The Obama Administration admitted Thursday that it is “facing reality.” Despite its ambitions, the administration will probably not broker a peace deal between Palestine and Israel before President Obama leaves office in 2017. In the meantime, the president will push for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas to consider a two-state solution.

As Palestinians have carried out a string of stabbings against Israelis, the relationship between the two states has become rocky. Steven Mufson at the Washington Post wrote that the agreements that are keeping Israel and Palestine at bay may be in jeopardy if leaders do not take new steps towards peace.

In September, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said his government would no longer consider itself bound by the Oslo peace agreements in effect for two decades, charging that Israel had failed to live up to its obligations.

Rob Malley, the National Security Council’s senior director for the Middle East, said that for the first time in two decades, an American administration “faces the reality” that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “is not in the cards for the remainder” of a presidency. That, he said, has “led to a reassessment not only of what we can do but of what the parties can do.”

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, said, “From the prime minister, we’ll want to hear what his views are for how the Israeli government can take steps” to build confidence and “to make clear that there is an aspiration” for a two-state solution, which Rhodes said was the only way forward.

What those steps might be wasn’t clear, though Rhodes and Malley said that the expansion of West Bank settlements remained an issue. Malley said the president would ask “how does the prime minister see things going forward” and hear his ideas of “what can be done in the absence of negotiations.