Now, as settlements expand and reach new, more distant corners of the West Bank, as the Palestinian leadership ages and fractures and grows more dispirited, as younger right-wing politicians, such as Naftali Bennett, gain more and more influence in Israeli politics, Obama, the avatar of hope, has lost hope.
Those who had not succumbed to disease and other predations either dispersed to the local settlements or were relocated to more distant Aboriginal reserves set up by the NSW government in the latter part of the 19th century.
But with the rebel groups fractured and unwilling to unite to seek a settlement to the crisis, peace seems more distant than ever.
The long-term settlement of the Syrian civil war is a more distant issue.
Like several of Brink's historical novels, "Philida" probes South Africa's more distant sordid past, animating real figures from the Cape Colony's days of white settlement, when the enslavement and indentured servitude of local black and indigenous populations, as well as people brought over from the Dutch East Indies, were entirely routine.
Another study shows that a tiny proportion of samples of contemporary Icelanders carry a more distant lineage, which belongs to the haplogroup C1, which can possibly be traced to the settlement of the Americas around 14,000 years ago.
This reflects the "hinterland effect" exerted by inland cities upon coastal ports, also denoted the "tunnel effect" (Offner 1993) or "urban shadow" (Fujita and Mori 1996) by which smaller urban settlements economically benefit only partly from the presence of transport infrastructure, which rather serves more distant and larger ones.
