New Delhi, Aug. 10 -- Hamas said yes. Benjamin Netanyahu said no. The 15-point plan that President Donald Trump had called a "historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas" lasted eleven days before the Israeli prime minister formally rejected it at a cabinet meeting on Sunday, shattering the roadmap the United States had spent months assembling and leaving Washington in the unusual position of having been defied by the government it arms, funds, and defends at the United Nations.

he was demanding "real disarmament, not fictitious disarmament." What precisely distinguishes the real from the fictitious, by Netanyahu's reckoning, he left undefined. The qualification was designed not to clarify but to foreclose.

The political co...