Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

IT WAS just another day for the Israeli army on the West Bank. Having parked its jeeps in the hills south of Hebron, a unit of soldiers checked the papers of the Palestinians who lived there, confiscated one or two, and then herded the people and their flocks off a hilltop which a nearby Jewish settlement, called Susiya, has been eyeing with a view to taking it over. “Military zone,” tersely explained an Israeli officer, who had just received a warrant declaring it such. “Off you go.”

Taking time out from their Saturday morning prayers, a few settlers looked on approvingly. “Don’t argue,” replied the officer, when a Palestinian shepherd asked why the soldiers were moving Arabs out of the newly acquired military zone but not Jews. “You have a minute to move or I’ll arrest you,” said the officer.

“Settlers are just off-duty soldiers,” mumbled the shepherd to his sons as they stubbornly continued to tend their sheep. A Palestinian mother picnicking with her two toddlers is hauled away by Israeli soldiers, while villagers plead for her release.

The signs of previous bouts of displacement ring the adjacent hills. Mobile homes for young Jewish settlers sprout on the hilltops. Armed with a list of military orders, Israeli soldiers are herding the West Bank’s Palestinians out of the rural 60% of the territory, officially known as Area C, where Israel has full military and civilian control, and into cities. On some days the Israeli army declares a patch of land to be a live-fire military zone. On other days they say the Palestinians must move because of an impending archaeological dig. The erection of hilltop stations to provide antennae for Israeli mobile phones (but not for Palestinian ones) is another oft-cited reason for pushing Palestinians out. Eight Palestinian hamlets around Susiya face demolition.

Armed Jewish settlers assist the clearance. Soon after the army did its job, a Jewish shepherdess from Susiya brought her flock onto a Palestinian field of wheat to let it graze. Someone had scratched out all the Arabic road signs. “The only weapons we have are our cameras,” says Alia Nawaja, a mother of seven turned amateur camerawoman, who lives in a nearby hamlet. Palestinian violence, however, still occasionally erupts. On April 30th a Jewish settler was killed by a Palestinian for the first time since September 2011, at the other end of the West Bank.

A barrage of reports by the UN, the European Union and assorted charities has repeatedly warned that the Palestinians in Area C are under threat. Some 350,000 Jewish settlers now inhabit over 200 settlements and outposts in the same area, usually on the high ground, twice as many people as the Palestinians in the land below. Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s new defence minister, the ultimate authority in the West Bank, backs a report commissioned last year by the Israeli government, endorsing all such Jewish settlements. Naftali Bennett, another powerful minister in the new coalition of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, wants all of Area C to be annexed outright to Israel.

In many respects this has already largely taken place. A senior Israeli officer recently testified in court that in the past 45 years of Israeli occupation the army has redistributed around 70% of the West Bank land designated as state-owned either to Jewish settlers or to the World Zionist Organisation, whereas less than 1% of supposedly state-owned land was granted to Palestinians. While Israel’s government expands Jewish settlements and ties them to Israel proper with a network of roads, it bars and sometimes reverses Palestinian development. It habitually denies housing permits to Palestinians, thus stunting the community’s natural growth, yet provides uninterrupted water to Jewish settlements. Water for the Palestinians generally comes once a week, by lorry. Israeli soldiers have destroyed scores of small EU-funded projects, ranging from wells to solar panelling, and threatened to demolish scores more.

So far this year, Israel’s army has evicted almost 400 Palestinians from the West Bank and dismantled over 200 homes, the fastest rate for two years, according to the UN. The number of such incidents has risen sharply since a new Israeli government, with even stronger settler influence within it, took office in March. As a result, the European Union called on April 26th for an end to what it calls “the forced transfer” of Palestinians out of Area C. The Israeli army has also again demolished a restaurant, al-Maghrour, in a rural spot that was popular with Palestinians from nearby Bethlehem, which is increasingly hemmed in by settlements. In addition, some 2,300 Bedouin have recently been earmarked for removal from the strategic west-east corridor known as E1, which links Jerusalem to a big Jewish settlement, Maale Adumim, and to its smaller satellite community, Kfar Adumim, where Israel’s new housing minister, Uri Ariel, happens to reside.

