Shortly after Yitzhak Shamir lost power in Israel in 1992, back at the beginning of what people still call the Middle East peace process, he made an admission to the Tel Aviv-based newspaper Maariv.

When he attended that first peace conference in Madrid in 1991, Shamir told the reporter, he never had any real intention of allowing a Palestinian state. What he really wanted was to stall and to use the time to implant as many Israeli settlers as he could in the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war.

"I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria," said Shamir, using the Israeli term for the West Bank.

Shamir's successors haven't reached the half-million mark, at least not yet. Today, there are roughly 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, but that number includes an entire generation born on its stony hills who consider it their home every bit as much as the Palestinians surrounding them. (The 187,000 figure excludes Israelis living in Arab East Jerusalem, which is another story.)

Were he still in control, Shamir would undoubtedly be proud of the stalling and inertia that have thwarted any real progress since the Palestinian Authority was given limited control over the West Bank and Gaza in 1994.

The current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is widely seen as more moderate than Shamir. But as all sides in this peace process prepare for the first "summit" in over six years, to be held next week in Annapolis, Md., movement on the five big issues — borders, water resources, refugees, settlements and the status of Jerusalem — has been sabotaged so often no one seems to know how talks will proceed.

A negotiated two-state solution — an independent Israel alongside an independent Palestine — might now be the official goal of Israel, the Palestinians and most of the rest of the world, but at this point, it's hard to imagine how that might come about.

In fact, a newspaper here in Washington quoted an unnamed Arab participant this week as saying he wasn't sure what would even be discussed.

The missing peace

Of course, a great deal of credit for today's impasse also has to go to the late Yasser Arafat, who turned out to be the greatest objective ally of Israel's stall-forever crowd.

Terrified of occupying an odious place in the Arab pantheon if he were to sign a deal with the Israelis, especially any compromise on Holy Jerusalem, Arafat instead waffled and shifted and doubled back for years, alienating even his friends in the Bill Clinton administration.

Arafat's vision for peace, if he had one, could probably best be described as permanent ambiguity.

In his book, The Missing Peace, former Clinton envoy Dennis Ross details how Arafat would lay down a list of clear conditions for one particular deal and then, when Ross reported back the next day with Israel's agreement, dismiss them as "unimportant."

Ross writes he once told Arafat that he didn't see the point in continuing if the Palestinian leader was going to deny he'd asked for the conditions under negotiation.

"Are you calling me a liar?" Ross says Arafat asked him.

"If the shoe fits," retorted Ross, flinging his binder of files across the room in frustration.

In the end, Arafat chose to encourage a second Palestinian uprising, which Israel eventually crushed and negotiations came to an end in 2001.

Is one state enough?

On the surface, it would appear that the main beneficiaries of all the years of mutual bad faith are the hard-liners in Israel. Their enemy is divided now, perhaps irreparably so.

Gaza remains essentially contained and controlled by Israel, but inside the Strip, the Islamist group Hamas is now in charge and appears to be turning the area into a harsh, veiled theocracy.

In the West Bank, what's left of the Palestinian Authority nominally administers an unconnected archipelago of cities: Jenin, Ramallah, Qalqilya, Nablus and part of Hebron.

Mahmoud Abbas, who once admitted to Dennis Ross he lacked the moral authority among his people to make any of the necessary compromises, remains, at least in title, the Palestinian president.

Confounding the problem are all those settlers and roads and security barriers Israel has built since Madrid.

"It is increasingly likely that the reality on the ground will become the form of the future," says Tony Judt, a British-born and trained historian at New York University, who famously declared the peace process dead four years ago in the New York Review of Books.

"There is only one state there, it is called Israel," says Judt, who describes himself as a former member of the Zionist left. "There isn't a Palestinian state. There is no longer any physical territory for a Palestinian state that is remotely contiguous. No one I know in Israel seriously believes we will uproot a quarter of a million settlers.

"There is a single state, with interwoven economies and populations. Even in the best scenario, a two-state solution, Israelis have been very clear: The external frontiers would be controlled by Israel. Which means that under UN rules, it would not be a sovereign state."

Beware the cradle

Judt's analysis should warm the hearts of Israel's hard-liners. But the more thoughtful, even among that group, are not rejoicing. They've had a close look at the numbers.

Israel's bureau of statistics reports that right now, roughly five and a half million Jews live in Israel and the West Bank. That's up from 4.7 million in 1997.

There hasn't been a Palestinian census in years, but the U.S. government estimates there are about four million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, up from about 2.6 million ten years ago. If you add in the 1.4 million Arabs who are Israeli citizens, that means the combined Arab population in Israel and the West Bank is already about the same as the Jewish population, but growing much faster. The average age in Gaza is 15.

At this rate, the Israeli Jews will be in the minority in just a few years, governing a much larger population of Arabs, some with fewer political rights, many with none at all, and that is a situation with serious implications for a democracy.

Judt puts it this way: If there is no negotiated two-state solution, Israel may well have to choose between being a Jewish state or a democracy. Having it both ways, he argues, will be nearly impossible once Jews are the minority.

Ariel Sharon foresaw this dilemma when he was prime minister and was alarmed enough to withdraw Israel's settlers from Gaza unilaterally.

If the Annapolis initiative fails as thoroughly as all the other past peace summits have, Olmert, the current PM, will have to consider whether to do the same in the West Bank, or to reconcile Israel to the dreary reality of essentially governing a hostile, ever-expanding population of angry enemies.

A negotiated two-state solution is "still possible because it has to be possible," says Michael Walzer, a renowned political philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton who has argued publicly with Judt.

"My sense is that there is greater acceptance in Israel today of the fact that withdrawal is inevitable, though it is not clear when. And even Jerusalem is going to be divided. Most Israelis know that.

"It can be done, and since it has to be done, it will be done."

When — or if — a peace deal will be done, of course, remains to be seen. But unless Israelis start to have larger families soon, time would appear to be on the side of the Arabs.

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