As photographers snapped away, the two men walked side by side with their jackets slung over their shoulders, looking vigorous and producing one of the iconic images of the trip.

Obama quickly struck a kind of buddy-buddy vibe with Netanyahu, noting some colored markings on the pavement and quipping, “He’s always talking to me about red lines.”

By the time of a state dinner Thursday night, Obama and Netanyahu were leaning in to each other like old friends, chatting intensely. The president even used his hand to try to shield their words from prying cameras.

During their joint appearances, Netanyahu gushed over Obama, saluting his “great success mobilizing the international community” to sanction Iran over its nuclear program. The Israeli prime minister said he would “cherish” Obama’s remarks on the historical origins of the state of Israel and said there’s more between them now than most have come to expect.

“I think that people should get to know President Obama the way I’ve gotten to know him,” Netanyahu said, suggesting a kind of intimacy entirely at odds with the first four years of their relationship.

The White House’s decision to have Obama speak to the Israeli people from a convention center rather than at the Knesset and the public declaration that the speech was the centerpiece of the president’s trip initially seemed like a snub — a kind of end-run around Netanyahu. But the move also took some pressure off the leaders’ relationship. Obama did the same when he stressed publicly that he understood the complex nature of Israeli politics and Netanyahu’s new coalition, accepting that big breakthroughs on the peace process would require more than just a nod from the prime minister.

During Obama’s first couple of years in office, he pursued a strategy on Israeli-Palestinian peace that — intentionally or not — seemed to involve putting greater distance between the United States and the Jewish state. The initial approach sought to set the U.S. up as a kind of fair broker between Israel and the Palestinians by essentially prodding the Israelis to concede to Palestinians’ longtime demands that Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank cease before talks could resume.

It didn’t work and helped generate significant political blowback in the U.S. that dogged the president all the way through the 2012 election.

Obama’s second-term strategy became clear during the trip: express such unqualified, heartfelt love and affection for Israelis and the state of Israel that they trust him to have Israel’s back in future peace talks, then coax Palestinians back to the table despite the improbability that Israel will halt settlement construction outside the context of some kind of peace deal.

Going into the trip, Obama was going to make gestures of support for Zionism, like visiting the grave of the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl.

But Obama warmed the hearts of many Jews by paying tribute to the ideas of Zionism and Jews’ historic connection to the Holy Land within minutes of getting off the plane. Sure, he didn’t kiss the tarmac as some Jews do. But his statements were unequivocal and rejected Arab narratives about Jews and the Jewish state being interlopers or worse.

“I know that in stepping foot on this land, I walk with you on the historic homeland of the Jewish people,” the president declared just 20 seconds into his remarks at the Tel Aviv airport. “More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here, tended the land here, prayed to God here.”

One of the downsides to Obama’s strategy is that in a part of the world where many take a zero-sum point of view, any step closer to the Israelis is a step away from the Palestinians. And the bear hug Obama seemed to give Israel left many Palestinians feeling they’d gotten the cold shoulder.

Obama’s itinerary fed that discomfort. While Israelis got a 50-minute speech to the nation and Obama’s presence at a state dinner, there were no such events for the Palestinians. He spoke for about 10 minutes at a press conference with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and then took a couple of questions.

Despite the lack of parity, Obama did say some things that could resonate with Palestinians. He compared the plight of their children to African-Americans in the United States under Jim Crow. And he criticized “settler violence against Palestinians [that] goes unpunished.”

But other aspects of Obama’s strategy remain murky. Obama seemed to publicly endorse a “borders and security ” first approach Secretary of State John Kerry has discussed publicly, urging the two parties to try to settle those questions before tackling trickier issues like Jerusalem, right of return for refugees and whether Palestinians will recognize Israel as a Jewish state. But a senior Obama administration official also dismissed “a lot of interim measures” as the way forward.

