Rarely have the prospects for a decent deal between Israelis and Palestinians looked so bleak. Despite his grudging acceptance of the two-state ideal, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, sounds perfectly content with the status quo: in effect, fortress Israel with the Palestinians impotently walled off. Meanwhile the Palestinians are as bitterly divided as ever. The Islamists of Hamas, still in military control of the Gaza Strip and-at least on paper-scornful of Israel’s right to exist, square off against secular and more amenable Fatah, which runs a fledgling state on the West Bank, albeit one riddled with Israeli roads, barriers and Jewish settlements. In the past week, things have got even worse for the Palestinians since their leader, Mahmoud Abbas, a man of peace and patience, has declared in frustration that he will step down, with no obvious successor in sight (see article). So they look leaderless as well as disunited.

Perhaps worst of all, the Americans, without whom no durable deal can be done, have seemed to vacillate, with neither a vision nor a plan. Suddenly, after the brightest of starts, Barack Obama appears to be making a hash of it. In June, in a speech in Cairo, he thrilled the Arab world, including many Palestinians, by promising that America would be more even-handed. He insisted that the Israelis should stop building or expanding settlements on the West Bank as a condition for bringing Palestinians back to the negotiating table. Yet four months later, after Mr Netanyahu had bluntly refused, Mr Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, was congratulating him merely for his promise to “restrain” settlement-building. This prompted a furious Mr Abbas to tender his resignation.

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