Let’s start with the good news: Secretary of State John Kerry managed to lower the flames on the Temple Mount, which threatened to set the region on fire and to stir up hundreds of millions of Muslims against Israel.

The secretary of state of the most powerful country in the world dragged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the royal palace in Amman, conferred with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and troubled Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to come to the phone. All this, to reach an arrangement enabling Muslim men not yet 50 years old to pray at Islam’s third-holiest site. At a news conference he held in Amman on Nov. 13, Kerry went out of his way to praise “all of the leaders today, particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas, … (who) made clear their desire to see this situation de-escalate and to move in the right direction.”

But most of all, it’s Kerry himself who deserves praise. Unfortunately and disturbingly so, relations between Netanyahu and Abbas are similar to those of a couple in the throes of divorce, whose feelings of animosity and desire for revenge overcome concern for their children’s welfare and well-being. Without the assistance of the marriage counselor from Washington, the two would not have managed to reach agreement governing the prayer arrangements on the Temple Mount.

Also good news is Netanyahu’s willingness to allow the intervention of outside parties, in full public view, in a dispute which he deems the “bedrock of our existence.” The prime minister, who adamantly rejects criticism over housing construction in Jerusalem, contending that Israel is sovereign over its capital and that the city’s standing is identical to that of Tel Aviv, traveled to an Arab capital to discuss the crisis in this compound.