The declaration by President Abbas that the Palestinian Authority is, as the New York Times put it, “no longer bound” by “mutual agreements with Israel,” including the Oslo Peace Accords, can be seen as a liberating moment for the Jewish State. Ne’er should it have gone to the Norwegian capital in the first place. It soon became politically incorrect to say that the agreements were a mistake. Now that the Palestinians have declared them no-longer-binding, Israel can pursue its interests less fettered than before.

The Palestinian Arabs, of course, are going to blame the end of Oslo on the Israelis, who, the Arabs insist, weren’t honoring the agreement in the first place. But the news comes in the wake of the report in the Israeli daily Haaretz that Secretary of State Kerry blocked a meeting from taking place between Mr. Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The plan for such a meeting emerged from a meeting in Paris between the Palestinian leader and four retired Israeli ambassadors.

Haaretz’s diplomatic leg, Barak Ravid, quoted Mr. Abbas as telling the group that in recent weeks he’d expressed a willingness to meet with Mr. Netanyahu but that a “third party who is not Israeli” had blocked the meeting. Mr. Abbas then made the mistake of checking with Mr. Kerry. Mr. Ravid qotes both Palestinian and Israeli officials as saying that Mr. Kerry, as Mr. Ravid paraphrased them, “asked Abbas not to hold the meeting” until Messrs. Abbas and Kerry could meet at the U.N.

That could prove to be an important scoop. For years the bedrock strategy for peace has been direct talks between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu once went before the United Nations and said he was prepared to walk out of that chamber and, without preconditions, go into direct peace talks with his Palestinian Arab counterpart — that very evening. It has always been the Arab side that has demurred. So what happens when Mr. Abbas is ready to meet? America blocks it.

Why is Secretary Kerry doing that, if he is? The American sources quoted by Mr. Ravid dispute Mr. Abbas’s version of what happened, and Washington reporters will be scrambling to see whether the report checks out. Haaretz itself reports that its U.S. sources “cast doubt” on the version of events offered by Mr. Abbas and his associates. They suggest it is an attempt, as Haaretz puts it, “to place responsibility on Washington for Abbas’ reluctance to meet with Netanyahu.” Our guess is that the Obama administration fears leaving the Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to their own devices.

That wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world under most American administrations. But we haven’t trusted Secretary Kerry since he went to Paris to treat with the Vietnamese communists. If he were on Israel’s side in the war that Palestinian Arabs have declared against Israel, he would have quit the administration on a point of principle long ago. He and the President have been all too glad to tilt the table against the Jewish state. For them to manage the Palestinian peace talks can mean nothing but trouble.

To top things off, Mr. Ravid reports that ten days ago Mr. Kerry met at London with the leader of Israel’s center-left opposition, Isaac Herzog (son of President Herzog). Their parley lasted two hours. Mr. Ravid quotes one Israeli familiar with the details as saying that the state secretary “was in listening mode during the meeting” and “specifically stated that he and the administration were not in the business of advising on internal Israeli politics.”

What malarkey. It was only a few months ago that Mr. Obama’s allies actually funded and ran a political operation to drive Prime Minister Netanyahu from office and get Mr. Herzog elected premier. They were famously humiliated by Israel’s voters. So now they’re advising Mr. Abbas to hang back from direct peace talks until Secretary Kerry can intervene, as he long ago did to pave the way for a communist victory in Vietnam and more recently to grease the appeasement with Iran. Being unbound from Oslo is the least of it.