"We don’t have to do anything at all to reassure you", he said. He offered this historical analogy: When David Ben Gurion and Konrad Adenauer negotiated the German-Israeli reparations agreement in the early 1950s, the Israeli prime minister was hardly expected to offer the German chancellor concessions or psychological reassurances.

"So we are your Nazis?", I asked.

"Now you’ve understood", he replied, and smiled.

I have thought often of that conversation since the collapse of any pretence of a mutual process of reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. Rev. Ateek offered the most cogent explanation I had encountered for why the Oslo peace process never had a chance to succeed.

From the start, Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking was burdened by asymmetry. The gap between Israeli power and Palestinian powerlessness was translated into a political process that required tangible Israeli concessions–reversible only through war–in exchange for Palestinian promises of peace: In essence, land for words. But the deepest and most intractable asymmetry has been psychological: it has been an asymmetry of pity, or, more precisely, of self-pity. The Palestinians, as losers of the conflict, continue to see themselves solely as victims, without responsibility for helping to end it. Because history has been kinder to them, Israelis can afford to concede complexity and, indeed, the Israeli mainstream now perceives the conflict as a competition between two legitimate national movements.

The first generation of Israelis after statehood resembled Palestinians today in their simplistic view of the struggle over the land as an absolutist moral conflict. In every generation, as the Passover Haggadah puts it, a new enemy rises to destroy the Jews and, for most Israelis, this was the Arabs’ turn.

Only gradually did Israelis begin to see the conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world generally as a fundamental break from the pattern of Jewish history – that Zionism’s hard gift to the Jews was to transform us from passive victims of fate to active shapers of our own destiny, responsible for the consequences of our decisions. A key turning point was the November 1977 visit of Anwar Sadat to Israel. The Israeli notion of the Arab world as an impenetrable wall of hostility began to change. The subsequent invasion of Lebanon in 1982, followed in late 1987 by the first intifada, reinforced for Israelis the moral ambiguity of the Middle East conflict.

By the time of the Oslo agreement in September 1993, a majority of Israelis had been weaned from the self-defensiveness of the victim and educated in the moral dilemmas of the conqueror.

It would be unrealistic to expect a similar evolution among Palestinians who lack fifty years of sovereignty to compensate for their historical trauma. The Palestinians are at a different stage of their national development, celebrating nationalism and self-sacrifice and mistrusting moral complexity as weakness. Yet that psychological gap between Israelis and Palestinians was precisely Oslo’s great structural flaw. The problem with the Oslo process, as Ariel Sharon has noted, was not its goals but its timetable. Oslo’s implicit expectation was that Israel would return to approximately the June 1967 borders after a mere seven years of tenuous relations with the Palestinian entity, well before the Palestinians could be emotionally prepared to offer Israelis even the most minimal sense of safety and acceptance.

On the Israeli side, a vigorous and successful effort was made by Labor Party leaders to wean the public from its emotional attachment to the biblical borders of "greater Israel." That message was reinforced by the Israeli media, often by what we journalists chose to omit as much as to publish. I recall, for example, reading an account in the Jerusalem Post’s media column, written by right-wing commentator David Bar-Ilan, just after the White House handshake of September 1993. The column reported on a speech delivered by Yasser Arafat in Amman in which the Palestinian chairman noted that by signing the Oslo Accords he was merely implementing the "stages" policy – that is, the 1974 PLO decision to accept whatever territory Israel evacuated and continue struggling until the demise of the Jewish state. My instinctive reaction was that the account must be exaggerated. I did not bother checking whether Bar Ilan’s report was accurate, precisely because I feared that it might be.

In contrast, no attempt was made by Palestinian leaders to accommodate the Jewish state in their people’s mental map of the Middle East. Indeed, the self-justifying myths of the Palestinians have only become more entrenched since Oslo. The Palestinian people are routinely told by their controlled media that the Temple never existed on the Temple Mount, that the biblical stories did not occur in Israel/Palestine, and even that the Holocaust is a lie. The consistent message is that the Palestinians are victims of a false Jewish narrative.

Rather than challenging the Palestinians’ wholesale expropriation of justice and truth, the international community has encouraged their self-perception as innocent victims of the Middle East conflict. Indulging that sense of blameless victimization has only reinforced the Palestinian inability to assume the role of equal partner in negotiations and take responsibility for helping to end the conflict. As Naim Ateek put it, the Palestinians’ only obligation to peacemaking is to show up and receive concessions. The Palestinian leadership has felt no moral obligation to fulfil its stated commitments under Oslo – such as curbing terrorism and ending incitement or even the straightforward matter of revoking the Palestinian Covenant that calls for the destruction of Israel. (To this day it is uncertain whether the Palestinians have legally revoked the Covenant.)

The apologetics offered by much of the international community–and by part of the Israeli Left – for Arafat’s violent rejection of Barak’s peace offer have reinforced the pathological tendencies of Palestinian self-pity.

When confronted with the continued ideological intransigence of the Palestinians, the Israeli left-wing retort was invariably a sarcastic dismissal: "We don’t expect them to become Zionists." Even as it successfully compelled a reluctant Israeli public to confront at least some truths of the Palestinian narrative, the Left refused to demand any reciprocity from its Palestinian partner. The Left ignored its own argument: that without accommodating the Other’s narrative, peace would be impossible.

