Let’s start with the good news: Secretary of State John Kerry managed to lower the flames on the Temple Mount, which threatened to set the region on fire and to stir up hundreds of millions of Muslims against Israel.
The secretary of state of the most powerful country in the world dragged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the royal palace in Amman, conferred with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and troubled Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to come to the phone. All this, to reach an arrangement enabling Muslim men not yet 50 years old to pray at Islam’s third-holiest site. At a news conference he held in Amman on Nov. 13, Kerry went out of his way to praise “all of the leaders today, particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas, … (who) made clear their desire to see this situation de-escalate and to move in the right direction.”