The President's proposals make peace in the Middle East impossible: If I were a careerist in Ramallah, I'd start organising the Palestinian version of the early Sinn Fein right now

The speech itself was not so much White House as Little House on the Prairie. All, said George Bush, that had to happen for there to be a Palestinian state (which, of course, we all want) was for the Palestinians democratically to kick out their horrid old leadership and replace it with a nice, new, peace-minded leadership. This new dispensation – plus major reforms – would clear the way for talks which, in the fullness of time, might or might not settle a few other tricky little matters, such as how big a Palestinian state might be, whether part of Jerusalem would be in it and whether Israeli settlements built in violation of United Nations resolutions would be dismantled. We'd have to see about that.

So it's all knitted samplers and best bonnets. As the President argued, the present situation is hopeless. "It is untenable," he said on Monday, "for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation". And you can't say fairer than that. It was the same belief that drove his predecessor, Bill Clinton, to his hunt for a peace plan, which just eluded him, first at Camp David and then at Taba on the Israeli-Egyptian border.

It's worth recapping on that process. There was, for a moment at the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001, a deal possible in which the Palestinians ended up with almost all of the West Bank, with part of Jerusalem and with a territory that was contiguous. But the Israelis had done too little to build Palestinian confidence in the period following Oslo, and Arafat lacked the courage or vision to seize the moment. A new intifada began, that was met by tanks, the number of terrorist attacks increased and Israel reoccupied much of the West Bank. Now, so far have the prospects for peace receded, that even exchanges between participants – conducted in the almost scholarly pages of the New York Review of Books – sound as though they can only be resolved by violence.