U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has turned his schedule upside down to keep his three-ring circus from collapsing under his “peace tent” that he has weighted down with his fake smile and iron fist to save himself from looking like a diplomatic clown.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas are not so stupid as to let themselves be blamed for any failure to resume a charade of the resumption of the peace process after a hiatus of more than two years. That leaves Kerry doing cartwheels to get the monkey off his back.

Israel has insisted that there be no pre-conditions, which in today’s diplomatic acrobats would mean acceding whatever Abbas demands, such as a building freeze or accepting a future PA state on the “basis” of the old borders of Israel.

Abbas has insisted that the only thing to talk about is when Israel is ready to accept what he considers a de facto state based on all of his political and territorial demands that the United Nations General Assembly, which is in his pocket, has confirmed through a resolution that is non-binding but which gave the PA a free pass to sit on key U.N. committees such as UNESCO. Next in line is the International Court.

Kerry has brought in Jordan’s King Abdullah into the picture. He is on his knees before Washington because of the spillover of the Syrian civil war into Jordan and the kingdom’s own precarious state in the face of louder tremors from the Bedouin and non-Jordan Arabs (read: Arabs who fled from Israel.) Add to that the up and coming Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and you come up with n explosive mixture that makes the king all the more dependent on the United States for help.

King Abdullah will do anything Kerry tells him to do, and it is in his own best interests to show himself as peacemaker by bringing the three-ring circus into his own court.

Netanyahu has two Israelis who are weighing him down. President Shimon Peres and “Minister of Peace Process” Tzipi Livni, like Kerry, have made as career out of “good will” concessions to the Palestinian Authority.

It is anyone’s guess what will come out of all this, but after wading through all of the trial balloons and media manipulation by the actors, Kerry clearly will be a lot less effective in other parts of the world if he is seen as a failure in the Middle East and cannot pin the blame on Abbas or Netanyahu for failing to resume direct talks.

The worst-case scenario for Kerry, if he cannot pull off a four-way stage show now, probably will be an agreement to continue talk about continuing to agree to talk about an agreement.

The circus must go on.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry may or may come up with results in his peace process trip to the region, but at least he will have a full stomach.

He ate and talked with Jordan’s King Abdullah in Amman Thursday afternoon before flying to Jerusalem, where he and the Prime Minister will dine at 8:30 p.m. Israeli time (1:30 p.m. EDT).

The Secretary of State will meet with chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Friday in Jordan, presumably over lunch or dinner, and is scheduled to meet again with the Prime Minister Saturday night, where he hopefully will get his just desserts.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered a clear message to Jews and the United States on Thursday, the 109th anniversary of the death of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, that there is no peace without security.

“Peace is based on security,” said the Prime Minister. It is not based on goodwill and legitimacy as is believed. It is based, first of all, on our ability to defend ourselves.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kelly is n Jordan on Thursday prior to talks on Friday and Saturday with Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Netanyahu have made every effort prior to his arrival to justify their positions, and the memorial ceremony for Herzl was a golden gift of timing for Israel.

Kerry is carrying with him the coffin of the peace process that the United States has been treating as a live animal since its inception more than 20 years ago. Netanyahu’s speech emphasized security and did not even hint about the status of Jerusalem or of borders for a Palestinian Authority state.

Without security, without the army, the establishment of which Herzl called for, we will be unable to defend the peace, we will be unable to defend ourselves if the peace frays. A basic condition for the existence of peace, for achieving it and for preserving it is security,” he declared.

Prime Minister Netanyahu also cast aside illusions of the international community that satisfying Arab world demands will change attitudes towards Jews and Israel.

“Let no one among us delude him or herself that if we make a peace agreement with the Palestinians, that this agreement would eliminate the wild defamation of the state of the Jews. What has been the lot of the Jews beforehand, for generations, today is the lot of the state of the Jews. Peace is desirable in and of itself,” he said.

Kerry began his 10-day Middle East and Asian junket last Friday, arriving in Doha. Except for India, his stop-off points have been in countries directly related to the Iranian nuclear threat, the Syrian civil war and the Arab-Israel conflict.

