ZE’EV ELKIN, Israel’s 43-year-old deputy foreign minister, who emigrated from eastern Ukraine in 1990, chuckles about the rise of “Russians” into his country’s highest posts. The foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, hails from Moldova, once part of the Soviet Union. “Recently the ministers of tourism, absorption, diaspora affairs, the head of the Jewish agency—they’ve all been Russians,” jokes Mr Elkin. Most Russian-Israelis, he notes approvingly, are “right-wing”, meaning that they are hawks on Palestine.

Mr Elkin openly opposes—under any circumstance, he breezily asserts—the stated desire of his prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for a Palestinian state to co-exist alongside Israel, something John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, is failing to achieve after nearly eight months of frenetic diplomacy. A Palestinian one, however hedged about, would, says Mr Elkin, “threaten the existence of a Jewish state.” Better, he adds, to annex a chunk of the West Bank, the core of the Palestinians’ would-be state, to Israel. These days the West Bank, he adds with another chuckle, is “the most stable part of the Middle East”.

Mr Elkin is not an oddity in flatly opposing his prime minister from within his ruling Likud party, on what is still the most contentious issue in Israeli politics. A sizeable majority of Likud’s central committee and most of its 20 members in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel’s parliament, also oppose the idea of two states, though Mr Netanyahu formally endorsed it, albeit tepidly, five years ago. Indeed, says Mr Elkin, only “two or three” Likudniks in the Knesset back the prime minister wholeheartedly on this issue. Yet Mr Elkin ran the foreign ministry for a year when Mr Lieberman, under investigation for corruption, stood down from the office until last November.

Mr Lieberman, known in his early days in the Knesset for his virulent hostility to the Palestinians, especially those who are Israeli citizens, arguing that they should swear an oath of loyalty to the Jewish state or lose their voting rights, has come round to the two-state idea, with “transfers” of land: the Arab-populated areas of Israel should be placed within a Palestinian state. He has repackaged himself as “just a moderate racist”, jokes an Arab-Israeli member of the Knesset.

Meanwhile Naftali Bennett, the ruling coalition’s economics minister, a bouncy IT-businessman whose Jewish Home party is the Knesset’s fourth-biggest, is outright hostile to the two-state notion, warning that if Messrs Netanyahu and Kerry sign even an anodyne “framework agreement” later this month, endorsing the broad principle of two states, he will remove his 12 Knesset members from the government, depriving it of a majority. Mr Kerry, adds Mr Bennett, has become a “mouthpiece for anti-Semitism” in his efforts to fix a two-state deal.

For his part Yair Lapid, the finance minister, whose party is the second-biggest, with 19 seats, avoided the Palestinian issue at the general election a year ago, campaigning on an economic platform that appealed to Israel’s secular-minded middle class. But he has become more forceful in advocating “divorce and separation” from the Palestinians, making sure that he cannot be regarded as a feebly fluttering dove.

The only senior member of Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet who is eagerly in favour of cutting a deal that would require Israeli as well as Palestinian concessions is Tzipi Livni, the justice minister, who is entrusted with the negotiations. Her small (six-seat) party is a spin-off from the late Ariel Sharon’s, which broke away from Likud in 2005. That was when Mr Sharon controversially decided, in the face of Mr Netanyahu’s fierce opposition, to evacuate Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, perhaps—some surmise—as a prelude to leaving most of the West Bank, though he denied this at the time.

In other words, a majority of Knesset members in Israel’s ruling coalition and a majority of ministers are either against a two-state solution or lukewarm towards it—hardly the sort of government that Mr Kerry can count on. “Netanyahu’s been Tea Party’d,” says a Western diplomat, using a phrase that the Israeli prime minister has apparently uttered himself.

Beyond the Rubicon

The only way this bleak prognosis could change is if Mr Netanyahu himself were to “do a Sharon”—that is, to defy his own Likud party, forge a new outfit, reshape his coalition, and—in an expression that often comes up in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—“cross the Rubicon” on the way to two states. And, on paper, he could indeed reshape a coalition that would more eagerly bid for a deal with the Palestinians.

