I have lived in Israel for twenty years. Long enough to know the particular silence that falls over this country when the sirens stop — not relief, exactly, but the held breath of a people who have learned that quiet is often just the space between blows. This week I felt that silence again, and it did not come from a rocket. It came from a headline.

The President of the United States announced that a deal had been reached with the Islamic Republic of Iran — a sixty-day ceasefire, a memorandum of understanding, the cancellation of strikes that were reportedly hours from launching. And Israel, the nation whose survival sits at the dead center of every Iranian threat, learned about it the way the rest of us did: from a post on social media. No advance notice. No seat at the table. The Prime Minister’s office was left to say, with the careful restraint of a man choosing each word, that Israel “is not a party” to the agreement.

Read that phrase again. Not a party. The most consequential negotiation about Iran’s war machine in a generation, and the one nation in that machine’s crosshairs was not in the room. Whatever we call that, we should not call it an accident.

Let me say plainly what I also want to say fairly. I am not among those who reflexively despise this President. He has done things for Israel........

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