PALESTINIANS spoke of an ill-wind from the West. A sandstorm shrouded President Barack Obama’s visit to Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the last-stop on this three-day tour to the holy land. Mr Obama’s outreach to Israel, they feared, had come at their expense. He visited the graves of Israel’s founders, but not that of Yasser Arafat, Palestine’s first president, despite parking his helicopter alongside when he visited the West Bank city of Ramallah. He repeatedly paid his respects to Jewish suffering and toured the Holocaust Museum, but could not utter the word "refugees", say Palestinians, which might acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homeland in the 1948 and 1967 wars.

Underscoring the asymmetry in the relationship, Mr Obama spent three days in Israel and almost as many hours in Palestine. While he reached out to Israeli students, Palestinians were kept far away. A phalanx of security guards allowed people to enter a distant corner of Manger Square in Bethlehem, a few hundred metres away from the president, but no closer.

The lacklustre welcome mirrored the Palestinians' mood. While trimmers in Israel had been weeding the pavements for days, in Ramallah and Bethlehem there was barely a broom in sight. Posters from a protest rally against Mr Obama the previous day still blew in the wind. The blustery sandstorm spoilt the photo-ops. The Palestinian press offered no positive comments, and though the protests were largely small the police did nothing to muffle the expressions of anger.

Mr Obama’s message, said Palestinian officials, was as derisory as the choreography of his visit. On arrival in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority which runs the West Bank, he implied that the onus was on Mahmoud Abbas, the PA’s president, to restart the political process. In their joint press conference, he echoed Israel’s demand that Mr Abbas abandon his pre-condition of an Israeli halt to settlement construction to talks, albeit more tactfully. It was time, said the president, to dispense with "old formulas and habits", sidelining Palestinian concerns that Israel would again use extended negotiations to further build and settle inside a putative Palestinian state. So tense did the press conference seem that commentators likened it to Mr Obama’s first-term encounters with Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

For Palestinian negotiators, Mr Obama’s apparent rewriting of the old rules for peace-making makes the call to resume direct talks all the harder to swallow. Speaking in Ramallah, he seemed to reduce the five core issues outlined by previous American presidents to two, namely Israeli security and Palestinian borders. He made no mention of two others—Palestinian claims that East Jerusalem be their capital and the return of refugees; and he recommended that a third—Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank—be addressed once a peace deal had been reached. To do otherwise, he said, would be to put the cart before the horse. Though he insisted that a future Palestinian state be independent, viable and contiguous, he backpedalled on a previous statement that the borders of 1967, predating Israel’s occupation, form the basis of a future Palestinian state, and dropped all mention of a timetable for concluding a deal. Further riling the Palestinians, he publicly endorsed Israel’s demand to be recognised as a Jewish state, which Palestinians take as an renunciation of what they claim is a UN-sanctioned right of refugees to return.

Mr Obama's denunciation of the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, could further cost Mr Abbas the domestic buy-in he needs to return to the table. While reaching out across Israel’s political divide, and shaking hands with Israelis opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state, Mr Obama repudiated Hamas, Palestine’s best-organised political force, for refusing to recognise Israel. Until now, Hamas leaders have said that they would not oppose negotiations for a two-state settlement, should they resume. By publicly excluding the Islamists, Mr Obama increases the risk they could again become spoilers. The few rockets fired from Gaza during Mr Obama are a reminder of the power the Islamists can muster.

In the wake of Mr Obama’s visit, some Palestinian officials mourned the absence of his predecessor, George Bush. Making a similar trip a decade earlier, Mr Bush spoke of the occupation on “1967” lands, stipulated that Jerusalem would be part of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and demanded that Israel stop settlement expansion and remove the 100-plus outposts in the West Bank which even under its laws it had not authorised. Unlike Mr Bush’s 2003 roadmap, Mr Obama offered no such formula to hold Israel to account.

Supporters of Mr Obama argue that he needs to woo the parties back to the table before dictating terms. But many observers remain unconvinced that Mr Netanayhu is serious about seeking a two-state settlement. Some Israeli officials suspect he would pocket the president’s new positions, and continue to play the blame-game with the Palestinians, accusing them of obstructing a deal. Certainly, Israel’s initial actions in the wake of Mr Obama’s visit suggested little in its posture has changed. Mr Obama praised Palestinian non-violent protests but within hours of his departure Israeli police began dismantling a small camp site Palestinians had erected during his visit in an attempt to hold onto E1, a strategic slither of West Bank land east of Jerusalem.

