The latest round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, held in Amman, have ended in mutual recrimination. Might it be the very search for a comprehensive and negotiated and final deal that is the problem?

On the one hand, we aim high, searching for a permanent status agreement that will solve all the issues and end all the claims. We tell ourselves that the deal is virtually agreed by ‘all reasonable people’.  On the other hand, twenty years of trying have produced no final agreement.

The obstacles are less to do with bad faith and more to do with certain intractable characteristics of the conflict.

One, there are significant gaps between the parties on the major issues, and it is a bit of a myth that ‘everyone knows’ the shape of the final agreement. The Czech Ambassador Michael Zantovsky  Zantovky argued  that ‘The minimum Palestinian position on refugees does not come near the maximum Israeli concessions on the subject. The minimum Israeli position on security does not come near the maximum Palestinian concessions on demilitarization or the Jordan Valley.’   (Actually, Zantovsky is too pessimistic here: in fact. Erekat told his aides, according to the ‘Palestine Papers’ that on refugees, ‘the deal is there’. Abbas did not reject the Olmert offer when he received it.  The gaps are real but not necessarily unbridgeable.)

Two, because the gaps are significant, the parties often enter talks not because they think a deal is possible but because they are fearful of being blamed by the international community for staying out. ‘Such fear is enough for negotiations to take place, but not enough for them to succeed,’ notes Zantovsky.

Three, the ambition to strike a comprehensive and negotiated and final deal ignores a series of obstacles, among which we can include the following: the irresolvable split (for now at least) in the Palestinian camp between Hamas’s Islamism and Fatah’s nationalism (‘we will not enter negotiations with any government that Hamas takes part in, or that its members are appointed by Hamas,’  said an Israeli official after the Amman breakdown, speaking to Ha’aretz’s Barak Ravid),  the poverty  of trust of the parties for each other, the absence of a belief on either side that negotiations can deliver what they want, and the fear on both sides of damaging what they already have (from economic growth to improved security, from the relative absence of violence to the preservation of fragile governing coalitions).

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