Obama was particularly unlucky in that just months after his inauguration, Netanyahu, with whom his relations went from frigid to awful, took office for the second time, and continued to develop his close ties with the Republican opposition to the president. For these and many other reasons, Obama left the White House in 2017 with the colonial status quo in Palestine of military occupation and expanding Jewish settlement intact, and the conditions for Palestinians even worse than when he took office eight years earlier.
