For all of Secretary Kerry’s unfathomable optimism eight months ago, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations had been going nowhere for months before they crashed spectacularly this week.

The Palestinians halted direct talks with the Israelis way back in November, in protest at ongoing Israeli settlement construction. (Israel would argue legalistically that, according to the understandings that governed the resumed peace effort, it was not required to limit West Bank building.) The Palestinians then torpedoed Kerry’s efforts to draft a document setting out the “principles of final status,” under which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was prepared to agree to continued negotiations on the basis of the pre-1967 lines. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected the Palestinian quid pro quo, which specified the goal of two nation-states for two peoples — a Jewish nation-state and a Palestinian nation-state.

All is nearly but not yet completely lost. As of Thursday afternoon, some of those in the know were describing the situation as “still fluid.” Tellingly, almost two days after Abbas dramatically signed up “Palestine” to 15 international treaties and conventions in an apparent screw-you gesture to the US and Israel, Netanyahu’s office was still batting away a deluge of requests for comment. The something-for-everybody deal — Israel releases the fourth and final batch of long-term terrorism convicts, including perhaps a dozen Arab-Israelis, as well as 400 security prisoners not involved in violent crimes; Israel halts new settlement housing tenders; the Palestinians come back to the table for at least nine more months and eschew the unilateral route to statehood; and the US releases Jonathan Pollard — could yet, just possibly, be revived. Netanyahu had been well on the way to mustering a cabinet majority for such an arrangement when Abbas got his pen out on Tuesday evening.

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