2. The Israeli side has utterly lost faith in agreements with the Palestinians.

The agreements of the 1990s, culminating in the 1993 Oslo Accords, were initiated by the Israelis and Palestinians themselves. They led to the famous handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn, to the creation of the Palestinian Authority under Arafat’s rule ... and then at last collapsed in the Second Intifada, in which more than 1,000 Israelis lost their lives. Since then, the Palestinian government has split in two. Hamas has taken power in Gaza, and used the territory as a launchpad from which to rocket Israel. Israel went to war in Gaza in December 2008 to stop the rockets. Israel is at war in Gaza again today for the same reason.

Few to none of the Israelis mentioned in the Birnbaum/Tibon piece hold much hope that any agreement will bring real peace with the Palestinians. The optimists believe that even a bad deal is better than continuing to rule over Palestinian populations. The pessimists regard the negotiations as a useless or even dangerous waste of time. The middle ground plays along, in order to humor the United States. Birnbaum and Tibon quote the skeptical Israeli defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon: "The only thing that can save us is for John Kerry to win his Nobel Prize and leave us alone.”

3. It’s amazing how much more gets done when the secretary of state isn’t running for president.

John Kerry’s initiative failed. But the risk of failure attends every political initiative. It’s fine to calculate how much political risk to accept. But when a secretary of state in pursuit of his or her own political future decides that no risk is acceptable, then nothing much is ever tried. Which is why Hillary Clinton’s record as secretary of state is so blank. By 2012, Obama had apparently given up on hopes of negotiating an Abbas-Netanyahu deal. Kerry’s hopes had dwindled, but not yet died. "I think we have some period of time—in one to one-and-a-half to two years—or it’s over,” Kerry said in 2013. So he tried. He failed. But in other places where is he trying, he seems to be succeeding: smoothing the post-Karzai political transition in Afghanistan, reaching U.S.-Europe consensus on how to respond to Russia in Ukraine. It seems you get a lot more done by doing your job than by positioning and planning for your next one.