Here in the valley below Gilboa, where Saul fell and where rockets fall now with much less poetry, I have been watching this war long enough to know the distance between what was promised and what is arriving. The deal taking shape between the United States and Iran will express, if signed, a capitulation that Netanyahu cannot name in public and Trump will not acknowledge in private. In 2015, when the Obama administration signed a nuclear accord with Iran that drew fierce criticism, Netanyahu delivered a speech before the United States Congress that violated every diplomatic convention between allied governments. He came to Washington to tell the American president he was wrong, and a large part of his political identity was built on that gesture. Three years later, he convinced Trump to abandon the accord. The maximum pressure policy that followed did not deter Tehran. Instead, the regime accumulated four hundred and forty kilograms of sixty-percent enriched uranium and advanced its program to a point where the original deal would have looked, in retrospect, like a........

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