The current opposition, led by the Labour party leader, Yitzhak (“Bougie”) Herzog, with 15 seats, would leap at the chance. He has recently persuaded a rare assortment of opposition parties, including Shas, the biggest religious party, and a clutch of Arab-Israeli ones, to co-operate. If Likud were to split and Mr Bennett pulled out, Mr Netanyahu would still have a solid majority, were Labour and its allies to join him in a new two-state-seeking coalition. Moreover, opinion polls suggest that three-quarters of Israelis accept the principle of a two-state solution.

Few observers think Mr Netanyahu has seriously contemplated such a drastic move. Tony Blair, representing the peacemaking “Quartet” of the UN, the United States, Russia and the European Union, still hopes that Mr Kerry has a chance of “re-anchoring” the negotiations, with the 1967 borders and land swaps as the basis for progress “to the next stage”. But others note that both Mr Netanyahu, barely challenged as the nation’s leader, and Israel itself, are comfortable with the status quo.

Israel’s GDP per person is $37,000, according to the IMF, nearly 12 times that of its biggest Arab neighbour, Egypt, and far above most of the others. Indeed, it is higher than most EU countries. And a bonanza from offshore gas is in the offing. Militarily Israel feels pretty secure, especially in the short run. It is nearly a decade since it faced the sustained terrorism that traumatised Israelis during the Palestinians’ second intifada (uprising).

Above all, the Palestinians are weak and divided. The Arab League and other potential sponsors seem uninterested in their plight, while other problems, such as Syria’s civil war, are more pressing. Why should Mr Netanyahu take the sort of risk that may have cost Mr Sharon his health and even his life?

Man with a mission

Mr Kerry has been trying desperately to bridge the gap between Mr Netanyahu and his Palestinian opposite number, Mahmoud Abbas, who presides over the Palestinian Authority that partially runs chunks of the West Bank (Areas A and B—see our map) under the watchful eye of the Israelis. But the gulf between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators has widened. The latest seemingly terminal glitch was a row over Mr Netanyahu’s refusal to free the fourth and final batch of around 100 Palestinian prisoners, previously promised to help lure Mr Abbas back into negotiations eight months ago. The Israeli prime minister retorts that Mr Abbas has reneged on his part of the deal by failing to negotiate seriously and by them breaking a pledge not to take its campaign for full statehood to the UN.

Since embarking on his mission last July, Mr Kerry has kept his cards to his chest. But it seems clear that he has cut the Israelis a lot more slack than previous American negotiators in an effort to draw them into a deal. And Mr Netanyahu has pushed further than did his predecessors: Ehud Barak, then Labour’s leader, at Camp David in 2000; Sharon, who unilaterally withdrew from Gaza; and Ehud Olmert, who came close to an agreement with Mr Abbas in 2008 before bowing out in the face of corruption charges, just before his party lost power. Mr Netanyahu has made a number of extra demands. He refuses to start with the borders that existed in 1967 between Israel and what was then the Jordanian-controlled West Bank as “the basis” of a redrawn line between Israel and Palestine. He does not agree that Jerusalem should be shared between the two states. He is calling for Israel to control the whole of the Jordan Valley militarily. Despite accepting a moratorium on permitting the building or expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank in 2011, he is now allowing them to be built at the fastest rate for many years. And before talks start in earnest he wants the Palestinians to say they will be willing to talk about recognising Israel as a specifically Jewish state. Moreover, on the borders question, Mr Netanyahu is coming under pressure to ask for much more. A growing number of leading lights in his coalition, such as Mr Elkin, are calling for Israel to annex Area C, which encompasses 62% of the West Bank (including the Jordan Valley) and is home to a shrinking and scattered minority of the Palestinian population. Mr Kerry says no. But Mr Netanyahu, even at his most flexible, is said to be demanding that Israel retain twice as much land in the West Bank as Mr Olmert proposed: perhaps 10-12%, compared with the 6.5% suggested, along with territorial swaps of equal area and quality, by Mr Olmert. “Netanyahu thinks Israel can co-exist with the Palestinians having autonomy but scattered on the West Bank that is totally divided and sliced up,” says a Palestinian close to Mr Abbas. “This is the same old movie we’ve seen many times—but this time it’s the worst-ever version.”