IN 1942, as the Holocaust in Europe was entering its most horrific phase, a pacifist American rabbi called Judah Magnes helped found a political party in Palestine called Ihud. Hebrew for unity, Ihud argued for a single binational state in the Holy Land to be shared by Jews and Arabs. Its efforts—and those of like-minded idealists—came to naught. Bitterly opposed to the partition of Palestine, Magnes died in 1948 just as the state of Israel—the naqba, or catastrophe, to Palestinians—was being born. Decades of strife were to follow.

At the United Nations, in the White House and around the world, there is a strong belief that any solution ending that strife must be based on two separate states, with a mainly Jewish one called Israel sitting alongside a mainly Arab one called Palestine. The border between them would be based on the one that existed before the 1967 war—known as the “green line”—with some adjustments and land swaps to reflect the world as it is. Jerusalem would be a shared but divided capital.

In the face of the manifold obstacles facing such a solution, however, something like Magnes’s one-state variant has been coming back into vogue, both in left-wing Western (and Jewish) circles and among a growing minority of Palestinians. In 2004 a British-born Israeli writer, Daniel Gavron, published a book, “The Other Side of Despair: Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land”, that called for the creation of a democratic binational “State of Jerusalem”. Some Israeli intellectuals are airing the notion of “Post-Zionism”. Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, says a “post-national” model must be explored. “I have no doubt something is emerging, though I am not sure what it is.”

One but not the same

Avi Shlaim, a leading British chronicler of the Israel-Palestine saga who was born in Baghdad and brought up in Israel, says he has “shifted…to supporting a one-state solution with equal rights for all citizens,” though he concedes that “this is not what I would ideally like.” Past and present Israeli governments, he thinks, have killed the two-state option, partly by entrenching Jewish settlements so deeply on the West Bank, the heartland of a would-be Palestinian state, that they cannot be removed.

This is an assessment the idealists share with hawkish Israelis and a growing number of Palestinians. More and more often, the two-state solution is pronounced dead. Mathematics suggests that the alternative is a one-state solution. But though there are a lot of different one-state outcomes under discussion, none of them really looks like a solution.

If one state is simply the rejection of two states, then many Israelis on the right are up for it. In 2009, under American pressure, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, gave a speech at Bar-Ilan University in which he grudgingly endorsed the two-state idea. Since then he has shown barely a flicker of enthusiasm for it. In a speech to the American Congress in May 2011, he declared triumphantly, and to sustained applause, that Jerusalem would be undivided, evidently under Israeli control, noting that “the vast majority of the 650,000 Israelis who live beyond the 1967 lines reside in neighbourhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem and Greater Tel Aviv.” Yet it is barely conceivablethat the Palestinians would ever accept a state that excluded all of Jerusalem.

Mr Netanyahu has made clear that he will not countenance the bulk of the West Bank’s settlers being pushed out in order to let the Palestinians have their state. And he is emphatic that Israel must control the Jordan valley as well as the airspace above the Palestinians; their West Bank state would exist under an Israeli lid. “He never made a clear-cut commitment to the two-state solution,” says Mr Netanyahu’s predecessor as prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

Regardless of Mr Netanyahu’s position, his Likud party has refused to endorse the creation of any kind of Palestinian state. Most of its Knesset members have joined a “Greater Israel Caucus” that says the West Bank must stay part of Israel for ever. Avigdor Lieberman, a rough-hewn populist whose largely ethnic-Russian party merged with Likud before the election, backs partition but also wants to encourage the fifth of Israeli citizens who are Arabs living within Israel’s 1967 boundary to leave—ethnic cleansing, in Palestinian eyes. Arab Israelis who fail a “test of loyalty” to the state of Israel should, he says, be deprived of various rights, such as the vote. Mr Lieberman is currently out of office, pending an investigation into alleged fraud, but the 31 seats held together by his party and Likud is easily the biggest bloc in the 120-seat Knesset.

You gave me nothing

Naftali Bennett, a 40-year-old software tycoon with a hip Californian manner, is the most strident new voice on the Israeli right: blunter than Mr Netanyahu, more openly dismissive of the two-state idea, and more hawkish than another, bigger beneficiary of Israeli voters in January’s general election, Yair Lapid. (Mr Lapid’s party won 19 seats in the Knesset to Mr Bennett’s 12.) Asked about removing Jewish settlements from the West Bank and creating a Palestinian state between Jerusalem and the Jordan river, Mr Bennett breezily replies that “It just ain’t gonna happen.” Of the Palestinians, he says “I will do everything in my power to make sure they never get a state. It would be national suicide for Israel.”

