Like most years in the Middle East, 2009 was not a particularly good one. War, instability, terrorism, and general mayhem showed no signs of permanently abating now or in the near future, but those of us who live here do have the cold comfort of reassuring ourselves that it certainly could have been worse. The year began, after all, with the aftermath of one war—Operation Cast Lead in Gaza—but appears to be ending without the outbreak of another. In this part of the world, that is enough reason to see the proverbial glass as half full.

This is not to say that 2009, again like most years in the Middle East, did not have its share of half-empty glasses. For Israel, the year began with war, and continued into bizarre and inconclusive elections, which ultimately put Benjamin Netanyahu in the prime minister’s office even though his party was bested at the polls by the now-opposition Kadima party. As everyone expected, this was followed by a long and painful struggle between Netanyahu and the newly inaugurated American President Barack Obama over negotiations with the Palestinians and, especially, Obama’s proposed settlement freeze. Though both Obama and Netanyahu smiled through gritted teeth throughout the whole ordeal, often making painfully stage-managed expressions of goodwill, the animosity between the two men was palpable, marking a new low in recent Israeli-American relations.

Domestically, at least, this worked very much to Netanyahu’s advantage, solidifying his government and giving him the aura of toughness and patriotic defiance he has always sought and previously failed to acquire. It must be said, however, that Netanyahu was mightily aided and abetted in this by Obama’s grotesque ineptitude, most especially his vaunted “speech to the Muslim world” in Cairo, which left Israelis aghast at the neophyte president’s bumbling equation of the Palestinian naqba to the Holocaust and the occupied territories to segregation in the United States. In the end, Netanyahu had to do little more than sit back and let Obama hang himself in the court of Israeli public opinion. Though he did eventually concede a limited freeze on settlement building outside of Jerusalem, no one but the most fanatical settlers took it seriously enough to expend much energy supporting or opposing it; and once it expires there is little expectation that it will be renewed.

On the Palestinian side, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had a far worse time of it, though he has managed to stay in office despite the collapse of his support among the Palestinian public. In particular, the perception that he acquiesced—perhaps happily—to Operation Cast Lead in the hopes of destroying his rivals in Hamas has massively damaged his standing among his own people, possibly irrevocably. Abbas survived nonetheless, propped up by American and Israeli recognition and support, and by the fact that his most popular secular rival, Marwan Barghouti, sits in an Israeli jail convicted of murder and terrorism. Essentially trapped in permanent checkmate, Abbas spent most of the year playing for time; alternatively threatening to resign and attempting to burnish his nationalist credentials by upping his anti-Israel rhetoric and refusing to negotiate without a complete settlement freeze, even long after it was clear that this would never happen. With a relatively sympathetic American president in office, one would have thought that Abbas would have been able to turn the situation to his advantage, but the vicissitudes of Palestinian politics have left him too weak and too dependent on Israeli largesse to do so.

Hamas, for its part, had a better year than Abbas or Netanyahu, although it must be noted that they had nowhere to go but up after having been militarily demolished by the IDF at the end of 2008. They did manage, however, to turn military defeat into a partial public relations victory, aided by the ever-dutiful United Nations in the form of the Goldstone Report, which also marked an event of historical significance, being the first time that the UN and the various human rights organizations that cluster around it officially declared themselves firmly on the side of terrorism. Nonetheless, the gambit was not a complete success, and Hamas remains isolated and mostly shunned by the rest of the world. Despite the best efforts of many, the international recognition the Gaza regime covets was ultimately not forthcoming. As a result, Hamas has chosen to quietly rebuild its arsenal and terrorist infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, waiting, one presumes, for the next precipitous moment.

The organization also managed to hold on to its trump card, in the person of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who remains illegally imprisoned by Hamas somewhere in the Gaza Strip. Shalit monopolized much of Israel’s collective emotions over the past year, with endless reports of possible prisoner exchanges in the offing, inevitably torpedoed at more or less the last moment. For Israelis, the prospect of such a deal never failed to arouse the mutually contradictory sentiments of anger that the deal has not yet been finalized and Shalit returned home; and anger that Israel will be releasing a great many terrorists in order to receive a single soldier in return. The issue also engendered a violent debate within Israel itself, with proponents of the deal claiming that Israel has an absolute obligation to bring its soldiers home and that to refuse to honor this obligation would cause immense damage to army morale, and opponents who claim that such a deal will only encourage more kidnappings and damage Israel’s deterrence. It seems certain, however, that Israel’s intensely paternal sentiments toward its soldiers will win out in the end. At the moment, rumors of yet another imminent deal are flying fast and furious in the Israeli media, leaving everyone in the country quietly hopeful while waiting for the inevitable other shoe to drop.

In the person of Shalit, Hamas has thus far retained its one source of leverage against Israel, but it has also been severely wounded by events outside of its immediate control — namely, the fact that 2009 was not a particularly good year for the type of Islamic totalitarianism the organization represents. Remarkably, the homeland of Islamic theocracy in Iran was shaken this year by what appears to be a genuine people’s uprising, thus far ongoing and incomplete. For their part, Israelis watched the events in Iran with hopeful but deeply skeptical eyes. Obviously, the overthrow of the regime and a possible peaceful end to the Iranian nuclear threat would be welcome developments to Israelis, but they are also naturally skeptical about any seemingly positive development in the region, and most of us watched convinced that at any moment the protestors would be crushed by the full force of the regime. The fact that this has not yet happened—though the oppression has been horrendous—is perhaps a hopeful sign. Nonetheless, optimism in regard to the uprisings must be tempered by the indifference of the international community and the shameful apathy of president Obama, who seems determined to pursue negotiations with the Iranian theocrats whatever the cost to the Iranian people.

Indeed, if there was any issue that remained permanently lodged in the back of Israeli minds this year, it was the Iranian nuclear problem. The seeming inaction on all sides, including our own, in regard to the issue has resulted in some particularly mordant examples of gallows humor, with Israelis casually remarking to each other that we should enjoy ourselves now because we’re all going to be nuked by Iran next year anyways. One shouldn’t dismiss such things, since Israelis tend to express their fears through humor, and pressure will be steadily growing for action on Iran over the next year. What this action might be is currently known, if at all, only to the higher echelons of the military and intelligence establishments, though the general consensus in the media seems to be that Israel is waiting to see what the outcome of Obama’s attempts at negotiation will be before taking action. Given that these attempts now seem likely to go on forever, Israel will probably not be satisfied with waiting and seeing for too much longer.

Despite the ticking time bombs in Gaza and Iran, however, the general state of things over the past year was one of stalemate. Both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides are currently led by men who are temperamentally given to preserving the status quo, and even if they were not, they are hemmed in on all sides by their supporters and rivals alike. America is led by a thus-far unimpressive neophyte, who made a foolish initial gambit that alienated both sides, and he now appears to have settled into a state of torpor in regard to the region, perhaps only to be awoken by a flare-up of the Iranian issue. If there was any light at the end of any tunnel to be glimpsed in the Middle East of 2009, it was, ironically, in Iran, where the first signs of serious discontent and resistance to Islamic totalitarianism have finally appeared. Given that, in the end, the dysfunctions of the Middle East can only be solved by the Middle East, this was one development—thought still nascent and fragile—for which all involved can be grateful.