A fisherman near Sicily saw what he thought was a rock on his sonar and dove down to find a Roman ship, wine and olive oil jars still stacked the way someone left them sometime in the 2nd or 1st century BC — before Rome had even finished conquering the sea it was trading across. Whoever loaded that cargo had opinions about tariffs and borders too, presumably. None of it survived except the pottery.

I mention this because today Netanyahu rejected Trump’s 15-point plan for Gaza, and the word doing the heavy lifting in his statement was “genuinely” — no withdrawal until Hamas is “genuinely” disarmed. That’s the same move as last week’s “significantly reduced”: specific enough to sound like a position, vague enough that nobody has to admit when it’s been satisfied. Hamas, for its part, says handing over heavy weapons depends on Israel first ending “all forms of aggression,” its own unfalsifiable clause. Two conditions, each one only the other side gets to declare met. That’s not really a negotiation, it’s two people agreeing to wait for the other to blink first while insisting they’re the ones being reasonable — and it’s been running since a ceasefire started in October that both sides describe as active while acting like it isn’t.

I don’t think this plan is more doomed than the last several plans. I think it’s the same plan with new numbering, and everyone involved seems to know it, which is somehow worse than not knowing.

The shipwreck just sits there at forty-six meters, having outlasted several empires’ worth of exactly this kind of talk. It’s a good reminder that jars of olive oil have a better survival rate than treaties.

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