Mr Kerry still hopes to pull both sides into accepting that the border can be adjusted so that at least 80% of the 575,000 Jewish settlers now in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (the mainly Arab-populated side of the city that was conquered by Israel in 1967) will fall within Israel, requiring perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews to be repatriated (or possibly absorbed into a Palestinian state) in the event of a final deal.

He is also seeking a formula acknowledging that the Palestinians have an “aspiration” for their capital to be in East Jerusalem rather than the blunter assertion that East Jerusalem would become their capital, along the lines of an ethnic division suggested by Bill Clinton at a conference in Taba that followed Camp David. But a close adviser to Mr Netanyahu says that, at this stage, any discussion of Jerusalem is “too problematic”; Mr Kerry has apparently yet to grapple with it in detail.

What next for Palestine?

For their part, the Palestinians are close to despairing of having a state of their own. Their leader, Mr Abbas, a prime proponent of liberation by negotiation, is boxed in by both the Israelis and his own people. For the Palestinians, the most onerous of the new Israeli demands is that they agree not only to recognise Israel, which the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organisation did back in 1988, but to recognise it as a specifically Jewish state. They fear this would cast the fifth of Israelis who are Arabs into a second class of citizenship. More significantly, Palestinians claim, it would mean that they would drop their age-old demand that refugees and their descendants have a “right of return” to their old homes in Israel that were abandoned when Israel was created in 1948.

That would require the Palestinians, as they see it, to disavow their own historical narrative, instead acknowledging the Jews’ right to establish a state on the back of the flight or expulsion of the majority of Arabs who lived there before 1948. For Mr Netanyahu that disavowal is precisely the point. Past Israeli negotiators, however, have demanded only that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a state. “It is up to them [the Israelis], not us, to decide what sort of state they have,” says a Palestinian negotiator. “We don’t expect them to tell us what religion the state of Palestine should have.”

Semantic conundrums galore

Mr Olmert got Mr Abbas to come close to that in 2008, suggesting that a small but symbolic number of Palestinians be allowed back into Israel, recognising the Palestinians’ aching aspiration to recover their old homes, yet making it clear that, for most, it will never happen. Mr Clinton, too, presented a formula in 2000 that sought to satisfy both sides. “A new State of Palestine is about to be created as the homeland of the Palestinian people,” he said at Taba in 2001, “just as Israel was established as the homeland of the Jewish people.” The UN resolution of 1947 that endorsed the partition of Palestine referred to a “Jewish state” and an Arab one. Mr Abbas might endorse a similar formula as a final, clinching concession—but not as a precondition.

Mr Abbas is already regarded by Palestinians as a weak and, in many eyes, illegitimate leader; his presidential mandate lapsed several years ago. Were he to meet Mr Netanyahu’s Jewish-state demand at the outset of negotiations, he would lose what support he still has among his own people. Mr Kerry will seek to find a formula whereby the Israelis and Palestinians recognise each others’ historic narrative without having to endorse it.

As the Palestinians see it, they have already made a bundle of concessions over the years—recognising Israel, agreeing to the principle of adjusting the 1967 border, and talking without a settlement freeze. More recently, they agreed not to seek to upgrade their UN status while negotiations were under way; in particular, they have held back from bidding to join such bodies as the International Criminal Court, where they could try to arraign Israel and its leaders for—among other things—occupying and settling the West Bank. They complain that they have received very little in return.

Mr Abbas is thus increasingly mocked by his own people for achieving next to nothing, while bowing to Israeli demands and suppressing opposition on the West Bank from those who argue for a more robust approach: “doing the Israelis’ dirty work for them”, as many Palestinians see it. Better, say many, if Mr Kerry finally gives up, to let the Palestinian Authority collapse and then Israel itself would have to administer the territory and its sullen people.

