Almost we succeeded, Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert tell us, some more and there were two sister states in the 1949 borders, sharing Jerusalem. If only ...

The advantage of such pathetic propaganda attempts is that it seems impossible to test them. We are supposedly set to sink into a maze of "what ifs" excuses for the farce that occurred between Barak, Clinton and Arafat, and all the other clever diplomatic concoctions that came out of it. Agile and superficial historians will still serve us full of dubious denials of the simple fact that Ben-Gurion was discovered in the mid-1930s and Jabotinsky before him: the State of Israel and Zionism ordered it impossible to stabilize peace with the Palestinian national movement. Peace requires a complete historical defeat of this destructive movement, or, indeed, the defeat of the State of Israel.

History reiterates this diagnosis, but it also presents a sequence of illusions of good people who cannot come to terms with the truth, which is a bitter but blessed remedy, preferable to a sweet and poisonous lie. And not only are there illusions here, but also propaganda and fraud. Olmert, a supporter of Gantz (his adviser?), Smokes a smokescreen with the man who has just announced in the Arab League that the Israelis are not actually Jews.

The former Israeli prime minister has launched a kind of diplomatic underground in the style of Alon Liel and Hagai Elad against the foreign relations monopoly of the State of Israel, which should be entrusted exclusively to the authorized representatives of the state, and in any situation, even during transit (who knows him). But let's take a brief look at the propaganda content presented there to the public. Fortunately, we are not condemned here in the tangle of "what would have been"; Barack Obama came to our aid.

The most pro-Palestinian US President has ever had years of political confrontation with Benjamin Netanyahu on Iranian and Palestinian affairs. His failure in this complex conflict will save us from the fog created by Abbas and Olmert.

As we recall, Netanyahu addressed the American people through the Senate, attacking Obama's Iranian policies. But Obama preceded him: When he arrived in Israel, he spoke to young people in favor of a Palestinian state within the borders of 1949 and against Netanyahu's attempts to thwart the Oslo outline. To exert massive pressure on the Israeli government, such as the one that Bush put on Shamir in the 1990s, Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, needed legitimacy. After the second intifada, there was not much reputation for Palestinian leadership, so Kerry demanded that the Palestinians explicitly accept the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people (which Abbas had just ruled back in the Arab League), and other demands. From Israel, the Americans demanded settlement freeze - and received; Netanyahu played judo with them. But they didn't get anything from Abbas. Abbas fled to Kerry like he did to Olmert.

This case cannot be justified in the shaky political situation of a prime minister. It was an American president who was devoutly committed to the Palestinians - and they were gone. This explains the main thing: the Palestinians will never agree to an arrangement whose practical and symbolic conditions (which are very important in practice) block their path to the defeat of the State of Israel throughout the days.

Prof. Avi Barali is a lecturer at the Ben-Gurion Institute for Israel Studies and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev