One presidential administration after another has attempted to bring about a negotiated settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but none has succeeded. To the contrary, argues Michael Mandelbaum—all the U.S. has accomplished is to worsen the situation and undermine its own credibility:

The orthodox approach to the peace process has harmed American interests by wasting the most valuable commodity the American government possesses: the time of its senior officials. It has done harm as well by diverting attention from the real cause of the conflict—the Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy and permanence of Israel—thereby reducing the already small chance of ending it. Worst of all, the peace process has actually obstructed a settlement of the conflict by supporting—unintentionally—the current Palestinian strategy for eliminating the Jewish state. . . .

In recent years, . . . the Palestinians and their allies have adopted a . . . strategy [of] delegitimization. They have sought to portray Israel as a neocolonial power that practices the kind of discrimination that characterized apartheid-era South Africa. . . .

This strategy will also fail, not least because the charges it levels are false. Nonetheless, the peace process has given the champions of the strategy of delegitimization reason to believe that it can work. The Palestinian authorities, led first by Yasir Arafat and now by Mahmoud Abbas, have managed to ensure the failure of all negotiations with Israel by their intransigence while at the same time avoiding responsibility for that failure. Successive American administrations have refrained from telling the world—clearly, emphatically, and repeatedly—precisely why the peace process has never succeeded. The Obama administration has in fact blamed Israel.

By failing to rebut the false narrative about the fate of the peace process and, even worse, by occasionally propagating it, the American government has reinforced the strategy of delegitimization and made the faint chances of settling the conflict even fainter.

If Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, the war in Gaza, let alone the protests on college campuses, will seem like a minor complication. Jonathan Schachter fears that this danger could be much more imminent than decisionmakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe. In his view, Israel seems to be repeating the mistake that allowed it to be taken by surprise on Simchat Torah of 2023 and Yom Kippur of 1973: putting too much faith in an intelligence concept that could be wrong.

Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.

Meanwhile, most of the restrictions put in place by the 2015 nuclear deal will expire by the end of next year, rendering the question of Iran’s adherence moot. And the forces that could be taking action aren’t:

The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decisionmakers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the U.S. refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign-currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.

Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.