At a White House meeting in March 2014, Obama read to Abbas a draft U.S. framework for continued negotiations, telling Abbas that he could add reservations to it, as could the Israeli side. Obama’s March 2014 proposal was more favorable to the Palestinians than was the 2000 Clinton Parameters on one issue, territory: Whereas Clinton’s proposal precluded the possibility of a Palestinian state equal in area to all of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Obama’s did not, saying that the borders would be along the pre-1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps. But the rest of the proposal was less favorable to Palestinians. Unlike the Clinton Parameters, Obama’s March 2014 proposal offered no end date for the withdrawal of Israeli security forces from Palestinian territory. It made no mention of a right to return and it specified that only a small number of humanitarian cases would be permitted to return, at Israel’s discretion. Like the Clinton Parameters, it did offer a Palestinian capital in part of East Jerusalem, but unlike Clinton’s plan, it did not state that Palestinians would be sovereign over Jerusalem’s Holy Esplanade, the third holiest site in Islam.

The Obama administration expressed great frustration at Abbas’s refusal to accept the framework. In August, Obama said that Abbas was “too weak” to make peace, a defensible yet incomplete assessment of what went wrong with the Kerry talks. Obama failed to mention that Abbas’s inability to accept the U.S.’s March 2014 framework was greatly exacerbated by the fact that Abbas does not represent huge parts of Palestinian society, including the many supporters of Hamas, which for decades has been excluded from the PLO, the body that is supposed to represent all Palestinians. U.S. officials privately lament the lack of vision or courage of Palestinian leaders. But instead of seeking to bolster their legitimacy and strengthen them, the U.S. prioritizes the exclusion from Palestinian decision-making of all but the most dovish voices surrounding Abbas—not just Islamists but other large, neglected constituencies, including refugees and the diaspora. This all but guarantees that the doves will be too weak to gather consensus around possible compromises, too afraid in the absence of such consensus to sign a deal, and too isolated to successfully sell one. It was little wonder, then, that given the choice between making politically explosive concessions and rejecting the U.S. framework, the PLO moved in April 2014 to end the talks, join international conventions and treaties as the State of Palestine, and sign an agreement with Hamas to form a new government of technocrats acceptable to the PLO and not loyal to Hamas.[8]

In the end, Kerry did help broker an agreement, but not the one he intended, and for that Hamas and Fatah owe him thanks. And yet, obvious as the Palestinian decision to leave the talks may sound, the rationale for it remains mysterious to Kerry and his team. During a speech following the collapse of negotiations, Indyk stated, “I can’t say that I fully comprehend all of the factors involved” in causing Abbas to “shut down.” On other occasions he and Kerry have blamed failure not on the large differences between Israeli and Palestinian positions but on procedural impediments and the cliché of a “lack of trust.”

Today there is again discussion of attempting to restart negotiations in order to fill the “political vacuum” that numerous US.. officials believe was an important cause of the war in Gaza. If efforts to renew talks are not successful, the Obama administration may once again weigh the possibility of publicly putting forward the U.S. vision of the end of the conflict. By now one would think U.S. policymakers would have more modesty about their ability to predict what terms a final-status agreement will contain. But even as the collapse of the talks came into view in March, both Kerry (“it is really no mystery what the end-game really looks like”) and Obama (“everybody understands what the outlines of a peace deal would look like”) remained convinced they knew the terms on which the conflict would end: something more or less like the past proposals Palestinians have found wanting—the Clinton Parameters, the proposal made by Olmert to Abbas in 2008, or the Obama framework of March 2014. And so it seems likely that Kerry and Obama will repeat their past mistakes.

4.

Despite the tactical differences among Skeptics, Reproachers, and Embracers, there is more uniting the three approaches than distinguishing them. If they were to draw up the outlines of a peace treaty, they might fight over the size of land swaps, the number of settlers Israel would evacuate, the location of the border dividing Jerusalem, the duration Israeli security forces would remain in a Palestinian state, and whether the refugee issue would be “based on” UN resolution 194 or represent the fulfillment of it. But to a non-expert observer it would be difficult to discern the importance of such distinctions.

On issues of broader significance, their opinions largely overlap. Members of all three groups consider themselves pro-Israel and are concerned with preserving it as a Jewish state. All favor a two-state solution, the annexation by Israel of large settlement blocs on the West Bank, and a Palestinian capital in some part of East Jerusalem. When speaking of dividing Jerusalem, all three mean dividing only occupied East Jerusalem, while forcing Palestinians wishing to go from Ramallah to al-Aqsa mosque to travel in tunnels running beneath East Jerusalem settlements annexed by Israel. All wish to deny Palestinian refugees anything more than a symbolic return to Israel and do not call for the return to Israel of an upper limit of 120,000–125,000, as discussed at the Taba negotiations in 2001.[9] All underestimate the moral significance to Palestinians of Israeli recognition of at least partial responsibility for the refugee problem. All imagine amounts of financial compensation to refugees that are orders of magnitude lower than refugees expect. (A 2003 survey showed that among those refugees willing to choose compensation instead of returning to Israel, 65 percent believed a fair amount would be $100,000–$500,000 per family. Prior to the Camp David negotiations in 2000, U.S. officials estimated that a combined total of up to $20 billion might be available to Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees from Arab countries, meaning that Palestinians could expect to receive no more than $1,000–$3,000 per refugee.) All neglect how unacceptable their proposals are to refugees, whose support will be indispensable for a lasting agreement, since they make up a majority of Palestinians worldwide and roughly 45 percent of the population of the West Bank and Gaza.

