The Agenda

"The Palestinians need to state clearly and publicly that any agreement is the end of all claims regarding Israeli territory. Would you want to lose your national independence and become a religious minority in an Arab state?"
Israeli official, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

"The Palestinians are so wrapped up in their victimhood. I'm not trying to dismiss their aspirations but they need to get beyond it and say, 'Lets be pragmatic.' We need a moment of great leadership."
Israeli official

"This settlement straddles the main road that an army coming from the east would have to use to invade. Let's move the border, not the people, and divide the land logically.
"The vast majority of people are not driven by ideology or religion. It was not created to put a Jewish presence on soil where Abraham walked. People come here because the housing is cheaper and the standard of living is better."
Herb Keinon, diplomatic editor Jerusalem Post, Settlement of Ma'ale Adumin

"That's why we say to have a genuine peace, there has to be Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish state. That's it, that's what this is about."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

A general view of the West Bank Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim is seen near Jerusalem January 3, 2014. REUTERS/Ammar Awad

In Mr. Keinon's hometown, the settlement of Ma'ale Adumin, east of Jerusalem, located in the West Bank, a bedroom community of 40,000, the community has been laid out in a grid of neat homes, parks, malls and community centres.  The numbers of Jewish settlers in the entire West Bank is estimated as 330,000, most of whom, according to Mr. Keinon, are not ultra-religious.

They are, however, considered by the international community to be illegal under international law. And the plan placed front and centre by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks of the centrality for success in reversion to the 1967 Green Line, with the flexibility of accommodation to land swaps, Israel absorbing the areas where most of the West Bank settlements exist, and the new Palestinian nation carving out and claiming that part of Israel that is majority-Muslim occupied.

The experience that Israel went through it now uses as a prototype of what might develop with pulling its forces out of the West Bank, stationed there to prevent ongoing attacks by Palestinians against Israel. That experience was the result of its unilateral retreat from Gaza resulting in an increase in attacks from Gaza into Israel, culminating in the Hamas takeover, and another corresponding increase in rockets fired over the border.

Two kilometres from Bethlehem the Aida camp exists, its motif write large in graffiti and signage: "We Will Win", and "We Will Return", backdropping Arab youths competing in stone-throwing competitions. A giant key spans the entrance, symbolic of the key to the homes the refugees have been assured they will be given when the enemy is finally defeated and they are able to return to their homes in Israel.

The Palestinian Authority encourages this fictional absurdity, and in so doing discourages refugees from leaving as a betrayal of the national cause of return to the pre-1948 homes they left. The United Nations has been a useful accomplice, granting refugee status from generation to generation, in perpetuation of the grievance of victimhood. "We can't live, so we are waiting for death", one mural says of the misery of life in the Aida refugee camp.

The Palestinian Authority grieves that it must liberate the West Bank from Israeli occupation, in public denunciations of the oppressive presence of Israel's military presence. But that is the surface situation, underlying it is the mission to liberate pre-1948 Palestine. Palestinians have remained fixated on a return to their lost Palestine; the 'occupation' is merely an inconvenience to achieving the ultimate goal.

And this, precisely, is what afflicts the peace process. The negotiations can accomplish nothing when the Palestinians demand concessions and when they are given, up the ante again and again, until there is nothing left to concede but complete withdrawal of a nation from the geography it holds as a creation of the United Nations recognizing the need for a Jewish homeland.