On Saturday, the diplomat, scholar, and teacher Charles Hill died at the age of eighty-four. During his long career in public service, he served as an aide to Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz; he was also deputy director of the State Department’s Israel desk before serving as political counselor to the American embassy in Tel Aviv, then director of Israel and Arabi-Israeli affairs, and after that deputy assistant secretary for the Middle East. A reminiscence by the Mosaic contributor Eric Edelman can be found here; some recent articles by Hill here; and Hill’s reflections on war and human nature here. In this 2019 essay on the idea of “balance” in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Hill saw far beyond the usual complaints that the U.S. needs to take a more “balanced” approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict:

In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, . . . Arabs insisted that every aspect of the conflict be agreed upon all at once by all relevant parties, ideally at a huge international conference. To do anything less would besmirch Arab honor and be unacceptable to the Arab nation as a whole. Israelis recognized this as a lopsided approach that would overwhelm their interests entirely.

A state of Palestine, agreed up front, would transform the regional and international context. With such a decision, all other issues between Israel and Palestine would remain to be directly negotiated with one exception, also needed to restore balance: the Palestinian side would have to give up, in principle, their claim to the right of return; the Israeli side would give up, in principle, their claim to the right of settlement.

This is the fundamental trade-off between the two parties, but it has been kept deeply out of balance because of international pressure on Israel to concede its right without pressure on the Palestinians to match such a concession. With these two major decisions, a balance could enhance the possibility of positive negotiating outcomes on all other issues.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”