Jordan’s King Abdullah warned on Wednesday that if Israel does not accept Palestinian Authority demands, a “stalemate in peace efforts would cause an explosion in Palestinian-Israeli ties in a sort of Arab Spring-like protests, taking the form of either a new intifada or a cycle of violence and counter-violence.”

His statement to the mass circulation London-based AsharqAlawasat daily came one day before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry brings his peace plane to Israel, with a stop in Jordan before coming to Israel.

Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has cleverly lined up his diplomatic guns and mined the diplomatic field so that wherever Israel steps, it faces an explosion. UNESCO is meeting this week and has passed a resolution condemning Israel for allegedly damaging the Old City through excavations that supposedly threaten the collapse of the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount.

The Saudi Gazette chipped in with another headline that Israel’s archaeological excavations intend to bring down the mosque actually are preparations for the building of a new Holy Temple.

And U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry did his bit by telling his staffers at the embassy in Jeddah on Tuesday. “The relationship with Saudi Arabia is one of our really super-important ones for a lot of obvious reasons… Saudi Arabia has been particularly helpful…thanks to King Abdullah on a major peace initiative, the Arab Peace Initiative…securing the support of all of the Arab League as well as most Muslim countries in the world, to support the notion that if we can resolve the differences with respect to creating a Palestinian state, that you could wind up with peace with every single one of those countries.”

That is in a nutshell the heart of American thinking. Wrap up the Saud Peace Initiative, get the Jews of the Old City, Ramot, French Hill, Gilo and anywhere else they were forbidden from living under the Jordanian occupation between 1948 and 1967, and there will be peace.

Kerry forgot to note that the Saudi Initiative provides for “normalization” and not the “establishment” of diplomatic ties, but so what?

The Secretary of State also dished out Hallelujahs for the Arab League, who met in Washington a few months ago and actually were willing to talk about changing the original Saudi plan to enable land swaps.

That “was something new and different, and frankly, it brought some feedback, some kickback, from people who didn’t like the fact that they were willing to show that kind of leadership,” said Kerry in Jeddah.

That fits in well with the Saudi foreign minister’s statement that a Palestinian Authority state must have “continuous borders,” meaning Israel would keep areas such as Maaleh Adumim in return for giving the Palestinian Authority land to connect Gaza and Ramallah.

That would mean lopping off a few thousand acres of prime agricultural land and Jewish towns from Sderot to the area of Kiryat Gat until it ties in with the PA west of Hevron.

Of course, no sane Arab with Israeli citizenship living in those areas would give up benefits from the Israeli government for the privilege of living under a Palestinian Authority welfare state, but neither Kerry nor Jordan’s King Abdullah looks that far into the future.

Kerry has one future – a peace agreement, no matter what,

King Abdullah has another future planned. His inciting warning of violence is classic “adaptive expectation,” whereby one’s expectations put into action events that bring about the desired results.

Three is nothing like the promise of war to bring about war.

In the king’s own words, the expected violence in the absence of Israeli surrender will result “from the loss of hope for the two-state formula and the emergence of a one-state reality where Palestinians are persecuted.”

“This would trigger a popular revolution venting the injustice the Palestinians have been historically subjected to,” he added.

He had the audacity to say that despite his prediction of violence, “As for us in Jordan, we are effectively contributing to creating a positive atmosphere that can help the Palestinians and Israelis return to direct negotiations.”

For clinchers, he said mentioned the new legal status of the Palestinian state, referring to the United Nations General Assembly resolution last November that gave Abbas an upgraded status, which allowed its becoming a member of UNESCO.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has succeeded in convincing the European Union to back off from passing another critical resolution of a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, an indication that the international community is losing its patience with the Palestinian Authority.

The Foreign Ministers were expected to adopt a critical resolution on Israeli settlement policy following their monthly meeting in Luxembourg on Monday, according to the European Jewish Press.

Instead, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton told a press conference that ministers had simply “reaffirmed our commitment to the two-state solution.”

Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Romania reportedly called for the more moderate statement while Denmark and other critics of Israel lost their initiative for a sharper condemnation.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas are trying to put the other in the role of “bad boy” if U.S. Secretary of State John Kelly does not succeed in arranging for direct talks when he visits Israel later this week.

