The fact that no other major hidden nuclear facilities have yet been revealed may be a function of tactics - they may be known to the West, as Qom was for three years, which is biding its time on when to publicly confront the Iranians - or they may be undiscovered; after all, Syria built a nuclear facility in Israel's backyard, and it went unnoticed for years.

Largely overlooked in the reporting from Geneva, incidentally, is the fact that another Iranian deception was exposed there. Earlier this year, Iran approached the IAEA with a request for new supplies of low enriched uranium for its decades-old, IAEA-safeguarded research reactor in Teheran. The Iranians should have suggested that their own stockpile of LEU - supposedly being produced precisely for such peaceful use - be utilized. But Teheran, evidently with its eye on non-peaceful use, didn't want to see that stockpile depleted. The proposal now being discussed, under which Russia and France would perform the further enrichment necessary for the use of this Iranian feedstock at the Teheran reactor, reducing Iran's known LEU stockpile, was the international community's elegant response.

Israel and the US are maintaining close and constructive coordination on the Iranian nuclear crisis. Concerns and assessments are shared effectively. Nothing that was raised by the US in Geneva came as a surprise in Jerusalem.

But the US's 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, confidently asserting that Iran had frozen its nuclear weapons program in 2003, shattered any expectations here that the Bush administration would stop Iran. So Israel had concluded long before the current administration took office that it would ultimately need to rely on itself.

And that conviction has only been reinforced by everything that has unfolded in the last few months - notably including the latest revelation by US officials, including Panetta, that the US knew about Qom back in 2006. The disclosure that US intelligence was aware Iran had a covert enrichment facility makes a mockery of the NIE's complacent assurances about a frozen Iranian nuclear weapons program, and it appears to confirm the long-held Israeli sense that the unwarrantedly sanguine NIE was deliberately skewed to deny president George W. Bush the evidence to more forcefully confront Iran. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized on Thursday, "The authors of the 2007 Iran NIE have some explaining to do."

MOREOVER, JERUSALEM'S confidence in this administration and its judgement - on Iran and anything else - seems also to have been shaken because of what are considered here to have been costly rookie errors where the Palestinians are concerned.

The Netanyahu government professes itself shocked that the Obama administration sought to disown understandings reached with the Bush administration, and put in writing, on Israel's retention of major West Bank settlement blocs.

And it broadcasts shock, too, that Washington sought to insist on a halt to all settlement building, including in east Jerusalem - a demand it should have known Binyamin Netanyahu would not and could not meet, and one that placed the US at odds with the Israeli mainstream while unrealistically heightening Palestinian expectations. As a consequence, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who met readily and frequently with prime minister Ehud Olmert even as settlement construction proceeded, is playing hard to get, staving off talks with Netanyahu despite the prime minister's stated readiness in principle for a freeze in the West Bank.

Counterproductively for US, Israeli and genuine Palestinian interests, the Abbas of fall 2009, now being cajoled back to the negotiating table by Obama's envoy George Mitchell, is a more radical figure in the eyes of the Israeli government - a leader proving obdurate over settlements, inciting against Israel over Jerusalem, and farcically investigating his own actions in initially agreeing to shelve the Goldstone Report while now feverishly working to maximize that report's Israel-bashing potential.

Previous Israeli governments, including the Likud-led coalition of Ariel Sharon, consistently spoke of Abbas as an asset. More skeptical by its very nature, this government - which is now reduced to seeking to condition resumed talks on a commitment from the PA not to act against Israel in international legal forums, and urging a halt to PA propaganda against Israel - is far less sure.

IN THIS government's thinking, efforts at negotiation with the Palestinians have been set back because of the exaggerated US demands on settlement, and the reality on the ground has grown more tense in the interim.

That's bad enough for Israel. But miscalculation by Washington over Iran would have far more profound consequences here.

Which is why, for all the genuinely excellent coordination between the US and Israel, and the truly wide exchange of information, Jerusalem's silence over the goings-on in Geneva speaks loudest of all.

America and the other key world players are doing what they see fit with regard to Iran. As will Israel.