Netanyahu and Abbas each moved on some issues, but neither could accept the whole Kerry framework. So the status quo prevails. But this is no normal status quo. It gets more toxic by the day. If Israel retains the West Bank and its 2.7 million Palestinians, it will be creating an even bigger multisectarian, multinational state in its belly, with one religion/nationality dominating the other — exactly the kind of state that is blowing up in civil wars everywhere around it.

Also, the longer this status quo goes on, the more the juggernaut of Israel’s settlement expansion in the West Bank goes on, fostering more Israeli delegitimization on the world stage. Right after the Gaza war, in which the United States basically defended Israel, Israel announced the seizure of nearly 1,000 more acres of West Bank land for settlements near Bethlehem. “No worries,” Israeli officials said, explaining that this is land that Israel would keep in any two-state deal. That would be fine if Israel also delineated the area Palestinians would get — and stopped building settlements there, too. But it won’t. That can only lead to trouble.

“Ironically, most Israeli settlement activity over the last year has been in areas that will plausibly be Israel in any peace map,” said David Makovsky, a member of the Kerry peace team, who is now back at the Washington Institute. “However, by Israel refusing to declare that it will confine settlement activities only to those areas, others do not make the distinction either. Instead, a perception is created that Israel is not sincere about a two-state solution — sadly fueling a European delegitimization drive. Israel’s legitimate security message gets lost because it appears to some that it is really about ideology.” Adds the former U.S. peace negotiator Dennis Ross: “If you say you’re committed to two states, your settlement policy has to reflect that.”

Alas, though, “rather than trying to think imaginatively about how to solve this problem,” said Halbertal, Israel is doing the opposite — “bringing the regional geopolitical problem into our own backyard and pushing those elements in Palestinian society that prefer nonviolence into a dead end. We are setting ourselves on fire with the best of arguments.”

Is anyone trying to build healthy interdependencies? Last week, I had a visit from EcoPeace Middle East, led by Munqeth Mehyar, a Jordanian architect; Gidon Bromberg, an Israeli environmental lawyer; and Nader al-Khateeb, a Palestinian water expert. Yes, they travel together.

They came to Washington to warn of the water crisis in Gaza. With little electricity to desalinate water or pump in chlorine — and Gazans having vastly overexploited their only aquifer — seawater is now seeping in so badly that freshwater is in short supply. Waste management has also collapsed, so untreated waste is being dumped into the Mediterranean, where it moves north with the current, threatening drinking water produced by Israel’s desalination plant in Ashkelon. It is all one ecosystem. Everyone is connected.

Up north, though, EcoPeace helped to inspire — through education, research and advocacy — Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian mayors to rehabilitate the Jordan River, which they had all turned into an open sewer. Since 1994, Jordan has stored water in the winter from its Yarmouk River in Israel’s Sea of Galilee, and then Israel gives it back to Jordan in the summer — like a water bank. It shows how “prior enemies can create positive interdependencies once they start trusting each other,” said Bromberg.

And that is the point. The only source of lasting security is not walls, rockets, U.N. votes or European demonstrations. It’s relationships of trust between neighbors that create healthy interdependencies — ecological and political. They are the hardest things to build, but also the hardest things to break once in place.