Instead, Mr Bennett wants Israel to annex the 61% of the West Bank known as “Area C” (see map), in essence the territory’s central and eastern slab, going down to the Jordan valley. The Palestinians—at least 50,000—who live there would become Israeli citizens, should they stay. The other 2.6m or so Palestinians on the West Bank would have to be content with “full-blown autonomy” in their towns and villages. This, in essence, would mean municipal rights (he mentions garbage collection). Jewish settlers would stay put.

Mr Lapid, a jovial former television anchorman now deemed a kingmaker in the Knesset, is considered a centrist by Israelis. But he is no enthusiast for a two-state plan, at least not of the sort promoted by Western diplomats or in the UN. He chose to make his chief election speech at the university of Ariel, one of the largest and most controversial of Jewish settlements, a town of 20,000 people (with another 12,000 students) built deep within the West Bank. The second person on his party’s list in the Knesset is a settler rabbi. Mr Lapid also argues for Jerusalem to remain undivided under Israeli control.

The only mainly Jewish parties that treat negotiations towards a two-state solution as a priority are Tzipi Livni’s group (which won a paltry six seats in the recent election), Meretz (which also got six) and the rump of Ariel Sharon’s Kadima party (just two). Three Arab-Israeli parties, all two-staters, got 11 seats between them.

The Labour Party, long Israel’s leading proponent of a two-state solution, got 15 seats. But its campaign concentrated almost exclusively on domestic issues. Indeed, the degree to which the election and its coalition-cobbling aftermath ignored negotiations with the Palestinians to any end at all was telling. Mr Bennett’s provocative no-state-for-the-Palestinians oratory was noticed. But he was never rebuked for it by, say, Mr Netanyahu.

In sum, despite Mr Netanyahu’s glum espousal of the two-state idea in his speech at Bar-Ilan, proponents of a state of Israel that encompasses all or most of the West Bank are plainly the strongest force in the Knesset. On March 14th, Mr Netanyahu announced a proposed government in advance of a visit by Barack Obama on March 20th. It contains Mr Lapid and Mr Bennett; Ms Livni will probably be its only member keenly committed to negotiations with the Palestinians.

Within Israel, the Palestinian question simply does not seem urgent. Even the settlers do not seem to feel threatened. With a web of well-built roads knitting their infrastructure into that of Israel proper—some of them reserved for Israeli use—a visitor barely notices which side of the green line he is on. Those living in the settlements have scant contact with Palestinians whose villages lie close by. In 2012, for the first year since 1973, not a single Jewish Israeli was killed as a result of Palestinian violence on the West Bank.

Palestinians, for their part, talk more and more of “a one-state reality”—while most caution that it is not a “solution”. They argue that the notion of a viable, contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state sitting peacefully alongside Israel is no longer feasible. An ever more popular parallel for the situation is South Africa before and after its emergence from apartheid.

The main similarity is the existence of two separate systems of government and law for two people living side by side on territory that is occupied as a result of conquest and confiscation. The web of Israeli roads and the restrictions that Palestinians face in terms of travel are compared to the sequestering of black South Africans in wretched “bantustans”. Israel’s security fence, in many places a five-metre (15-foot) concrete wall wound round Jewish settlements is inevitably known to Palestinians as “the apartheid wall”. Scores of checkpoints recall the old South African “pass laws” whereby blacks needed permission to go from one area to another, especially in search of work in “white” areas.

The campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, which is growing in strength in America and Britain, sees the one-state reality as a precursor to a civil-rights movement that would then bring down the “apartheid state” with the help, as in South Africa, of external support inflamed by the injustice. If Jewish settlers were determined to remain on the West Bank, they might be able to do so—but under Palestinian authority.

To drag the past out into the light

Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, and its former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert—men in what used to be the mainstream of national politics—worry about just such a future. They have warned that, unless the occupation of the bulk of the West Bank ends, or Palestinians in the West Bank are given full voting rights in Israel, the country will lose its claim to be a democracy. It will, says Mr Peres, become a “pariah”, just as South Africa did. The BDS campaign may thus, he implies, become unstoppable. Even the Americans might find it hard to go on backing Israel come hell or high water.