“What we want to do is get down to the fundamental issues here so the parties are dealing with questions that will resolve the conflicts, not simply open up a process of discussion,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Surprise substance: Obama defrosts Israel-Turkey ties

In advance of the trip, the White House signaled — almost boasted — that it didn’t expect any significant policy announcements during the visit. Yet a breakthrough came on an issue rarely mentioned in the U.S. press before this trip: Obama helped oversee a defrosting of the relationship between Israel and Turkey, the first majority Muslim country to recognize Israel and still one of the few to do so.

Relations between Ankara and Jerusalem went into a deep freeze in 2010 after an Israeli commando raid on a Turkish flotilla that claimed to be bringing aid to Gaza. The raid killed Turkish nationals and one American. Israel said their commandos came under attack from the self-styled peace activists.

Turkish officials demanded an apology and as recently as earlier this month, continued to sling hostile rhetoric at Israel. At a United Nations conference in Vienna, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan called Zionism a “crime against humanity,” a description that particularly rankles Jews in light of the Holocaust.

Netanyahu appears to have decided that Obama’s overtures or entreaties made it worth bending a bit. So on Friday, moments before the president took off from Israel for Jordan, Netanyahu and Obama went into a trailer at the Tel Aviv airport and made a call to Erdogan. With Obama standing by, the Israeli prime minister offered a kind of qualified apology, expressing regret for any loss of life caused by Israeli mistakes in the raid. Then the president jumped on the call and thanked the pair for getting things back on track.

“I discussed it with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and both of us agreed that the moment was right, and fortunately, they were able to begin the process of rebuilding normal relations between two very important countries in the region,” Obama said in a statement afterward.

Urgency of Iran raid decision dialed back

It could be simply that both Netanyahu and Obama were eager to paper over their differences about how best to resolve the grave concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, but the U.S. and Israeli stances seemed a little less in conflict during Obama’s visit to Israel.

While Netanyahu talked last fall about a need to act by spring — which just began — or by summer, he did not use that language this time around but instead spoke in vaguer terms. “Whatever time is left, there’s not a lot of time,” he said.

It’s unclear exactly why Netanyahu isn’t publicly suggesting action needs to be taken in the next few months, as he suggested would be the case in his speech at the United Nations last year. However, there are some indications that the Iranians might have encountered some difficulties in their program or might have chosen to slow it down somewhat for some reason.

So while it’s still the case that the U.S. and Israel differ about how soon action should be taken if Iran doesn’t abandon the program, the pressure to resolve those difference seems to have eased. That looks to have been enough to avoid a sharper exchange on this point during Obama’s visit.

Obama fears being drawn in on Syria

One of the three issues officially on the agenda for this trip was the crisis in Syria. The humanitarian aspect of the civil war there is disturbing enough, but the situation now threatens to destabilize other countries in the region, including Jordan.

King Abdullah II painted a frightening picture for Obama of the situation, with an estimated 460,000 Syrians having crossed the border to escape the fighting. The total could hit 1 million by the end of the year.

“This has added economic and financial costs due to the influx and has further strained the economy that is already under considerable external pressures with an unstable region,” Abdullah told reporters.

The U.S. has contributed aid to Jordan to help address the crisis and recently cleared the way to deliver more aid to Syrians in rebel-controlled areas. Obama said Friday that he will ask Congress to chip in another $200 million. But the administration has for more than a year rebuffed suggestions to send U.S. arms to the rebels despite former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey pressing for such aid.

A former Obama aide said one of the president’s concerns about aiding the rebels is that it will lead to calls for direct U.S. military action.

“There are second- and third-order consequences to that sort of decision that are enormous,” former White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said on MSNBC last week. “We’re at the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq war. I think we need to remember … that 150,000 troops couldn’t stop a sectarian war.”

However, many former national security officials believe the U.S. should use military aid to hasten the fall of the Assad regime and to preserve U.S. influence with the future leaders of Syria.

”It’s shameful what we’re doing. We’re sitting on our hands,” said Steve Hadley, deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush. “I know there’s a lot of nervousness those weapons could end up in the wrong hands. … If we keep doing what were doing, sitting on our hands, those weapons will end up in the wrong hands, because they will flow from other sources. … Every reason people gave for not arming has only gotten worse.”

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