I’ve argued that Netanyahu has long been a plausible candidate for the third seat in the Zionist pantheon: Theodor Herzl, who envisioned the physical return of the Jews to Zion, holds the first seat; David Ben-Gurion, who made that return a concrete political reality, holds the second. The third seat remains empty. This seat is for the person who guarantees Israel a permanent place under the sun, with fixed, recognized borders and something close to universal legitimacy. Yitzhak Rabin was meant for that third seat, but an assassin ended that dream; Ariel Sharon was a credible candidate, but a stroke felled him. Netanyahu has been the most likely living candidate for that seat.

But over the past 18 months, since Obama issued that challenge, Netanyahu has shown very little interest in changing, in any sort of dramatic way, the reality on the ground, in particular the reality of slow but inexorable settlement growth on the West Bank—settlements that are meant, in many cases, to obviate the birth of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has also shown himself, over and over again, to be deaf to the concerns of Israel’s (dwindling band of) liberal supporters in the West, Jewish and non-Jewish, who worry about the direction his country is taking, and he has appeared to be deaf to the sort of pragmatic concerns articulated by Obama and others regarding the seeming inexorability of a one-state non-solution (I call it a “non-solution” because the idea of a single, even semi-functional state containing two warring Middle East tribes is farcical).

Here is what Obama said last year about the illusion that the current status quo can be maintained indefinitely: “[M]y assessment, which is shared by a number of Israeli observers, I think, is there comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices. Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?”

Unlike Obama, several of his predecessors, and most American diplomats who specialize in the Middle East, I no longer believe that a reversal of the settlement project would necessarily set in motion a process that culminates in the conflict’s end. The 100-year conflict between Arab and Jew was not initiated by the 48-year-old occupation of the West Bank. As the latest round of Palestinian terrorism directed at Israelis suggests, the conflict is about something more than settlements. For many Palestinians, and certainly for many Palestinian leaders, Israel is an illegitimate state, and the Jews are not a people. There will be no permanent end of the conflict until Palestinians bring their understanding of Jewish history into line with reality.