15-Sep-13: The response from State Dept. and Prime Minister's Office...

Kerry arrives in Israel today for brief visit [Image Source]

For readers still wondering, neither Secretary of State Kerry, who visited Jerusalem today, nor Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, nor anyone from their respective entourages, responded today to the open letter we published here last night.

We know how busy Secretary Kerry has been. There's no shortage of analysis out there concerning his mission, assessing what it's all worth. A sharp critique over at Commentary Magazine captures what many pundits are wondering:

If John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov have concluded a deal that will really result in the elimination of Syria’s entire arsenal of chemical weapons by this time next year, they will win the Nobel Peace Prize – and, unlike so many previous Nobel recipients, they would have earned theirs. But there is good cause for concern that the deal will fall apart long before next year’s Nobels are handed out.
Indeed, if the deal is implemented as advertised, it would be an unprecedented and almost unbelievable achievement: UN inspectors will have to catalogue, seize, and destroy some 1,000 tons of chemical weapons while a brutal civil war rages around them. Little wonder that Kerry added, when he first offered a way for Syria to avoid American military action, that such a plan couldn’t and wouldn’t be accepted. Now it has been accepted at least by the U.S. and Russia but without any obvious sticks to compel Assad’s cooperation... [Max Boot: "Syria Deal Faces Long Odds", Commentary Magazine]

Prime minister Netanyahu has been busy too, but Frimet Roth, in a scathing op ed published this evening on the Times of Israel site ["What our prime minister can learn from the Birmingham church bombing"], finds it hard to see anything like a Nobel Prize in his future.