When President Barack Obama announced his trip to Israel, there was widespread speculation for the motivations. I thought it was a grab-bag of reasons, including for domestic political purposes, to connect (finally) with the Jewish-Israeli public, to improve personal relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and to talk about Iran and Syria.

Week after week and month after month, leaders and officials from across the Middle East and North Africa, and beyond, come to the UAE. The leaders who come here, typically with government ministers and high civil servants in tow, are here for a reason. To be sure, the UAE is a prime diplomatic destination any time a crisis demands a quick transfusion of aid money, because this country has resource wealth and is known for its generosity in good causes.

Israel is making the most of President Obama's visit to get the word out about the challenges the country faces, and the “unbreakable relationship” between Israel and U.S., says Danny Seman, Deputy Director in the General Ministry of Public Diplomacy, in charge of social media for the group. Social networks are the new global “water cooler” where people exchange ideas and opinions, and it's important for Israel to make its voice heard in these forums, in order to ensure that people know what this country is facing."

A delegation of university students, comprised of members of the Jewish, Arab and Druse communities, has just returned to Israel after a week-long outreach tour of Canadian universities, timed to conclude just before the start of Israel Apartheid Week on North American campuses. The trip, organized by WordSwap, a nonpartisan public diplomacy project, brought the students specifically to Canada.

The Pakistani teenager who survived an assassination attempt and inspired a worldwide movement for girls' education will soon become a published author. Malala Yousafzai, 15, says she wants her book, "I Am Malala," to reveal and help children across the world who still struggle to get to school.

Did you know Yemeni Kurds support Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s peace efforts with the Kurdistan Workers Party? The March 6 tweets from Yasin Aktay, a prominent pro-Justice and Development Party (AKP) pundit, say they do.

President Obama’s highly visible trip to the Middle East was seen as a timely and badly needed shot of public diplomacy in the world’s most volatile region. But what happens behind the scenes and out of public view now that the president is back in the United States may be even more critical to the decades-old American quest to forge stable peace between Israel and her neighbors.

For all the drama of President Obama's stirring speech Thursday in Jerusalem, the most encouraging thing about it may have been the applause from the audience. "Remarks of President Obama to the People of Israel," the White House called the speech -- and, like President Reagan, Obama went soaring over the heads of officials, elites, and pundits, directly to Israel's citizenry. In that may lie the nub of a second-term approach to Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking that could prove more fruitful than the frustrations of the first.