Globe-trotting U.S. Secretary of State John Kelly has left India for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait before flying to Jordan and Israel later this week to tackle the issue of Palestinian Authority demands.

The Saudi kingdom is a powerful ally of the United States and is solidly behind the rebels in the Syrian civil war. Kerry and the Obama administration want to get rid of Assad and have come out in favor of arming the rebels but still are concerned that a terrorist regime might replace Assad, if and when he is ousted or killed.

“If the United States does nothing, and the rest of the world does nothing, then Syria is going to wind up in an even worse condition than it is today,” Kerry told CBS News from New Delhi. He said it would be even worse if Syria were to break up, “with radicals, extremists able to get a hold of chemical weapons and free to use it as a base to begin to conduct their operations again against the West and the United States.

Sources familiar with the events in Syria have told Israel Army Radio on Wednesday morning that military officers from France have been training Syrian rebels in Jordan and Turkey. The information reveals a picture whereby the government in Paris is the most active among Western nations in attempting to topple Assad

The French military officers are instructing the Syrian rebels on the use of the advanced weapons with which they’ve been supplied, in Jordanian and Turkish territories.

The information indicates that Paris is the life and soul of the Western campaign to topple the Assad regime. The French also work hard at the “Geneva Conference 2″ to resolve the situation in Syria, although chances are low that it will indeed take place.

French intelligence officers are coordinating their activities with their Saudi counterparts, who invested large sums of money in funding the rebels. Over the past two weeks, since the fall of the city of Kosiir into the hands of President Bashar Assad’s army, the French have held several meetings with representatives of Saudi intelligence and Turkish security systems executives, to coordinate their actions, especially in light of the approaching battle over control of Aleppo.

A frequent participant in these coordination meetings is Brigadier General Salim Idriss, commander of the largest rebel army, the Free Syrian Army.

France and Saudi Arabia have marked Brigadier General Idriss as their Man among the rebels, and he is provided with the bulk of arms and ammunition coming in from the west.

Brigadier General Idris is a former Syrian army officer, originally from the city of Homs, who was given the top position only six months ago. He is known for his opposition to the Jihadist organizations that are currently fighting in Syria.

Iran is ending it s first contingent of approximately 4,000 Hezbollah terrorist organization fighters, all of them Shi’ite Muslims, to fight with the Assad regime days after the Obama administration announced it will arm rebels, mainly Sunni Muslims who have been aided by the Sunni Muslim Al Qaeda’s proxy, Al Nusra.

American arms to rebels in Syrians have to pass through Jordan or Turkey. Add to this anti-Syrian and anti-Iran alliance the Sunni kingdom in Saudi Arabia, which would like nothing more to see the Iranian regime collapse, along with its threat to build a nuclear bomb and its ambition to dominate a pan-Islam state throughout the Middle East.

Ditto for the Gulf States.

Iran has thrown down the gauntlet by its sending Hezbollah troops to help Syrian President Bashar Assad. Both countries are dependent on each other.

A victory by Assad is unthinkable. It would totally destroy American’s image of a world power.

If the rebels can overcome Hezbollah and Assad’s army, Iran would be severely weakened, if not decimated.

Until then, Israel faces increasing instability in Lebanon, dominated by pro-Syrian and Hezbollah, and in Syria.

The Obama administration’s decision to take sides  in the Syrian Civil War sucks up Jordan and Turkey as totally dependent on success for the United States, and Israel can only pray that the instability does not turn the Golan Heights into an active war zone.

Once the Al Qaeda-linked terrorists get their hands on weapons, they always can be turned on Israel in the future, the exact same threat that Israel faces against Hezbollah.

Everyone is turning against everyone, and the best outcome for Israel in the Sunni-Shi’ite war is that both sides lose.

The United States also might wish for the same. It is backing the Sunni Muslims, whose terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks.

The Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt has broken off with Syria. Hamas, headquartered in Syrian only two years ago, now is accused by Assad as training rebels to attack his regime with Kassam rockets.

One interesting sidebar to this proxy war is the Palestinian Authority.  Does anyone remember  that the PA-Israeli issue is supposed to be the heart of all of the problems in the Middle East?