With whom, for what do Israel, Palestine negotiate?

JERUSALEM — 'Twas a famous victory for diplomacy when, in 1991 in Madrid, Israelis and Palestinians, orchestrated by the United States, at last engaged in direct negotiations. Almost a generation later, U.S. policy seems to have succeeded in prodding the Palestinians away from their recent insistence on "proximity talks" — in which they have talked to the Israelis through American intermediaries — to direct negotiations. But about what?

Idle talk about a "binational state" has long since died. Even disregarding the recent fates of multinational states — e.g., the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia — binationalism is impossible if Israel is to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people. No significant Israeli constituency disagrees with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "The Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders."

Rhetoric about a "two-state solution" is de rigueur. It also is delusional, given two recent searing experiences.

The only place for a Palestinian state is the West Bank, which Israel has occupied — legally under international law — since repelling the 1967 aggression launched from there. The West Bank remains an unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, the disposition of which is to be settled by negotiations. But with constructive — because illusion-shattering — bluntness, Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States, puts aside diplomatic ambiguity:

"There is no Israeli leadership that appears either willing or capable of removing 100,000 Israelis from their West Bank homes — the minimum required to make way for a viable Palestinian state, even with Israel's annexation of its three main settlement blocs. (Those blocs effectively function as the suburbs of Jerusalem.) The evacuation of a mere 8,100 Israelis from Gaza in 2005 required 55,000 IDF (Israel Defense Forces) troops — the largest Israeli military operation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War — and was profoundly traumatic."

Twenty-one Israeli settlements were dismantled; even the bodies of Israelis buried in Gaza were removed. After a deeply flawed 2006 election encouraged by the United States, there was in 2007 essentially a coup in Gaza by the terrorist organization Hamas. So now Israel has on its western border, 44 miles from Tel Aviv, an entity dedicated to Israel's destruction, collaborative with Iran and possessing a huge arsenal of rockets.