Yair Hirschfeld: Given present conditions nobody today can speak about finalising a permanent status agreement. The gaps are far too wide. There’s no legitimacy there, no leadership, nothing that you really need. But you can move ahead on state-building. And we are working on this. There are very strong teams working on security. The Palestinians have started to understand that they are too weak to defend themselves and take responsibility for security. There has to be a certain Israeli control, one way or the other, in the Jordan Valley. Now we’re working on ways and means – how to do this without interfering with Palestinian sovereignty.

There is a lot happening on civil society. You have the division of the West Bank into areas A, B and C. A is the towns, B is the villages, and C is the rest. C is 60 per cent of the West Bank. If there’s no major economic development in Area C, then there’s no Palestinian state. At the moment there are difficulties, there is little understanding, and the Palestinians have taken an everything-or-nothing approach. We’ve got 50 projects which can be done in Area C. We have the Israeli Security Authority, officials in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance trying to work on this. There’s the beginning of a very serious dialogue. One breakthrough is that while the Quartet powers (United States, UN, the European Union and Russia) have hitherto always asked to go to the endgame first – which we told Kerry at the beginning was a major mistake – since September 2015, the Quartet have said ‘let’s move forward with state-building and whatever can be done in order to preserve the two-state solution.’

So, you’ve got state-building, security, civil society and, number four, the regional approach. There’s a lot going on with the regional approach. There’s a lot of talking to the Saudis and others; how do you get a regional support structure? And there’s a fifth component – a discussion with the religious leadership and a discussion between the religious Jewish leadership and the Islamic leadership. Rabbi Michael Melchior is doing wonderful work there.

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