Sharon's unilateral efforts at disengagement—which would have preserved more Jewish settlements and granted the Palestinians less territory than do existing peace plans, and which would have created a separate but hardly sovereign Palestinian entity composed of detached cantons—have spurred Abbas to enter negotiations. Better to parley, the Palestinian leadership no doubt reasoned, than be forced to accede to the Israeli-imposed facts on the ground. In that case, why can't we expect that in fact the political problems created by demographics and land may lead to a binding and mutually satisfactory peace? First and most obviously, the gap between what Palestinian and Israeli leaders will agree to and what their constituencies will abide by is huge. Every sensible person on the left or the right concurs on the necessary steps, but the Israeli political system and national temperament seem to make those steps impossible to take. After nearly forty years of settlement building on the West Bank, for instance, those settlements close to the Green Line may have roots too deep and may well be too integral to the daily life of too many Israelis to be forsaken—perhaps by design. This is nothing, of course, compared with the obstacles that Palestinian moderates face. Groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, which are committed to Israel's destruction, are hardly on the fringe. And Palestinians seem to demand the right of return as adamantly as Israelis oppose it: 98.7 percent of refugees surveyed in 2001 dismissed compensation in place of return. Among nonrefugees polled the figure was 93.1 percent. Given that Abbas has promised to submit a "final status" agreement to a plebiscite of Palestinians in the occupied territories and throughout the Arab world (a promise all but ignored in the Western press), the chances of a real peace (as opposed to what the Palestinians call a hudna—a tactical truce) appear to be slim.

ut even assuming that a comprehensive settlement could be reached, Israel's long-term prospects are bleak. The late Faisal Husseini, a moderate PLO official and a scion of one of Arab Jerusalem's great families, said, "I worry about today. But the Israelis should worry about the future." Today the Palestinian cause is fragmented, and its people are exhausted. Israel, on the other hand, negotiates from a position of unassailable military strength. But the Zionist enterprise has never been able to transcend the demographic and geographic realities that have haunted it from its inception. Regardless of the moral opprobrium one might attach to either party, the seeds of the all-but-unsolvable Palestinian-refugee problem were sown when Israel recognized in 1948 that it couldn't function with a vast and hostile Palestinian population (indeed, even the relatively small number of Palestinians who remained in Israel after the war for independence lived under military rule until 1966). Today Israeli Arabs (that is, Palestinians living within Israel's pre-1967 borders and in East Jerusalem) have one of the highest population-growth rates in the world (among Israeli Arabs in the Negev, specifically, it is the highest), and they now make up about 20 percent of Israel's population; demographers project that they'll compose nearly a quarter of the population by 2020, and as much as 30 percent by 2050. (These figures don't count the approximately 150,000 Palestinian noncitizens, drawn to Israel largely by the prospect of higher-paying jobs, who live there illegally.) Such large antagonistic minorities have historically engendered conflict and calls for binationalism, which would further weaken the Jewish state.

More troublesome still, a future Palestinian state hemmed in between the Green Line and the Jordan and in the Gaza Strip will face astronomical population growth (the population in Gaza now doubles every generation, and an enormous influx of former refugees now living throughout the Arab world—mostly in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon—is almost certain), scarce water, and dire economic conditions. (The obvious outlet for Palestinian labor—Israel—will perforce be tightly closed; otherwise the sort of creeping immigration the United States has experienced from Mexico would swamp Israel, thereby subverting efforts to maintain a Jewish state.) A host of realistic Israeli observers, including Israel's national security adviser, General Giora Eiland, doubt that the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan contains enough land and resources to sustain two viable sovereign states. In few places in the world do conditions more demand that two peoples develop a symbiotic relationship; in no other place are the chances of building such a relationship more remote.

Whatever accommodation is made now, it seems inevitable that given the future that confronts a Palestinian state, its expansionist energies will be directed toward Israel (and, to a lesser extent, Jordan). At that point Palestinian leaders seeking further territorial revision will no doubt argue, correctly, that the Green Line was a cease-fire line, not an international boundary; that that line itself awards Israel territory won in war; and that it in no way resembles the boundaries of the UN partition resolution upon which the Jewish state was founded. David Ben-Gurion always urged his people to accept even the smallest Jewish state, arguing that it would serve as a springboard for future expansion. Palestine, he saw, would be taken over in stages. Today Israelis understandably fear that either by design or merely in response to exigencies it may be taken back in the same piecemeal fashion.

At some level most perceptive Israelis seem to grasp these future existential dangers. In fact, in conversations with Israelis on the left and the (moderate) right in academe, the military, the government, and the security services, I've been struck by their grim declarations that they as a people aren't going anywhere, but also by their foreboding about the country their children will live in. Most of all, though, I've been struck by the frequency with which these men and women—patriots all—have wistfully said, "We should have taken Uganda" (which Britain offered to the Zionist leadership in 1903). History shows that many problems have no solution—a fact all but unfathomable to Americans. Nevertheless, the century-long Palestinian-Zionist conflict is a story of two peoples, each with reasonable claims to the same piece of earth; and nearly every aspect of that story suggests that in the end—and to the detriment of those peoples, their region, and perhaps the entire world—their aspirations are not amenable to compromise.