More hawkish Palestinians, typified by the Islamist movement, Hamas, are not giving up on a two-state solution; they never believed in it in the first place. They still dream of a land where they hold sway from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river, with Jews and Christians living there, if they are lucky, on sufferance. Accepting that this harsh scenario is unlikely to come to pass in the short run, its proponents talk merrily of the long game, waiting for a generation or even two.

These true-believing one-staters have a strong position in Hamas, and it is one that will likely get stronger if people like Mr Bennett call the Israeli tune. “We consider the whole of Palestine our land,” says Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader in Gaza, sitting at home beside a portrait of two sons killed fighting the Israelis. History and time, he says with a big smile, are on Hamas’s side. “The Islamic trend is coming to power. Ten years is enough to neutralise the power of Israel and its supporters.” An Islamist regime has come to power next-door in Egypt; Syria may be next; Hamas’s allies in Jordan are shaking King Abdullah’s throne. “No one can guess what will happen tomorrow.”

“In the end I am sure there will be just one state,” says Basam al-Naim, for seven years Hamas’s minister of health in Gaza. “But what kind of state I cannot say. Many Jews would leave and many Palestinians would come back. In ten to 20 years there will be a completely different geopolitical map.” The 1m-odd Russian Jews who have bolstered Israel since the Soviet Union collapsed, he says, would have to go. “They are already segregated in Israel,” he adds. “And many of them are not even Jews.”

Over the years, some Hamas leaders, such as Khaled Meshal, have groped towards accepting Israel, at least as a “reality” to be grudgingly accepted. Some now posit a two-state solution, albeit often as a step on the way to a single state, once Muslims, Jews and Christians learn to live happily together, perhaps in some federal halfway house.

In every one-state outcome, be it created by virtue of persuasion or under duress, Jews would eventually be a minority (see chart). Mr Bennett seeks to avoid this by advocating “autonomy” outside Israel for much of the West Bank. But he must know that the autonomy he advocates will never satisfy the Palestinians, nor the neighbouring Arab countries that host several million Palestinian refugees, most of whose forebears fled when Israel was founded in 1948. “I do not have a clear-cut solution,” he concedes, before reverting to the old argument that “Jordan is Palestine.” Most Jordanians, it is true, are of Palestinian origin. But would Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza, let alone those within the borders of Israel, be satisfied with a state on the east side of the Jordan river, presuming that the present monarchy would grant it to them? Not a chance. Though Mr Bennett might want them to, the Egyptians aren’t going to let Gaza be dumped on them, either.

But, like the activists of BDS, Mr Bennett and his friends know that granting Palestinians proper civil rights within an enlarged Israel would mean that the Jews would soon be outnumbered and later outvoted by the Palestinians. Though ultra-Orthodox Jews are the fastest growing community in Israel, Palestinians still outbreed Israelis as a whole. Palestinians in Israel already add up to 1.6m, along with 2.6m on the West Bank and 1.7m in Gaza. Jewish Israelis on both sides of the green line number about 6m. “In ten to 15 years Palestinians would have a majority in one state,” says Mr Olmert.

This means that none of the one-state options makes sense for Israel in the long run. The idealists paint a picture of Arabs and Jews getting along swimmingly together: dream on. The hawks think the Palestinians can be kept quiet for ever if they are denied a state: again, dream on.

At the same time, the analogy with South Africa is fatally flawed. Israel within its 1967 borders has international legitimacy; no white South African state could ever have claimed as much; beyond a few Afrikaner zealots the idea would have been a non-starter. So a two-state solution was never possible. And a situation in which blacks outnumber whites by ten to one is completely unlike a situation where the sides have comparable numbers. In conceding the principle of one-person-one-vote South Africa’s whites knew that they were losing their political primacy for good. Israeli Jews will not do that.

Do you feel the same?

Even if the Palestinians were remarkably tolerant—and that is questionable—Israel as a Jewish state would disappear. Even the name would go. It is barely conceivable that Jews, after running their own vibrant polity for half a century and praying for a return to their ancestral homeland for two millennia, would quietly submit to Palestinian majority rule, however idealistic its proponents. That is why Dov Khenin, a Jewish member of the Knesset’s mainly Arab and communist-inclined Hadash party, sees two states as the only practical path to peace even while sympathising with the ideals of the one-staters. “If the two peoples want to have a binational state, OK,” he says wistfully. “But my impression is that Israelis and Palestinians don’t very much like each other.” Nor, he implies, will they ever do so.

