FORMALLY the Israelis and Palestinians are still meeting, albeit fitfully. But in reality they are turning their backs on each other, thinking up their next strategies as if the talks had already ceased. The process began to peter out after Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, delayed and then blocked the release of two dozen Palestinian prisoners, previously scheduled for March 29th. Mr Netanyahu said he wanted the Palestinians to promise to keep talking before he would let the prisoners go. No, said Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader; Israel must stick to what was agreed. “Poof!” said John Kerry, the American secretary of state, describing the noise of the talks, initiated by him nine months ago, as they run out of steam.
Naftali Bennett, the cheery leader of Jewish Home, a national-religious party that promotes the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, is building up support for his plan formally to annex the more than half of the Palestinians’ hoped-for state that Israel’s army already fully controls. The housing minister, Uri Ariel, a member of Mr Bennett’s party, has overseen the fastest growth of settlements in the territory for a decade. Buoyed by his rise in the polls and eyeing the prospect of fresh elections, Mr Bennett is threatening to bring down Mr Netanyahu’s coalition should he concede on the prisoners.
Meanwhile Mr Abbas, often criticised for being indecisive, has called meetings of Palestinian notables to prepare them for some “fateful decisions”. Despairing of ever getting a negotiated two-state solution, the ideal for which he has built his career, the 79-year-old leader is said to be planning now to bow out. It is being whispered that parliamentary and presidential elections for Palestinians in both the diaspora and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza may be held next January to choose a fresh set of leaders. “He has had it with negotiations,” says a minister close to him. “He knows he’s failed.”
Some Palestinians are urging a third intifada (uprising). Tension has been mounting. For the first time in a decade, a new Jewish settlement inside Hebron, the only West Bank Palestinian town where Jews have a section of their own, was recently given the go-ahead (by Mr Ariel). The next day a Palestinian gunman fired on cars on a nearby road restricted to settlers, killing one of them. Two Islamist factions, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, applauded the attack.
Given Israel’s overwhelming military superiority, most Palestinians still prefer to compete in an arena where they have a better chance of success. Appealing to the international community, Mr Abbas’s people have prepared four batches of applications to join various UN bodies.
But if the Palestinians go ahead on that front, Israel has threatened mayhem. It could block customs transfers to the Palestinian Authority, the body under Mr Abbas which administers much of the West Bank. That might bring his fief tumbling down and force Israel to reoccupy West Bank cities, which in turn would sharpen confrontation between the two communities and heap a new load of opprobrium on Israel.
Worse for the Israelis, American support at the UN may prove less rock-solid than before. American officials are annoyed by Israel’s apparent neutrality over Ukraine. Its representative at the UN absented himself from a resolution upholding Ukraine’s territorial integrity.