JERUSALEM—Optimism is not generally a word associated with the Middle East these days. Just a few hundred miles away from here, there’s the horrible civil war in Syria, where the devastating bombardment of Aleppo this week recalled the worst tragedies of World War II. And the fighting in Iraq, where a major new front is about to open up as international forces attempt to push the barbaric Islamic State out of the key stronghold of Mosul. And right next door in Egypt, a shattered economy and authoritarian crackdown by the military regime that rose out of the dashed hopes of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions.

Which made it all the more striking—and more than a little melancholy—to attend the state funeral of the late Shimon Peres today in Israel’s national cemetery. At 93, Peres was the last living link to the era of Israel’s founders, a former prime minister, president, foreign minister and just about everything else, and the occasion was seen by the global dignitaries who came from all over to mourn him as “the end of the era of giants,” as his successor in the largely ceremonial role of Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, put it. Peres was a giant, but of a particular sort: He was a dreamer, a believer in the future even when his hopes for peace were frustrated again and again. In short, he was an optimist.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his ideological foe whose hawkish security-state politics have been ascendant in Israel over the last decade, did not call Peres that in his eulogy. But he did recall his longstanding feud with Peres over which course to pursue: peace or security. One debate, he remembered, had them shouting at each other into the night. Rivlin and many others in the days since Peres died had called their country’s biggest advocate of peace with the Palestinians “naïve,” and if they didn’t outright criticize his congenital optimism, they treated it as a sort of personality quirk or charming anachronism – a relic from a time when a different outcome had seemed possible.

In the end, it was left to two Americans to defend Peres, to channel that optimism, to suggest that peace wasn’t the foolish dream of an old man.

Bill Clinton had been president at the time of Peres’s greatest accomplishment—the Oslo Accords that earned Peres a Nobel Peace prize—and his greatest failure, when Peres lost the prime ministership to Netanyahu after the tragic assassination of his fellow peacemaker, Yitzhak Rabin. Clinton, taking a couple days off the American campaign trail for his wife to get back to the global politicking he loves, movingly told one of his favorite stories, about Peres’s 80^th birthday party and how the old peace warrior was serenaded with the John Lennon song, “Imagine.” Clinton did not directly turn and point the finger he famously loves to wag at Netanyahu but he might as well have: He ended his speech with an invocation of what might have been, had Peres’s dream of a two-state solution worked out. “Imagine,” he said simply, then walked off the stage.

President Obama was even more direct.

Obama had flown around the world and through the night to speak at the funeral, and he spent so much time crafting his speech himself that aides scrambled to get copies made before they got off Air Force One to head directly to the ceremony. In it, Obama compared Peres to Nelson Mandela and explicitly rebutted Netanyahu and the hawks who dismissed him. “I don’t think he was naïve,” Obama said, “but understood from hard-earned experience that true security comes from making peace with your neighbors.”

The Americans clearly loved and admired Peres (and it was mutual; a former Peres adviser told me he was sure Bill Clinton had been Peres’s favorite president, and he had worked with them all back to John F. Kennedy), but in a way that is also the problem. They were invested in a man and a peace process that no longer really exists.

“You can’t want it more than the parties themselves,” as one Palestinian activist put it to me earlier this week, and America, certainly for the eight years of Obama’s presidency, has wanted it more. “It’s a zombie you’ve kept alive forever and ever.”

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Sitting in the front row at the funeral was Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader whose signature is on the Oslo Accords alongside that of Peres. The deal had been envisioned as the beginning of the path toward a two-state solution, but it has long since disintegrated into renewed cycles of violence and recriminations and is now so synonymous with dashed expectations that, amazingly, not a single politician at his powerhouse funeral here even dared mention the phrase “Oslo Accords.”

Things have gone so far off the rails that it was considered breaking news in Israel when Abbas shook hands with Netanyahu before the funeral—a stilted interaction that was their first in a year and consisted of Abbas saying “too long, too long” in heavily accented English as he nodded politely to the prime minister and his wife. The two haven’t had an actual meeting in six years, despite hundreds of hours of effort on the part of American mediators and the indefatigable pressing of another optimist, Secretary of State John Kerry. And just to make sure no one thought this funeral handshake would lead to anything like a new opening between the Palestinian president and the Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu quickly disabused them of that notion in his remarks, going out of his way to thank a long list of world leaders for coming to Peres’s funeral—and pointedly excluding Abbas.

When it came down to it, it was left to Obama to do what Netanyahu would not. In what all present took, correctly, to be a barb aimed right at Netanyahu, the president of the United States mentioned not a single other foreign attendee except for Abbas, sitting right there in the front row (and even that, I was told, came after heated negotiations), his presence, Obama said, a “reminder of the unfinished business of peace.”

It’s also a reminder that Obama will leave office, like Bill Clinton and many other American presidents before them, deeply frustrated by his failure to achieve any kind of breakthrough to Israel’s stalemate with the Palestinians. “Some of us were talking, is it the death of Peres or the death of an era and a process and hope,” one veteran of the Obama White House told me. “Obviously this president is going to leave very disappointed.”

With all the other crises in the world, it’s easy to forget that Obama had in fact entered office in 2009 an optimist about his chances for making peace. He announced former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special peace envoy just two days after being sworn in, and even when rebuffed initially on efforts to restart the peace process after Netanyahu authorized a new round of settlements just as Vice President Joe Biden was in town, allowed Kerry to make a full-on push in 2014 that also ended in failure.

Obama advisers have long privately acknowledged that America’s ability—or anyone’s—to impose a two-state solution is hardly more than a remote possibility, given fast-shifting demographic realities in a country where the population of Palestinians is growing far faster than that of Jews and the huge rise in the number of Israeli settlements—the number is now more than 300,000 settlers and growing fast—that would fall within the proposed borders of a Palestinian state.

So would a second President Clinton—or a President Trump for that matter—do anything different?

I spoke to Dennis Ross, who served as a top adviser not only to Obama but to multiple presidents before him on peace talks. Ross had left disillusioned with the Obama approach but believes that Clinton’s team will not abandon the two-state concept altogether. “Part of the problem of the Obama approach is: either you solved it, or you basically did nothing,” Ross said. He is arguing to her team for “an approach that is quiet but more sustained,” and sees the potential for an opening if she is elected president and Netanyahu calculates that he’ll get a better deal working with Clinton and the Americans than having them throw up their hands.

But these are tough times even for a career peace processor. The sense of something being over is palpable to any involved and the first task for an American leader who dares to step back into peacemaking will be, he acknowledges, “to restore a sense of possibility that’s been completely lost.”

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Six years ago, as President Obama’s first Israel-Palestine peace foray was failing, one of America’s longtime peace negotiators, a man who had made an entire career of it under Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton wrote a cover story for Foreign Policy magazine, which I then edited.

“Mideast peace was my religion,” Aaron David Miller wrote. “I’m an atheist now.”

The article presciently, and depressingly, laid out the reasons why Netanyahu and Abbas would never come to terms during the Obama presidency and why pursuing the same policy, over and over again, would and had, as logic suggests, produced the same bad results. I re-read the article the other day and what’s striking is both how right Miller was, and how much the religion has persisted nonetheless, in Washington if not in Jerusalem.

I asked an Obama veteran about it today, after Peres’s funeral. He said it was something they had long discussed. “But if you have decided that this era is over and there’s a new paradigm, well, we always thought it’s such a horrible thing. Concluding that would require you to essentially put aside the foundation of U.S. policy of the last 20 years. It always seemed easier to keep going on.”

Israel buried more than the last of its founding fathers on Friday. Will America give up the ghost of peace too?

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