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Secretary of State John Kerry held a round of meetings Thursday with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Mr. Kerry has said that the next 18 to 24 months is a crucial period for achieving a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process and the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

“Our hope is that the leaders in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority will find the way to compromise and to achieve both of their goals,” Mr. Kerry added.

As he embarked on another round of meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Thursday in an effort to revitalize the peace process, Secretary of State John F. Kerry acknowledged the doubts being expressed on both sides over his chances of success

“It is our hope that by being methodical, careful, patient, but detailed and tenacious, that we can lay out a path ahead that could conceivably surprise people, but certainly exhaust the possibilities of peace.”

Palestinian officials have said that they expect Kerry to present a proposal for restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks by early June

Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop.

The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons.

arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too

The president’s goal, said Ms. Rice, who discussed the review for the first time in an interview last week, is to avoid having events in the Middle East swallow his foreign policy agenda, as it had those of presidents before him. “We can’t just be consumed 24/7 by one region, important as it is,”

“He thought it was a good time to step back and reassess, in a very critical and kind of no-holds-barred way, how we conceive the region.”

Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.

Critics say the retooled policy will not shield the United States from the hazards of the Middle East. By holding back, they say, the United States risks being buffeted by crisis after crisis, as the president’s fraught history with Syria illustrates.

“You can have your agenda, but you can’t control what happens,”

Egypt is still the test case of whether there can be a peaceful political transition in the Arab world

The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.

The president’s goal, said Ms. Rice, who discussed the review for the first time in an interview last week, is to avoid having events in the Middle East swallow his foreign policy agenda, as it had those of presidents before him.

“We can’t just be consumed 24/7 by one region, important as it is,” she said, adding, “He thought it was a good time to step back and reassess, in a very critical and kind of no-holds-barred way, how we conceive the region.”

Ike ultimately came to see Suez as his “major foreign policy mistake.” He should not have cut the legs out from under England and France, nor sided with Egypt against Israel.

even hardheaded realists like Eisenhower sometimes get snookered, in part by their own wish for the world to be more amenable to American values, and American power, than it is. And nowhere do American leaders fall into that trap more than in the Middle East.

The inference one draws from “Ike’s Gamble” is not: Do nothing in the Middle East. When you are the United States, not doing is every bit as fateful a decision as doing. (See: Syria.)

Few even talk about the Palestinians or the Arab world on their borders, despite the tumult and the renewed peace efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry, who has been visiting the region in recent days. Instead of focusing on what has long been seen as their central challenge — how to share this land with another nation — Israelis are largely ignoring it, insisting that the problem is both insoluble for now and less significant than the world thinks. We cannot fix it, many say, but we can manage it.

Jewish Israelis seem in some ways happier and more united than in the past, as if choosing not to solve their most difficult challenge has opened up a space for shalom bayit — peace at home. Yes, all those internal tensions still exist, but the shared belief that there is no solution to their biggest problem has forged an odd kind of solidarity.

Israel has never been richer, safer, more culturally productive or more dynamic. Terrorism is on the wane. Yet the occupation grinds on next door with little attention to its consequences. Moreover, as the power balance has shifted from the European elite, Israel has never felt more Middle Eastern in its popular culture, music and public displays of religion. Yet it is increasingly cut off from its region, which despises it perhaps more than ever.

Obesity is a touchy subject in the emirate. Data from the International Association for the Study of Obesity shows that Qatar has the highest obesity rates in the Mideast, and worse rates are mostly found only in a few South Pacific countries. Some 34 percent of Qatar’s men and 45 percent of its women are obese, defined as a body mass index of more than 30.

They are based on the emirate’s total population of about 1.9 million, but most of those are migrant workers. Qatari citizens number only about 250,000. Since most of the migrant workers are construction and other manual laborers, obesity rates among citizens are likely to be far higher than overall figures suggest.

Surprising the United States and Israel, the Palestinian leadership formally submitted applications on Wednesday to join 15 international agencies, leaving the troubled Middle East talks brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry on the verge of breakdown.

relayed to the appropriate body for each of the 15 treaties and conventions the Palestinians want to join, adding that there is “a whole procedure involved” in examining the documents. “You basically submit that you want to accede and then it goes to the depository and there’s a process of review,” Ms. Ramming said. “To say this takes effect tomorrow, that’s a bit misleading.”

