Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is seen as a savvy player in an administration where the president doesn’t have much background on foreign policy. That’s especially true in the Middle East, where the former oil executive knows the territory. But this week Tillerson made a damaging and amateurish mistake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The problem arose on Tuesday when, during testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tillerson let drop a bombshell. When asked about the Palestinian Authority’s payment of salaries to imprisoned terrorists and their families, the secretary announced the problem had already been solved. “They have changed that policy,” Tillerson assured Idaho Sen. James Risch.

If true, that would be quite a feather in Tillerson’s cap. But the claim was false. A day later, when speaking to the House Foreign Relations Committee, he was forced to backtrack and admit that instead there was only an “active discussion” about the issue. But, later in his testimony, Tillerson insisted he still believed the assurances he got from PA leader Mahmoud Abbas during President Trump’s visit to the region.

That left members of Congress wondering: What, exactly, does Tillerson think is going on?

As it turns out, the Palestinians are a more reliable source of information than the State Department. Within hours of Tillerson’s statement, members of Abbas’ government announced payments to terrorists hadn’t stopped and there were no plans to stop them. Indeed, they considered the entire discussion a form of “aggression” against the Palestinian people.

That leaves Tillerson and the United States in a delicate position.

The problem is not just that the PA uses the massive aid it gets from both the European Union and the United States to pay for terrorism — in just the last four years, they have doled out more than $1.1 billion to those who seek to kill Jews, Israelis and Americans. But by going public about this outrage, Trump and Tillerson have staked their reputations on ending it.

When Abbas visited the White House in early May, he told Trump the Palestinian Authority didn’t conduct incitement or pay terrorist salaries. But by the time Trump met with Abbas in Bethlehem weeks later, he learned that the Palestinian leader had lied. Reportedly, Trump pounded the table while demanding Abbas clean upzhis act.

But apparently neither Trump nor Tillerson has drawn the logical conclusion from this exchange. Abbas has a long record of lying about his connections to violence as well as the hate broadcast on the PA’s official media and taught in its schools. So when Abbas promised again to be good, Tillerson may have believed him.

Tillerson’s motivation may in part be to head off passage of the Taylor Force Act, a necessary piece of legislation opposed by the State Department that’s named after an American murdered by a Palestinian “martyr.” Under its terms, the payment of future US aid to the Palestinians would be conditioned on the elimination of the payments to terrorists.

What Tillerson doesn’t understand is that anti-Jewish violence is an essential element of the Palestinian national narrative. Ending support for terror is essential to peace, but it’s also an impossible ask for Abbas, who is rightly worried about losing support to his Hamas rivals.

Trump and Tillerson may have thought the need for Israel and Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia to cooperate against Iran made dabbling in Middle East peace a low-risk, high-profit venture. But they didn’t count on the continued hold of a Palestinian political culture that makes it impossible for Abbas to end the payments.

And by announcing that the PA had already stopped them, Tillerson gambled American credibility on getting Abbas to make a promise he can’t keep. Indeed, Tillerson set back Trump’s own negotiating position because now that the Palestinians have revealed the truth, the White House can’t plausibly claim it can get the Palestinians to stop the practice.

All of which means Trump’s peace initiative is likely over even before it starts, making this an embarrassing introduction to a conflict he has no more chance of fixing than his predecessors.

Jonathan S. Tobin is opinion editor of JNS.org and a contributing writer for National Review.