Academic gatherings, such as a conference last year at Harvard to discuss the one-state option, have yet to put flesh on the idealists’ notions. Would a federal framework provide for separate assemblies? What sort of army and police would there be? Would, as Mr Gavron’s book suggests, the Jews have to drop their Law of Return (allowing any diaspora Jew to become a citizen) and the Palestinians likewise have to drop their Right of Return (letting all refugees and their descendants back)? Few have begun to address such nettlesome questions, because in truth, few see a one-state outcome as a true goal. Most come to it out of exhausted despair or amiable fantasy.

Israel, as Mr Netanyahu must know, cannot remain both democratic and Jewish if it continues to control several million Palestinians without granting them full political rights. At the same time, he dreads the encirclement of hostile Arab states around him, and frets that America, under Barack Obama, may fail to make good on its promise to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. Meanwhile he lamely repeats the old mantra that “there is no Palestinian partner for peace.”

Quite possibly he does not know what he should, can or will do. Had Mitt Romney won the American presidency, he might have given Mr Netanyahu a fillip. Mr Obama has no such desire. Instead, he will repeat to the Israeli leader what Mr Netanyahu has almost said but cannot bring himself fully to endorse—that there is no serious alternative to a two-state deal

BINYAMIN NETANYAHU, Israel’s prime minister since 2009 (and before that, from 1996 to 1999), has called elections for January 2013, confident that his Likud party will be elected for another term. As things stand, he is probably right. Most of the other party leaders reacted to his announcement on October 9th more as prospective coalition partners vying to serve under him than as possible rivals striving to replace him.

For Mr Netanyahu, an early election—the government’s full term would have ended in November 2013—means getting back into power before he needs to face the new deadline he himself set recently for Iran’s nuclear ambitions: the summer of 2013. He will campaign as the Israeli leader who concentrated world attention on the Iranian threat and who, in the last resort, will act alone to eliminate it.

An election in January may also avoid the effect on Israeli voters of a possible worsening of Mr Netanyahu’s fraught relations with a second-term President Barack Obama. If, on the other hand, Mitt Romney were to win, Israeli voters will be encouraged to bask in the personal and political warmth between the new president and the incumbent prime minister.

Mr Netanyahu’s formal reason for dissolving his parliament is his failure to persuade his present right-wing and religious coalition partners to support a new, austere budget that he believes is crucial to keep the national economy in good shape. After the election, he hopes, those same parties will either have to support the same budget or make way for others jostling to join the government. The present and prospective partners, for their part, hope to get enough seats to soften Mr Netanyahu’s economic rigour.

There is little talk in either of Israel’s main political camps of peace with the Palestinians, and little anticipation therefore of any change on that frozen front. Mr Netanyahu, in his election announcement, pledged to “uphold our vital national interests in any future peace negotiations”. That, to his own constituency, signalled a supposedly reassuring lack of interest in resuming the long-suspended talks.

Meanwhile, Likud’s rivals, the Labour party, bidding to revive under the new leadership of Shelly Yachimovich, and the more centrist Kadima under Shaul Mofaz, are still lagging some way behind Likud, according the opinion polls.

A slim possibility of change—of policy or even of prime minister—hinges on two Israelis, both recently found guilty in the courts but both with solid followings: Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister (2006-09) who used to head Kadima, and Arye Deri, a former interior minister (1993-98) who led a religious party, Shas.

Mr Olmert was acquitted in July of bribery in a corruption case that forced him to resign as prime minister in 2008. But he was convicted on a lesser charge of breach of public trust arising from a conflict of interest; he was given a suspended jail sentence. Mr Olmert and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, have both said they would have reached a peace deal between them had his term as prime minister not been truncated. Some in the Israeli peace camp believe Mr Olmert could offer a credible challenge to Mr Netanyahu and could unite the various pro-peace parties behind him. But a separate bribery trial, still going on, in which he is a defendant makes that an unlikely prospect in this election.

Mr Deri got a three-year jail sentence for bribery, but a decade has passed since then and he is eligible to run and hold high office again. He is still hugely popular in his former party. He remains too, a relative dove on the Palestinian issue. In the 1990s he led Shas into Yitzhak Rabin’s pro-peace coalition. With Mr Deri at its head, Shas might not side with Mr Netanyahu’s hawkish and religious partners. At least in theory, it might join the peace camp to block Mr Netanyahu from forming a new government. In any event, the decision on Mr Deri’s comeback is in the hands of Shas’s spiritual mentor, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a sprightly 92-year-old.