Peter Berkowitz joined the State Department in 2018 as an adviser on Israel policy; seven months later he was promoted to the storied position of director of policy planning. In an interview by Tal Schneider, he discusses his experience leaving academia for Foggy Bottom, the successes and failures of the Trump administration, and the future of Iran’s nuclear program. He also rejects the assertion that the State Department “moved to change the legal status of settlements and lower the chance for Palestinian statehood.”

It’s really important to emphasize that the White House peace plan [released in January of last year] involves a proposal for a two-state solution, indeed, a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would retain control over approximately 70 percent of the West Bank. There are also land swaps.

We have to be very careful about the policy that the State Department and therefore the Trump administration adopted concerning the settlements. It is often misstated, but Secretary Pompeo was very careful in his language. He did not say that settlement activity is consistent with international law. . . . He said, “settlements in the West Bank beyond the Green Line are not per se inconsistent with international law.” What is the difference between those two formulations? It’s huge. One says that everything that Israel builds is automatically consistent with international law. The other formulation, which was Secretary Pompeo’s, says that whatever Israel builds is not on its face illegal. It’s a matter of dispute and each case has to be examined on its own merits.

Berkowitz also comments on Israel’s current political instability:

[I]t’s very disturbing. It’s very urgent, I think, that both of us, the United States and Israel, get our houses better in order. I think, actually, [that] we face parallel problems. In the United States, a large part of the right hates the left, and a large part of the left hates the right. Each thinks that the other side is un-American and is destroying the country. Something similar could be said of Israel, though I understand that right and left in Israel have gotten jumbled up over the last couple of years. No liberal democracy can prosper when big segments of society on either side of the political aisle scorn the other side.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.