Israel has “real opportunities” to build better relations with Arab countries, Antony Blinken imagined, out loud, on Tuesday.

Joe Biden’s top diplomat is on his fourth trip to the Mideast in as many months. These are thankless missions to be sure. Like US officials before him going back decades, Blinken is seen in the Arab world as akin to Israel’s attorney. At best. At worst, he’s an envoy from Israel’s chief enabler in the maintenance of a cruel apartheid regime built atop an illegitimate colonial project.

(Don’t shoot the messenger, folks: Although I happen to agree with America’s critics on this particularly issue, here I’m merely explaining how the US is often viewed in the context of Palestinian oppression.)

Blinken on Monday said Mohammed Bin Salman still has a “clear interest” in normalizing ties with Israel, on two conditions. Readers can probably guess what those conditions are. First, the war has to end. Second, the Crown Prince wants to see real progress towards a Palestinian state.

Blinken came to Israel on Tuesday carrying that message, which he delivered first to Isaac Herzog, then to Israel Katz (the Israeli foreign minister) before ultimately meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet. Blinken, speaking to Katz with the cameras rolling, said he’s apprised of Israel’s “efforts, over many years, to build better integration in the Mideast.”

Some Arab nations, the Kingdom among them, may indeed still be willing to engage with Israel at some point, but to describe the war in Gaza as a setback would be to materially understate the case.

There are 23,000 dead in the enclave that we know of, and scores more buried beneath concrete and other rubble. Half the population is on the brink of starvation, according to the UN, and at least 80% of Gazans are displaced.

As The Wall Street Journal put it Tuesday, Gaza has effectively “shrunk by two-thirds.” “The Israeli invasion has reduced the ground available to the territory’s 2.2 million people to an area slightly larger than the Bronx,” the linked article noted.

That’s anathema to the Arab world, and although Israel says it’s transitioning to a less invasive stage of the war, some high-profile members of Netanyahu’s far-right government, including Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, recently called for the en masse deportation (“immigration”) of Palestinians from the strip, rhetoric Blinken’s State Department publicly decried as “inflammatory and irresponsible.” And that’s to say nothing of ongoing provocations in the West Bank.

Suffice to say that even if Netanyahu’s more practical than Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, that’s a very low bar. And clearing it (which just entails not saying things deemed crazy by all interested parties) won’t come anywhere near placating the Saudis, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and so on.

Still, Blinken said, Arab leaders (and Ankara) are prepared to engage in “difficult conversations and make hard decisions” in order to “forge the way forward.”

For now, it isn’t clear what that way forward is. Israel still has no real “day after” plan. Yoav Gallant (the defense minister who’s in the news every few hours) recently suggested Israel would allow Palestinians to stay in Gaza (how generous) but won’t accept a governing role for the Palestinian Authority (which is handy, because Gazans probably don’t want that either).

On Tuesday, protesters gathered outside Blinken’s Tel Aviv hotel demanding Biden pressure Netanyahu to bring home the rest of the hostages. “Only you can save them!” a sign shouted.

Meanwhile, Israel claimed the strike which killed Wissam Al-Tawil on Monday. It’s rare that the Israeli government formally takes credit for strikes and assassinations.

“In regards to the hit in southern Lebanon, we eliminat[ed] the Radwan force’s acting commander,” Katz told Israel’s Channel 14. “It’s part of the war.”