In the past year, Mr Abbas has looked increasingly isolated. First, his most effective prime minister, Salam Fayyad, resigned, frustrated by the old guard around Mr Abbas who apparently resented his growing power and efficiency. In the past few months Mr Abbas, now 79, has faced virulent public hostility from a former close associate, Muhammad Dahlan, 52, who plainly wants to replace the old man as leader, apparently with backing from some Gulf states. The two have even accused each other of poisoning Yasser Arafat, the Palestinians’ long-time leader, who died in murky circumstances in 2004.

To rally support, Mr Abbas has recently been calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti, the most popular Palestinian politician, who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. Mr Abbas may, it is mooted, even anoint him as his successor. But that may worsen the jostling in Mr Abbas’s inner circle. The Israelis are unlikely to find Mr Barghouti, 54, more amenable than Mr Abbas, though the younger man may, as a hardened former fighter, have a better chance of persuading Palestinians to accept painful but clinching concessions.

In any event, the broader Palestinian movement remains as divided as ever, with the Islamists of Hamas running the Gaza Strip, while Mr Abbas’s secular Fatah group runs as much of the West Bank as the Israelis allow it to. Hamas won the most recent Palestinian general election, in 2006, and ousted Mr Abbas’s Fatah fighters from Gaza a year later. At present, says Khalil Shikaki, a leading Palestinian pollster, Fatah would get around 40% of the vote against Hamas’s 30% or so in both territories. In any event, there is little sign of the two groups burying the hatchet. Some of those Israelis who accept the idea of a Palestinian state would like Gaza excluded, perhaps even attached to Egypt. (Mr Olmert even included a rail-and/or-road link between Gaza and the southern part of the West Bank as part of his proposed territorial and border adjustments.) When Mr Kerry began his quest last year, he declared that his aim was a “final-status agreement” within nine months: ie, by the end of April. He has long since curbed that grand ambition. The “framework agreement” now sought could be so vague as to be meaningless. Both sides, it has been suggested, would be able to note “reservations”, even if they endorsed the broadest of principles. The latest hope is for them to agree to extend negotiations, perhaps until the end of this year. And then what? “If we say yes, we are doomed,” says Mr Abbas’s adviser, fearing the derision of fellow Palestinians. “And if we say no we are doomed; the blame game is waiting for us as usual,” he adds, referring to the castigation he expects in America. Few Palestinians, even the Islamist hardliners of Hamas, argue for a resumption of violence. But a new intifada, directed as much at Mr Abbas and his unloved administration as at the Israeli occupiers of the West Bank, cannot be ruled out.

Could America ever ditch Israel?

The Israelis, for their part, have nervously construed comments by Mr Kerry and Mr Obama as veiled threats to withhold hitherto almost unconditional backing for Israel in the UN and other forums, unless it shows more flexibility on such issues as borders, settlement-building and Jerusalem. Remarks by Mr Kerry this week in Washington were widely interpreted as holding Israel mainly to blame for the impasse. And earlier this year Mr Obama referred bleakly—in Israeli eyes menacingly—to “continued aggressive settlement construction”, warning Israelis that if “Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach, then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.”

That was taken by many Israelis as a veiled threat from Mr Obama that if the Palestinians, abandoning the currently stalemated round of talks, were to go back to the UN and get wider recognition of Palestine as a state, the diplomatic tide would gradually turn against Israel, casting it as an international pariah.

If Mr Netanyahu carries out a threat to punish the Palestinians by cutting off the revenue from taxes and tariffs that passes through Israeli hands, the Palestinian Authority might well collapse, requiring the Israeli army to go back into West Bank cities and turning the Palestinians’ struggle into one for full incorporation into a Greater Israel, along with voting and other civil rights. Since the Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza outnumber Jewish Israelis, it would mean the eventual end of Israel as a majority-Jewish state.

As things stand, Israel is strong and the Palestinian movement weak. Even if the UN were to declare Palestine a state, it would be virtual rather than real for some time to come. But no thoughtful Israeli can be sure it would remain so for ever.

Corrections: Jewish Home is the Knesset's fourth-biggest party, not its third-biggest as we initially said. And the Labour party has 15 seats, not 12. Sorry.