The French initiative to deploy an international observer force on the Temple Mount, as reported Oct. 17 in the French daily Le Figaro, brings to mind an old English joke about an initiative to change the driving directions in the United Kingdom and adapt them to those of most of the Western world. At a British government debate on the matter, one of the ministers said that such a revolution should be implemented gradually and not imposed on the public in one fell swoop. To start with, only trucks would drive on the right side of the road, then buses and taxis. If the experiment was successful, the change would be applied to all vehicles.

Until the last visit by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to Jerusalem and Ramallah in June, France was leading a strategic move at the UN Security Council for recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital. But instead of leveraging the current crisis of the stabbing intifada to advance a permanent arrangement between Israelis and Palestinians, Paris is offering the sides another short-acting sedative.

The English joke is also apt for the current mediation attempt by US Secretary of State John Kerry. Instead of pulling out a plan to resolve the conflict, he turns the world’s strongest power into a fire brigade band. “The administration’s main aim right now is to return the dangerous genie to the bottle that [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu — in their eyes — failed to close in time,” wrote Haaretz US correspondent Chemi Shalev on Oct. 18. “Among people close to the administration there are those who are even toying with the idea of using the crisis as leverage to relaunch some kind of peace process," Shalev added. “For now such offers are mostly being greeted with amused sighs of despair.”

If there are any Israelis and Palestinians who still believe or hope that the international community will extricate them from the occupation and diplomatic freeze, they will not be amused by the failed French idea and the US attempt to manage the crisis. On the other hand, this illustration of US and French ineptitude is expected to increase the despair, which in turn could result in intensified violence. Just one year ago, on Oct. 12, 2014, Kerry suggested to a reporter at a news conference that the Arab Peace Initiative could serve “in one form or another” as the basis for negotiations. He was referring to the 2002 plan proposed by the Arab League for peace and normalization with Israel — in return for the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.