All three groups back the Israeli demand to place severe restrictions on the sovereignty of a future Palestinian state, with limits on Palestinian armament, border control, airspace, and ability to form alliances, as well as the presence in the Palestinian state of international security forces, Israeli early-warning stations, routes for Israeli emergency deployments, and a continued presence for some considerable period of Israeli troops. Some but not all of these restrictions are acceptable to PLO leaders, but they remain highly unpopular with the Palestinian public.

Most important, all three groups underrate how ineffectual and often detrimental U.S. actions and policies have been, whether the incremental steps favored by the Skeptics or the final-status talks promoted by Embracers and Reproachers. All three groups justify their positions on the grounds that they advance the parties toward a two-state peace. Yet the effect of all three groups, in practice if not in intention, has been to create false hopes.

For two decades, the notion of Embracers and Reproachers that peace may come in the near future has excused taking little more than minimal and inadequate steps to lessen the hardships imposed by occupation today. Neither Israel nor the U.S. demanded that a peace treaty accompany Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza or southern Lebanon, which is one reason the Israeli army departed from both. In point of fact, the U.S.’s earnest and patient search for peace serves to entrench a one-state reality: Israeli Arabs deepen their ties to Palestinians in the West Bank; settlements spread; outposts are legalized; and annexationist Israeli ministers and parliamentarians grow in power and strength. New roads and parks cut through Arab East Jerusalem and make any realistic division of the city untenable. East Jerusalemite Palestinians are cut off from the West Bank, receive eviction orders from their homes, or move to the other side of the separation wall. All the while a series of fruitless negotiations helps to discredit the two-state model and confirm the depth of the chasm between the two sides.

Despite the good intentions that Skeptics, Reproachers, and Embracers express, the U.S. is less a cure than a cause of stasis. It deprives any other third party—whether European or Arab—of a meaningful part in the peace process. It negotiates and drafts proposals without adequately consulting or considering the concerns of communities whose support would be crucial for a lasting peace. These include religious Zionists and ultra-Orthodox Jews as well as Islamists, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and refugees. The U.S. tells the Palestinians that peace talks, as well as Western support, are conditional on a halt in Palestinian steps to place more pressure on Israel.

Those steps—which, though popular with the public, are opposed or regarded warily by many Palestinian leaders—include popular protests, boycotts and sanctions, lawsuits, pursuit of recognition of a Palestinian state in various international institutions, and limits on security cooperation with Israel. They also include reforms within the PLO to admit Hamas and other excluded Palestinian factions. The U.S. opposes such reforms, which are necessary for true Palestinian reconciliation, but fails to see that Palestinian negotiators will have little legitimacy without them.

U.S. policy is designed to thwart actions that would raise the costs of the status quo, in effect sustaining it. At the same time, the U.S. expends considerable effort preaching to unconvinced Israeli and Palestinian leaders that the continuing impasse cannot be sustained. But most Israeli voters, and many among the Palestinian elite, are quite at ease with existing conditions, thanks in no small part to the United States. This will remain so as long as the different proponents of the U.S.-led peace process insist on mediating the conflict even as they help perpetuate it.

Rather than accepting current circumstances in an effort not to harm the possibility of a negotiated two-state settlement, the U.S. could condition ongoing support on unilateral changes that are consistent with partition. Netanyahu claims that he is in favor of creating a Palestinian state. In any future two-state agreement, Palestinian, European, and U.S. officials will require that the Palestinian state contain, at minimum, all of the 91.5 percent of Jerusalem and West Bank territory east of the planned route of the separation barrier. The U.S. can exert influence on Israel to greatly reduce the presence of occupation in this territory and grant far more Palestinian control there.

At the same time, the U.S. could reverse its opposition to the formation of a unified PLO leadership. Without such leadership, no stable Israeli-Palestinian coexistence can be reached, and no PLO leader can avoid the accusation of being “too weak” to make peace. The U.S. could also remove its threats against Palestinian accession to international treaties and institutions, including the International Criminal Court. Membership in such organizations would serve as a protection against the possibility of binationalism and bolster the Palestinian statehood that the U.S. professes to support.

Yet the political incentives for the U.S. to take such radical steps do not exist. The potential benefits of creating a small, poor, and strategically inconsequential Palestinian state are tiny when compared to the costs of heavily pressuring a close ally wielding significant regional and U.S. domestic power. And even if the steps I have mentioned were taken, they would be no guarantee of a peaceful future. But unlike current policies, they at least offer the possibility of a better one.

A shorter version of this piece appears in the October 9, 2014 issue of The New York Review of Books.