We are back in no-man’s land. At midnight on Tuesday of last week, we passed the deadline set by Secretary of State John Kerry for the nine months of make-or-break negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Kerry’s was a valiant effort to put forth an outline of a two-state agreement after three sterile years. Scores of east-west journeys, 34 meetings with the PA’s President Mahmoud Abbas (known as Abu Mazen) and many more with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu produced only one affirmation: that the PA is not interested in a Palestinian state if it means recognizing the legitimacy of the state of Israel. How else, six days before the deadline, could Abu Mazen make a pact with Hamas and Islamic jihad, the Palestinian terror groups based in Gaza? Since the Oslo peace accord, they’ve murdered and injured countless Israeli civilians. Jen Psaki, spokesperson for the State Department, put it clearly: “It is hard to see how Israel will negotiate with a government that does not recognize its right to exist.”

Abu Mazen and his officials, photographed holding hands with Hamas leaders, know who and what their new partners are. They’re the people who executed his Fatah supporters in fighting in 2006-07 that claimed perhaps 600 Palestinian lives and ended with Fatah’s eviction. He knows Hamas will not change. Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas official, has already said that the newly announced Palestinian government “will not recognize ‘Israel’ and will not give up the resistance” (i.e. terror attacks). Fatah’s military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, is contemptuous of two-state efforts. It says it “will adhere to the option of armed resistance until the liberation of all of Palestine,” a euphemism for the destruction of Israel. This is horribly expressed in a video promising to “turn Tel Aviv into a ball of fire.” These are the same people who have said to the Israelis, “We love death more than you love life.” This is, as one Israeli put it, “a confirmed kill” of the peace process.

Let’s be clear about the mission of Hamas. It calls not just for Muslims to wage jihad against Israelis but also to kill Jews wherever they are. It has sent scores of suicide bombers into Israel and praised Osama bin Laden as a holy warrior, and refuses to respect past agreements. From the territory Israel yielded as a gesture for peace, Hamas has fired over 10,000 missiles and rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. Many countries categorize Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The Israelis believe Abu Mazen doomed any talks by his actions. Who can blame them? How can PA security forces operate effectively against their new partners? How can any shred of trust be put in Abu Mazen, a man of specious double-talk? Amid talks with the Israelis to agree on terms for a Palestinian state, he announced that he will seek accession to more than 60 international conventions and treaties for the “state of Palestine.” There isn’t one – and even as he spoke, he was planning to sabotage the best hope there has been for such a state. He knows that in 2011 the U.N. Security Council rejected a similar Palestinian bid (though he did achieve recognition for Palestine of nonmember state status at the General Assembly in late 2012). He knows that his move breaks Article IX of the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of Sept. 28, 1995. That agreement, which set out the powers and responsibilities of the Palestinian Council, did not allow the exercise of power in the realm of foreign policy. To cap this catalog of bad faith, the Abu Mazen tactic also violates Article XXXI, according to which the PA agreed that “neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”

Clearly the strategy has been to use diplomatic tricks to obtain international recognition, with the goal of a sovereign Palestinian state along the 1967 lines, without having to make concessions on fundamental issues of the conflict such as the Palestinian “right of return,” which would flood Israel with millions of Palestinians. The idea is to enhance diplomatic and economic pressures on Israel to unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank, as it withdrew from Gaza in 2005 – with horrible consequences.

The history is shameful. The peace activist Ari Shavit, liberal columnist and author of “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel,” recently wrote for the news service Haaretz that in early 1997, “rumors were rife about the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement, but only a few had the opportunity to see the document with their own eyes or hold it in their hands. I was one of those few. With mouth agape, I read the comprehensive outline for peace that had been formulated 18 months earlier by two brilliant champions of peace – one Israeli and one Palestinian. The document left nothing to chance: Mahmoud Abbas is ready to sign a permanent agreement… . In 2000, we went to the peace summit at Camp David. Whoops, surprise: Abbas didn’t bring the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan to Camp David, or any other draft of a peace proposal. The opposite was true: He was one of the staunchest objectors… .” And Abbas has continued to say no to both Secretary of State Kerry and President Obama.

Shavit’s conclusion: “There is no document that contains any real Palestinian concession with Abbas’ signature. None. There never was, and there never will be… . But many others haven’t learned a thing. They’re still allowing Abbas to make fools of them, as they wait for the Palestinian Godot, who will never show up.”

Abbas is now in the 10th year of his presidency of the PA. He is low-key, but Palestinians celebrate him as a man who can stand up to the Americans. All along he has defied the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995, making excuses to avoid real peace negotiations. Yet he wants to appear to be reasonable. On April 27, he went so far as to recognize the crime that much of the Arab world pretends is Jewish fiction. “What happened to the Jews in the Holocaust” is heinous, he said. He fears the U.S. and Europe might cut off financial aid, long urged by people revolted by acts of terrorism and the poisoning of minds by Fatah media and teaching. But he also knows Israel’s countermeasures will always be limited, for Israelis have no interest in bringing about the collapse of the PA.

Our administration in turn has been very gentle with the Palestinians. The general assumption now is that the Obama administration is willing to do almost anything to salvage the peace process.

The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are a long road to nowhere. Just as former President Bill Clinton exposed the true face of Yasser Arafat at Camp David, Secretary Kerry has now exposed Abu Mazen’s rejectionism. The PA is just following its original plan to ultimately turn to the U.N., sticking to impossible preconditions for any agreement. They insist that Israel recognize the pre-1967 lines as the future borders of a Palestinian state even though the borders were neither secure nor defensible for Israel. And they are unwilling to sign an “end of conflict” provision.

Furthermore, they want East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and the release of 1,200 prisoners, including three major terrorists. Abu Mazen continues also to insist on the right of return. Ever since the founding of Israel, Palestinians have lived in the belief that one day all of Israel will be theirs.

Bringing an end to the conflict requires that both sides recognize each other as equals. But the Palestinians have never acknowledged the validity of the Jewish narrative, as if the Jewish identity of Israel were not deeply embedded through thousands of years of the longing of patriarchs, prophets, dreamers and fighters. And they therefore have been unable to make the necessary historic compromise with the Jewish state, and have been unable or unwilling to maintain a peaceful and secure border: See Gaza. Abbas doesn’t seem to be strong enough to convene his people to make a final settlement. By contrast, Netanyahu is strong enough to make peace and divide the land, and he is applying himself in good faith to the peace process.

Secretary Kerry gets an A for effort and sincerity, and for his enormous energy in trying to keep both sides moving forward. He understands that the Israelis must separate from the Palestinians, that some of the settlements will have to be dismantled, and that Israel will have to withdraw from portions of the West Bank. But the Palestinians have refused twice, in 2000 and 2008, to sign an agreement that would have given them more than 90 percent of the territory. Indeed, Abbas has not signed anything since 1993. Kerry pointed out that if the merger with Hamas goes through, Abbas will be perceived as the leader of a terrorist government. His partnership with them is a giant leap backward, away from a peace process.

In 1947, the Arabs flatly rejected the U.N.’s two-state resolution and went to war the next day. Today, they still reject the existence of Israel and want a state without an end to the conflict, while a majority of Israelis want to see the creation of a Palestinian state through a negotiation. They are certainly going to insist on reasonable security requirements.