"What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass." That was the mordant comment of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first prime minister, on the failure of a liberal reform to achieve the results promised with great assurance by the articulate liberal eminences of the day.

With two centuries of foresight, he might just as well have been describing President Donald Trump's triumph, celebrated "in a state of ecstasy" in Israel's Knesset on Monday, as he secured the release of hostages held by Hamas for two years and won support from multiple Muslim nations for his 20-point peace plan between Israel and Hamas.

Or as The Free Press's Matthew Continetti put it, "Trump has done more to advance peace in the Middle East than the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs could hope to achieve in a million years."

Certainly, more than anyone has accomplished since Israel's victories in the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the era when it became accepted wisdom that Arab and Muslim nations would recognize Israel's legitimacy only after it reached some form of agreement with Palestinian leaders on the creation of a Palestinian state.

The conventional wisdom was that pressure must always be exerted on Israel, the leaders and voters of which had obvious qualms about relinquishing any supervision over armed and hostile neighbors within shooting range of their geographically tiny country.

The 1990s saw a test of that conventional wisdom, with Israel accepting the Oslo framework, and Bill Clinton, in his final days as........

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