CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, most of this is a result of American disengagement and withdrawal. When you see what happens when America engages you wonder whether we shouldn't have more disengagement. Look at the wreckage that Kerry has done in intervening in the Israeli/Gaza fighting. He decides he has to go, the Israelis did not invite him. The Egyptians didn't want him. And he said he advanced a peace plan that was sort of building on the Egyptian one. It didn't at all. It undermined it.



I think there was a left-wing Israeli paper that said Kerry had dug a tunnel under the Egyptian peace plan. Egypt wanted a ceasefire in place which means no reward for Hamas starting this war by attacking the civilians, which is a war crime. And that was proposed before the ground incursion, the casualties would have been infinitely lower. Israel accepted; Hamas said no.



Kerry goes over and then he negotiates in Paris with who? Qatar and Turkey and returns essentially as the lawyer for Hamas, hands Israel a proposition that is so outrageous that the cabinet votes 19-0 against it. Israeli cabinets have never voted 19-0 on whether the sunrises in the east. It was unbelievable. It would have given Hamas all of its demands. As a result -- and there's one thing he doesn't seem to understand.



There's a miracle happening in the Middle East which is a tacit alliance between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority of all people, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the Gulf Arabs, all of them are our friends who want to see Hamas squeezed, who supported the Arab league, supported the Egyptian peace plan and this entirely undermines [it]. It's a peace plain that all the Arabs had supported and this undermines it. If I could add one point. The Palestinian Authority leader attacked the plan and said what was Kerry doing in Paris negotiating with Qatar and Turkey and leaving out the P.A. and leaving out Egypt?