In a May 9 Reuters article “Israel fires back at U.S. envoy over peace talks' failure” this is the part that caught my eye: “The Israeli official said [U.S. envoy Martin] Indyk had been informed of the construction plans, down to the number of homes. ‘Furthermore, he knew that it was on this basis that Israel agreed to enter the talks,’ the official said. ‘So it's not clear why now that should be criticized.’"

Which is more or less like asserting that if you walk up to someone in the street and say you’re going to smack them, then they can’t complain afterwards when you actually do. “So it’s not clear why that should be criticized,” as the official said.

But it’s not just the anonymous official. Most Israelis and many of Israel’s defenders abroad were no less upset that in his address to the Washington Institute last week, Indyk had the chutzpah to pin at least half of the blame for the collapse of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace efforts on Israel and its settlements. There is nothing wrong, they believe, with Israel building or planning thousands of housing units in what right-wingers insist are “disputed territories” - despite the fact that even that neutral label implies that it’s a dispute that has yet to be settled.

With breathtaking self-persuasion, most Israelis have convinced themselves that the physical, geographic and demographic transformation that has taken place in the West Bank as a result of four decades of Jewish settlement does not constitute a unilateral act that undermines a peace process, while Palestinian letters to international bodies such as the United Nations or the World Health Organization are irrefutable indications of bad faith. And the only possible reason for the world not to concur is that it is anti-Semitic.

Precedent and history, one must admit, support this view. Israel has always built new Jewish homes in the West Bank, whether there was a Labor, Kadima or a Likud prime minister at the helm and regardless of whether he seemed genuine in his pursuit of peace or was widely perceived as an impostor. In a region often described as one of the most unstable on Earth, the development and expansion of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria has been as reliable as clockwork, rain or shine, war or peace, Abbas, Arafat or Fayad or any combination thereof.

Since the Oslo Accords were signed two decades ago, and in what is arguably still the “interim period” that is meant to precede a final status solution, the Jewish population in the West Bank – excluding East Jerusalem – has more than trebled. According to the government’s own statistics, in the past year alone, concurrent with its burning desire to achieve a two-state solution, the pace of new construction and building plans has shot up by over 150 percent.

Many Israelis as well as government spokesmen cite the evacuation of settlements in the Sinai following the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, as well as the removal of Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005, as proof that settlements are not an obstacle to peace. They somehow succeed in ignoring that 1. There were 7,000 evacuees from northern Sinai and about 9,000 in Gaza compared to 140,000 who live OUTSIDE East Jerusalem and the so-called settlement blocs which Israel already claims as its own; 2. Most of the settlers in Sinai and Gaza were far less ideological and certainly less committed to what wasn’t, strictly speaking, the biblical Land of Israel 3. They did not hold anything resembling the sway that they hold today in the military, in the government or in public opinion.

Nonetheless, not only do Israelis manage to harrumph and take umbrage whenever someone describes settlements as a major impediment to peace, most of them also brush off repeated warnings that the impasse will inevitably lead Israel to a “binational reality” and “historic Jewish tragedy” as Indyk said. The former ambassador to Israel was lambasted near and far for taking sides in the supposedly crucial blame game, but his warnings of the possible demise of the Zionist enterprise fell on completely deaf ears. "Meh," as the popular New York Times Magazine column would say.

In his book “States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering,” the late sociologist Stanley Cohen defined three main forms of denial: literal, interpretive and implicatory. A literal denier disputes the facts; an interpretive denier ignores their accepted interpretation; and an implicatory denier may concede both facts and interpretation but does not acknowledge their emotional or moral implications.

To borrow from Cohen’s own examples – and a hot current topic - the statement “I did not have sex with that woman” was literal denial, the claim that oral sex is no sex at all is interpretive denial and the assertion that there is nothing wrong about a president engaging in oral sex with a White House intern is implicatory denial.

Similarly, Israel and its defenders usually start out by denying the statistics (The figures are exaggerated) then go on to refute their common interpretation (Obstacle to peace? How on earth?) and finally avert their gaze from a. the undeniable fact that the world (excluding many Jews and most evangelicals) views settlements as proof of Israel’s disingenuousness; b. that settlements undermine the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state and c. that as such they can only lead to a fork in the road with only two possible exits: a binational “state of all its citizens” or one that will be described, accurately or not, as an apartheid regime.

As George Orwell wrote in 1945 in his famous essay “Notes on Nationalism”: “A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.”

Which brings to mind the chorus of protestations against Secretary Kerry’s recent use of the term "apartheid," which, whatever you think of it, was closer to reality than many of the words of his critics. Israel may be “a shining light for freedom and opportunity,” as AIPAC stated, but in the West Bank, give me a break, it is anything but.

The settlers themselves, to their credit, appear to be living well outside the states of denial in which many of their defenders reside. In a Channel 2 news broadcast on Friday, veteran settler leader Elyakim Haetzni acknowledged the settlers’ “victory” and said that the collapse of Kerry’s peace efforts was “a cause for celebration.” But while Haetzni emulated the bon-ton gaining currency among many Israeli right-wing politicians who want the government to annex the territories while granting Palestinians permanent “autonomy” – (South African Bantustans? How dare you?) - Uri Elitzur, Netanyahu’s former chief of staff and the recently appointed editor of the religious Zionist newspaper Makor Rishon, now the property of Sheldon Adelson, actually accepts Kerry’s line, hook line and sinker. “If we will be an apartheid state,” he wrote recently on the NRG website, “we won’t exist at all, and rabbinical hairsplitting won’t help us. John Kerry said he was afraid of such a development, we were insulted and he apolog ized. But Kerry was right.”

Elitzur maintains, however, that an independent Palestinian state will inevitably lead to the destruction of Israel, leaving him with only one solution: annexation of the West Bank and “gradual” granting of full citizenship rights to the Palestinians. “It won’t be easy but it’s possible, and it is the obligation imposed on us by Jewish history: to safeguard the heart of the country,” he writes.

According to Elitzur, Israel can somehow retain its Jewish character with what he concedes will be an Arab population that will comprise a third of the Knesset - but even that prognosis holds true only if one clings to the increasingly fashionable demography deniers who have somehow crunched the birth rate numbers to prove that time is on our side.

Don’t get me wrong: the Palestinians have done more than their fair share to sabotage peace talks, but that only strengthens the argument that naysayers on both sides have pushed the two-state solution to the edge of extinction, aided and abetted by denial, delusion but also bad intent. As Orwell wrote: “Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakably certain of being in the right.”