The word doing the heaviest lifting in the present diplomacy is the word “peace,” and the prophets of Israel had a precise name for peace that is announced rather than achieved. They called it a lie, and they did not soften it. “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly,” Jeremiah said of the men who told a frightened people what it wished to hear, “saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.” I am a Christian, and I come to this subject as a guest in a house not my own; but the prophet I am quoting is yours before he is mine, and his warning belongs to this hour as if it had been written for it.

Consider what a deal with the Islamic Republic actually proposes to do, and what it leaves untouched. It proposes to manage a timeline. It addresses centrifuges and stockpiles and breakout windows — the machinery of the threat. What it does not, and cannot, address is the thing that makes the machinery dangerous, which is the intention of the men who own it. You can freeze enrichment. You cannot freeze a creed. A regime that has woven the elimination of the Jewish state into the very fabric of its self-understanding, that has made enmity toward Israel not a policy but a pillar of its legitimacy, is not pacified by a pause it regards as tactical. It is merely handed time, and cover, and money, and the priceless gift of the world’s averted........

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