During the year 2000 and early 2001 - prior to, at, and after Camp David II - Israelis and Palestinians tried for the only time at the official level to negotiate a final status agreement. Since those negotiations failed, relations have deteriorated seriously and many Israelis have lost faith in the two sides' capacity to reach a solution in the foreseeable future.
The current post-Lebanon war reality in which fighting still rages in Gaza, PM Ehud Olmert's convergence plan for the West Bank has been shelved and Palestinian internal governance is in disarray, in some ways constitutes a new low in the relationship and bespeaks a greater degree of stagnation than ever.
Precisely because things are so bad, this may be a good time to look again at the basics. A considerable majority on both sides appears today to agree broadly on issues like borders, settlements, security, water, and economic arrangements between Israel and a Palestinian state.
A majority appears to concur on the geopolitical model of a two-state solution. But what we learned in 2000 is that even near-agreement on these topics couldn't prevent the process from collapsing because we remained so far apart on the narrative, or "existential" issues: the refugee right of return question and the Temple Mount/Haram Al Sharif.
In the years since 2000, it has become apparent that the consensual Palestinian position on these two issues actually contradicts the underpinnings of a two-state solution as Israelis understand it and as UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947 defines it: "An Arab state and a Jewish state" in Mandatory Palestine, i.e., a Palestinian Arab state adjacent to Israel, a Jewish state.
Ostensibly, Palestinians are roughly divided in their allegiance and historical-philosophical approach to the conflict between a large minority that supports Hamas' insistence that genuine peace with an Israeli state is impossible and the only true solution comprises Israel's disappearance (a plurality voted for Hamas in January of this year), and a majority that accepts Fatah's advocacy of a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines.
In fact, nearly all Palestinians insist on two "narrative" versions that, at least at the historical-philosophical level, contradict a solution that juxtaposes a Jewish state and an Arab state.
First, the Palestinian argument that there was no Jewish temple on the Temple Mount/Haram Al Sharif, which therefore has no overriding national-religious significance for Jews, denies Israel's Jewish national roots in Jerusalem and in the Land of Israel/historical Palestine.
It projects Israel as an artificial state, the product of colonial settlement by foreigners, which is indeed precisely the way most Palestinians, indeed most Arabs, see us.
Israel could make peace with Egyptians who hold to this view because Egypt makes no claim to the land of Palestine or Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount, thereby rendering the issue irrelevant to good (albeit cold) neighborly state-to-state relations.
But the intimacy of Israeli-Palestinian relations - two peoples sharing the same land -makes this far more difficult.
The same argument holds for the right of return. The problem is not whether Israel will accept Palestinian refugees as part of a settlement or even the question of how many refugees.
Rather, the real narrative issue is the Palestinian insistence that, regardless of the fate of specific refugees, Israel must acknowledge at the level of principle the right of return of all the 1948 refugees and their descendants, more than 4 million people.
As Israelis understand this demand, if all Palestinians have even the theoretical right to return, this is because Israel expelled them in an unjust war. If the descendants of those expelled in 1948 have, in perpetuity, the right of return, this is because Palestinians' link to the land is eternal, whereas Jews' link to the land is not.
In other words, Israel was born in sin in 1948, meaning, once again, that it has no right to exist, that it is a foreign and illegitimate entity. This is what Palestinians in a Palestinian state next to Israel will teach their children in school.
It is not an acceptable basis for a two-state solution, because it comprises the kernel of one side's negation of the other and opens the door for future irredentism and subversion.
Note that Israelis do not call into question the sacred and historical importance of the Temple Mount/Haram Al Sharif for Palestinians and Muslims in general. They don't demand that Palestinians and other Arabs apologize for rejecting 181 and trying to destroy the nascent Jewish state in 1948.
They don't insist that Palestinians recognize that wars cause refugee problems, that the 1948 war generated as many Jewish refugees in Middle East countries as Palestinian refugees, and that each country should in principle absorb its own.
They don't care what Palestinians think about the first and second temples as long as they acknowledge that Jews have a national-religious historic tie to the Temple Mount/Haram Al Sharif that must find expression in arrangements for its sovereign status and in respect for Israeli and Jewish rights on and access to the site, all without prejudice to Palestinian and Muslim rights.
In other words, Israelis don't insist that Palestinians (or other Arabs contemplating peace with Israel) ratify the Israeli narrative in order to end the conflict, even though Palestinian logic dictates that we should.
If Palestinians cannot adjust their narrative to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state in the Land of Israel/historical Palestine - and I see little likelihood of this happening in the foreseeable future - then we cannot truly end this conflict.
Israel would legitimately fear lest Palestinian acceptance of a two-state solution and recognition of Israel be tempered by Palestinian adherence to a set of narrative beliefs that negate Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and harbor an agenda of eventually Palestinizing Israel through legal and illegal "return," subversion, and incitement of Israel's Palestinian minority.
Meanwhile, we can and should find ways of coexisting with one another and with our conflicting narratives. We Israelis should dismantle settlements and withdraw unilaterally from as much of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (but not the Temple Mount/Haram Al Sharif!) as possible in order to provide the Palestinians with the best possible conditions for running their own lives in their own political entity.
We can reach partial agreements and solutions. But we cannot truly end the conflict.
Yossi Alpher is co-editor of the bitterlemons family of Internet publications. He is former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and a former senior advisor to PM Ehud Barak. Acknowledgement to bitterlemons.org
Commentary: Clashing Palestinian narrative
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