Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, seen at a summit meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in June. (Omar Rashidi, Maan Images)

When Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush met at the White House in June, they concluded that Hamas's violent ousting of Fatah from Gaza - which brought down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the Saudis in Mecca in March - had presented the world with a new 'window of opportunity'.[*] (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows of opportunity.) Hamas's isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush agreed, would allow them to grant generous concessions to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, giving him the credibility he needed with the Palestinian people in order to prevail over Hamas.

Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look good. That is why their expectation that Hamas will be defeated is illusory. Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those considered extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is Palestinian acquiescence in Israel's dismemberment of Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and his government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbas's moderation and justify its rejection by Hamas. Equally illusory are Bush's expectations of what will be achieved by the conference he recently announced would be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a "meeting"). In his view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet's newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel's decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow - indeed, it would insist on - the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

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The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel's interest in a peace process - other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo - has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, is "to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people." In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

Anyone familiar with Israel's relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory - based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon - knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza's situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.

Israel's disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet - with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington's lead - has collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting Israel's claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace partner.

Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for the future as "the current reality in the territories." "The plan," he said, "is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank." Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv, Dayan said: "The question is not 'What is the solution?'� but 'How do we live without a solution?'" Geoffrey Aronson, who has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, summarises the situation as follows:

"Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River."

In an interview in Ha'aretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic goal of Sharon's diplomacy as being to secure the support of the White House and Congress for Israeli measures that would place the peace process and Palestinian statehood in "formaldehyde." It is a fiendishly appropriate metaphor: formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead bodies, and sometimes creates the illusion that they are still alive. Weissglas explains that the purpose of Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and the dismantling of several isolated settlements in the West Bank, was to gain US acceptance of Israel's unilateralism, not to set a precedent for an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank. The limited withdrawals were intended to provide Israel with the political room to deepen and widen its presence in the West Bank, and that is what they achieved. In a letter to Sharon, Bush wrote: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."

In a recent interview in Ha'aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet's representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the agreement he helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned Gaza into a vast prison. The official behind this, he told Ha'aretz, was Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser. "Every aspect" of the agreement Wolfensohn had brokered "was abrogated."

To read the full article please visit The London Review of Books.