“Israel is not interested in permitting one and the U.S., who is subsidizing this effort, is unable and unwilling to change that because of domestic politics,” Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the Washington-based Palestine Center wrote in an e-mail. He said Palestinians had lost faith in American mediation. Palestinians were likely to “re-strategize away from a state-based separatist struggle toward a rights-based struggle (already happening)” as “Israeli colonization” had “destroyed the territorial integrity of a would-be state.”

In other words, Palestinians will seek their rights — including that of return — within one state, rather than pursuing the establishment of their own national state. The only trouble is that, as the Israeli novelist Amos Oz told me recently, “The right of return is a euphemism for the liquidation of Israel. Even for a dove like myself this is out of the question.”

As Omar Barghouti, a leader of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, once put it: “If the refugees were to return, you would not have a two-state solution, you’d have a Palestine next to a Palestine.”

One state equals the end of Israel as a Jewish national state. It is not going to happen. It cannot be allowed to happen. Palestinian pursuit of that goal equals acceptance of eternal conflict. Jews, after the experience of the 20th century, are not going to give up the homeland they have battled so hard to build.

For any liberal Zionist — and I am one — convinced of the need for the two-state outcome envisaged in the United Nations resolution of 1947 establishing the modern state of Israel, both the religious-nationalist Israeli push to keep all the land and the Palestinian refusal to abandon the untenable, unacceptable “right of return” (there is no such right in history, just ask the Jews) are causes for deep despondency.

I said Israel’s situation is sustainable. It is in physical terms. It is not in ethical terms. This is a state whose Declaration of Independence in 1948 says it will “be founded on the principles of freedom, justice and peace in the spirit of the visions of the Prophets of Israel; will implement equality of complete social and national rights for all her citizens without distinction between religion, race and gender; will promise freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.” The West Bank dominion over 2.6 million humiliated Palestinians runs counter to every word of this.

President Obama will soon visit Israel and the West Bank. He has zero cause for hope. Peace lies beyond the eye of a rusty needle. The limitlessness of Israeli strength and of Palestinian victimhood has narrowed the path to the well-known compromises needed to end the conflict.