Stephen Walt: Time for George Mitchell to Resign: I don't think the bottom line matters much one way or another, especially if Mitchell were to resign without turning the fact into a damning indictment of Obama, Clinton, Emmanuel, et al. -- which isn't Mitchell's style. One might also talk about Mitchell's own problems. Early on, Israel's flaks accused him of being too even-handed, and it turns out they were right: Mitchell has bent over backwards to let Netanyahu obstruct the process. Still, this post does a good job of explaining what's been going on this past year when nothing got accomplished.

One thing I want to add to the list of missteps -- and I'm already on the record as saying that it would be more useful to break Gaza free as an independent Palestinian state now than to try to do anything about freezing settlements. This is that Obama made a major mistake allowing Iran to be rolled into the equation. He may have thought that he could easily cut a deal with Iran and throw that as a bone to Netanyahu, but Iranian political turmoil made that impossible, leaving him nothing to offer but increasingly belligerent posturing, starting with a big arms buildup in the Persian Gulf. The net result is not only no Israel/Palestine progress but also a worsening of his Iran problem. One indication of how bad this is getting is that Richard Haass, not normally a neocon, is among those agitating for regime change.

The news out of Israel/Palestine has been unremittingly bleak lately -- scroll back through WarInContext and Mondoweiss if you want details.