In that planned deal, the United States would release from prison Jonathan J. Pollard, an American convicted of spying for Israel more than 25 years ago, while Israel would free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and slow construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.Mr. Abbas, who had vowed not to seek membership in international bodies until the April 29 expiration of the talks that Mr. Kerry started last summer, said he was taking this course because Israel had failed to release the fourth batch of Palestinian prisoners.

American and other Western officials say the elimination of Mr. Assad’s stockpiles of poison gas would be a major accomplishment.

“But if this can be solved satisfactorily, diplomatically, it is clearly better for everyone,

Iran, by contrast, has insisted that the West acknowledge what it says is its right to enrich uranium as part of a negotiated compromise that would put limits on the nation’s nuclear program.

As the United States grapples with some of the most intractable problems in the Middle East, it has run into a buzz saw of criticism, not from traditional enemies but from two of its strongest allies.

And during a stop in Rome, Mr. Kerry sought to reassure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that the Obama administration would not drop its guard in the newly invigorated nuclear talks with Iran.

But the criticism by Saudi officials has been the most vehement, as they have waged a campaign against the United States’ policy in the Middle East in private comments to diplomats and reporters, as well as in public remarks by a former intelligence official.

In the Middle East, and wherever there are protracted conflicts, nations have a way to address this problem. They use violence as a form of communication. A nation trying to maintain order will assassinate a terrorism leader or destroy a terrorism facility. The attack says: “Hey, we know we’re in a long-term conflict, but let’s not let it get out of hand. That’s not in either of our interests.

The attack is a way to seize control of the escalation process and set a boundary marker.

These sorts of operations have risks and rewards. A risk is that it won’t cease the escalation, just accelerate it. The radicals on the other side will get enraged and take to the streets. Their leaders will have to appease that rage.

Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who is challenging Donald J. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, said Mr. Trump’s rhetoric of intolerance — as evident today as it was during his presidency — had fueled the surge of bigotry confronting Jews and Muslims after Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the fierce Israeli response in Gaza.

And Mr. Trump’s lopsided adherence to the wishes of Israel’s right-wing government, while widely praised in Republican circles, secured only the “low-hanging fruit” of Middle Eastern diplomacy during his presidency, Mr. Christie said, denigrating one of Mr. Trump’s chief foreign policy accomplishments.

He argued that Mr. Trump’s lack of “intellectual curiosity” and foreign policy ambition had led his administration to give up the pursuit of a more elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

The United States currently provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in annual military assistance, the most to any country per year, with the recent exception of Ukraine. High levels of assistance date back roughly to the 1970s and reflect a longstanding American bargain with Israel of security for peace — the notion that the more secure Israel feels, the more concessions it will be able to make to the Palestinians.

Since the mid-1990s, the United States has also been a major sponsor of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority Security Forces, providing training and equipment on the theory that as the Palestinians stand up, the Israelis can stand down.

In both cases, the rationale for U.S. security assistance is fatally flawed.

there are just three governing options in the Middle East today: Iron Empires, Iron Fists or Iron Domes?

a massacre in government-held Tartus Province that has inflamed sectarian divisions, revealed new depths of depravity and made the prospect of stitching the country back together appear increasingly difficult.

That lurid violence has fueled pessimism about international efforts to end the fighting. As the United States and Russia work to organize peace talks next month between Mr. Assad and his opponents, the ever more extreme carnage makes reconciliation seem more remote.

“The Gatekeepers,” a new documentary by the Israeli director Dror Moreh, consists of interviews with six men, all of them retired, most of them bald, one of them a grandfatherly type, well into his 80s, in suspenders and a plaid shirt. They reminisce about past triumphs and frustrations, but Mr. Moreh’s amazing, upsetting film, which opens Monday for a weeklong awards-qualifying run in advance of a wider release next year, is the opposite of nostalgic. It is hard to imagine a movie about the Middle East that could be more timely, more painfully urgent, more challenging to conventional wisdom on all sides of the conflict.

“The Gatekeepers” is in part a history of post-’67 Israel, in which familiar events are revisited from an unusual and fascinating perspective. The leaders of Shin Bet, who answer directly to the prime minister, are not part of the country’s military command structure. Nor, because of the clandestine nature of the agency, are they visibly part of the Israeli political establishment, though they sometimes function as public scapegoats when politicians make mistakes. What is most astonishing about the interviews Mr. Moreh has recorded is how candid and critical these six spymasters are, inflecting their stories with pointed, sometimes devastating assessments of the failings of successive governments.