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.

President Barack Obama’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never been warm. So while visiting Israel, Obama did not limit himself to the standard rhetorical niceties. He went over the heads of politicians and appealed directly to the Israeli public, especially the young, to make his case for a more flexible approach to negotiating with Palestinians.

As US President Barack Obama's visit to Israel and the West Bank draws near, political instability in the region is believed to be a major talk during his three-day stay, besides his wish to introduce his new team and to garner more popularity among the Israelis after re-election. Obama's trip is "a combination of diplomacy and public diplomacy," Prof. Eytan Gilboa of the Bar-Ilan University said of the landmark visit, Obama's first to Israel as president.

Two years after the Arab Spring, questions still remain as to how much social media actually helped fuel and drive the uprisings that arose in Tunisia and swept across the region. But regardless of what happened during those Twitter-fueled revolutions, what's happened afterward? That's what social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon and Sanitas International wanted to find out when it decided to analyze tweets coming out of Egypt, Libya and even Syria, where there still is a war going on.

The U.N.-backed Alliance of Civilizations will strengthen its role through mediation and fostering of cultural understanding through sports, arts and music, the head of the initiative, which gives priority to defusing tensions between Western and Islamic worlds. “The Alliance can become a major soft power tool to diffuse tensions and conflicts, especially those which are ethnically or identity based,” the High-Representative for the Alliance, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York on Thursday, while outlining his priorities for this year.

A special delegation of 11 Israeli high school students landed in Paris on Sunday as part of the Israeli Jewish Congress' "Young Ambassadors" program..."Teenagers are the most useful group when it comes to public diplomacy," Sloutsker said.

An ancient Persian symbol of freedom, tolerance and coexistence has joined documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Emancipation Proclamation in Washington..."Exchange derives the history of values globally, and the social empathy that comes from cultural exchange is better than one thousand negotiations," Gopin said. Cultural exchanges are going on between the U.S. and Iran, even with the ongoing conflict over its nuclear ambitions.