JOHN KERRY has spent much of his first year as Secretary of State on a quest to bring about a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority through sheer relentless diplomacy. As of this week, his effort seems to be on its last legs. As Mr Kerry put it, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." If the nine-month negotiations process reaches the end of April with no significant agreement, it will be strong evidence that negotiations are simply never going to succeed in producing the long-sought two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. We have been around this block over and over for more than 20 years now. There seems little reason to believe that another American could succeed where Mr Kerry has failed, or that future political developments in Israel and Palestine will push their leaders closer to a peace deal rather than further away. For Americans, this will intensify an ever-worsening problem of cognitive dissonance: we support Israel in the belief that it is moving towards ending its occupation of the West Bank and granting the Palestinians statehood, even though we increasingly recognise that it is doing nothing of the sort. It is, in fact, repeatedly allowing negotiations to fail, cementing its hold on the West Bank, and expanding its settlements. By saying it is committed to the peace process, the Israeli government can avoid laying out any ultimate plan for governing the West Bank permanently, even as the peace process fails. A recent last-ditch proposal by Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the US, to unilaterally pull out of the West Bank if negotiations collapse, sounds almost reasonable. But, as Carlo Strenger writes in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, any unilateral pullout would surely involve Israel retaining the major (and, probably, the minor) settlements it has established, as well as a security cordon in the Jordan River valley along the border with Jordan, leaving Palestinian territory encircled. The international community would reject the Israeli move, leaving the Palestinians with more or less the same non-viable, legally disputed squiggles of desert land they have now. The Palestinian leadership, meanwhile, is unwilling to make the bitter sacrifices needed to get to a peace agreement their constituents will undoubtedly hate. Their power and stability depends on retaining control of corrupt PA institutions sustained by international-aid flows. Their popularity is thin and their democratic legitimacy is threadbare. The latest strategy of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, consists of a threat to apply for status as a state at the UN and other international institutions, which could lead America to cut off international aid. Mr Strenger describes this as "leaving the keys of the PA on [Binyamin] Netanyahu's desk," sticking Israel's prime minister with responsibility for the mess. Either way, Israel and the PA seem to be inexorably drifting towards making the "final status" a version of the horrible current status, in which Palestinians live as stateless people, with only limited autonomy over a small part of their territory, and no right to vote for the Israeli government that exercises ultimate control over their property and their lives, while Israelis are forced to keep a permanent boot on the neck of a people that hates them.

The standard blog-post turn at this point would be to say that Americans will eventually have to decide whether they can support a state that dispossesses, disenfranchises and exploits millions of people in territories it has conquered on the basis of their ethnicity and religion. In fact, many Palestinians and some progressive American and Israeli Jews believe the two-state solution has already failed, and that the time has come to demand a one-state solution. Since Palestinians can no longer achieve their own state, they must be granted full citizenship as Israelis. The Israeli state must give up its Jewish character and become a fully binational, egalitarian country. Americans, they think, must eventually face the fact that our political beliefs make it unacceptable to ally ourselves with a Greater Israel that rules over Palestinians who are not its citizens, and make a choice.

But I think this standard blog-post turn is too optimistic. I'm not confident that Americans will ever have to face such a decision. The human capacity for tolerating cognitive dissonance is immense. While some American Jews are starting to demand that Jerusalem reach a peace deal with the Palestinians or lose their allegiance, others will stick with Israel regardless of its policies, elaborating ever more baroque arguments to justify their position. Most American evangelicals and conservatives remain staunch supporters of Israel, and have little trouble blaming the conflict on Islamic extremism. It's entirely possible that most Americans could continue backing Israel indefinitely, as the prospect of a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict recedes into the mist. Maybe we won't force a solution for Israel's treatment of its non-citizens any more than we've forced a solution for our treatment of our own non-citizens.

Heck, the world is seeing more and more long-term low-level conflicts between rich, technologically advanced societies and poor, uneducated ones, all along the global borders between north and south. In a few decades, the watchtowers along the West Bank's separation wall may merge with the helicopters hovering over the US-Mexican border, the rubber bullets knocking African refugees off the barbed-wire fences in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, the South African police picking up Zimbabwean migrants and the Australian Navy ships dragging Indonesian boats back towards Sumatra. It will all look like one endless string of flashpoints, up and down the line.