A group of colleagues devoted to Israel-Palestinian issues thinks Jim Jones’ speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is same-ol-blather. Maybe. I don’t.

It’s true there’s really nothing here that’s new. And I mean nothing here that’s new — you could see Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright or Colin Powell or Jim Baker or George Schultz giving this same speech. But there are at least three choices here that Jones makes that make the speech noteworthy. That means it’s time for a listicle.

1. Jones tied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the administration’s forthcoming National Security Strategy. More on that NSS preview here. Message: this is central to the Obama administration, so there will be no backing away from the goal of ending the conflict with an independent Palestine.

2. Jones sidestepped the “indirect talks” with George Mitchell and moved on to a desire to get direct talks back on. That goes somewhat further than Hillary Rodham Clinton did in her Center for Mideast Peace address last week. And there the substance is less important than the vector. Jones is moving the Overton Window on Israel. Last month it was indirect talks. Last night it’s direct talks. You want to get on board with this, or are we gonna have to offer our own peace plan?

3. Lots of pro-Israel foreplay. Stay with me here. If you’re an Israeli strategist who wants to keep Israel intransigent on the peace process, then your best inadvertent ally is a U.S. administration that’s lukewarm on your country, since you can parlay that into a media/congressional counterthrust questioning its bona fides. (Of course, you’ll do that anyway when greeted with a peace-processor administration, so iciness helps feed the narrative.) Jones, however, really played up how much he loves Israel and the bonds are unbreakable and so forth. He slipped in a line referencing Start-Up Nation, which is a nod to how Israel wants to rebrand itself. There was even meta-foreplay in the form of praising WINEP. (“Instead of partisanship, you’ve given us scholarship. Instead of simply recycling old arguments, you’ve given us fresh and objective analysis.” Respectfully: nah, not really.) Message: time for Netanyahu to, ah, reciprocate.

Yeah, so I’m only half-convinced on the third point myself, and who knows what it’ll ultimately cash out to. But we’re seeing the emerging contours of a pre-Obama Plan meta-debate, and it’s up to Israel to do something if it wants to forestall the plan.