The success of Oslo was predicated on the Palestinians’ ability to convince Israelis to trust them enough to empower them. But soon after the White House signing, increasing numbers of Israelis began to suspect they had been deliberately deceived. That process accelerated with Arafat’s 1995 speech in a Johannesburg mosque, in which he compared Oslo to a ceasefire the Prophet Muhammad signed with an Arabian tribe he later destroyed. Then came the wave of suicide bombings in early 1996.

The inevitable result was a revolt by the Israeli majority that had initially welcomed the Oslo Accords and that had been willing to make far-reaching concessions for genuine peace. The erratic voting pattern of the Israeli public throughout the Oslo process – repeatedly veering between Left and Right, from Yitzhak Rabin to Benyamin Netanyahu to Ehud Barak to Ariel Sharon–reflected both the growing scepticism of Israelis and their reluctance to repudiate the hopes raised by Oslo. Only with the landslide election of Sharon, who had warned for decades against empowering the PLO, did the Israeli people deliver its definitive judgment on the Oslo process.

By refusing to "partition" justice and insisting that historical right belongs exclusively to them, the Palestinians have preempted the need, in their minds, to revise their long-term goal of undoing the "injustice" of Israel’s existence. Indeed, when Palestinian leaders speak of a "just and lasting peace", it is now clear that they mean, in the long term, peace without a Jewish state. Mainstream Palestinian leaders no longer invoke the old crude slogan of throwing the Jews into the sea. Instead, the scenario has become more complex, a gradual eroding of Israel that includes undermining its will to fight and to believe in itself.

The key element in the "stages" plan is the massive return–both through Israeli consent and illegal infiltration–of embittered and inassimilable Palestinian refugees to pre-1967 Israel. By refusing to concede the "right of return", the Palestinian leadership belies its claim that it has recognized Israel in its pre-1967 borders. For Palestinians, the great crime of Zionism was artificially transforming the Jews into a majority in any part of Israel/Palestine–through Jewish immigration ("colonization") and Arab expulsion and flight. In a stunning speech to Arab diplomats in Stockholm in 1996, Arafat laid out his vision of undoing the Jewish majority even within pre-1967 Israel. By overwhelming the land with refugees and expropriating water and other resources as well as turning a blind eye to ongoing Palestinian terrorism, Arafat would ensure that a large part of the Israeli middle class would emigrate in despair to the West. The remaining Jews would be so disoriented and demoralized that the state would eventually collapse from within.

That this was no mad fantasy on Arafat’s part but an accurate reflection of mainstream Palestinian strategy was confirmed by the late Faisal Husseini, long considered to be among the most pragmatic Palestinian leaders. In an interview last year with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi, Husseini made the remarkable admission that the Oslo process was a "Trojan horse." He explained: "When we are asking all the Palestinian forces and factions to look at the Oslo Agreement and at other agreements as ‘temporary’ procedures, or phased goals, this means that we are ambushing the Israelis and cheating them." The goal, he concluded, was "the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea" – that is, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

In a private conversation I held about two years ago in Gaza with the head of one of the Palestinian security services established by Arafat, I was offered a benign vision of that dream of Israel’s demise: "This land is too small to sustain two states", explained the commander. "When the refugees return, there won’t be enough resources and we will be forced to create one state–a beautiful country that will show the world how Muslims and Jews can coexist, just like in the days of Muslim Spain." That historical model, of course, is based on a Muslim sovereign majority and a dependent Jewish minority.

It is hardly coincidence, too, that the model most invoked by Arafat for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is South Africa. Israeli left-wingers misinterpreted that constant reference as proof that the PLO leadership had embraced peaceful reconciliation. In fact, what most appeals to Palestinian leaders in the South African precedent is the transition from minority to majority rule. Though the Jews constitute a slim majority in the whole of Israel/Palestine and an overwhelming majority within the pre-1967 borders, Palestinian leaders believe that this is a temporary aberration. When the refugees begin returning (and Jews begin leaving), the "natural" majority will re-emerge, and the Jewish minority, like the white South African minority, will then be compelled to negotiate the terms of its own surrender.

There certainly exist Palestinians capable of accommodating the Israeli narrative into their understanding of the conflict. Understandably, it is easiest for Palestinian citizens of Israel to reconcile with Israel, more difficult for Palestinians in the territories, and more difficult still for Palestinian refugees in the diaspora. The tragedy of the Oslo Accords was to impose on West Bank Palestinians–with whom Israel’s conflict is, potentially, territorial rather than existential–the revolutionary leadership of the diaspora, which represents the Palestinian grievance of 1948; that is, the very existence of a Jewish state. Israel has empowered a Palestinian leadership that is unwilling to revise its morally exclusionist view of the conflict. Genuine peace is impossible when one partner considers the other’s very existence illegitimate.

Despite the growing sense among Israelis that we have slipped back into the pathology of Jewish history, Israeli society has not reverted to a simplistic moral understanding of the roots of the Middle East conflict. Most Israelis still perceive the conflict as being fought between two legitimate national movements; if a majority were convinced that a credible partner had emerged on the other side, they would opt, even now, for partition. While sympathy for the settlers under attack has grown, there has been no increase in political support for their annexationist agenda. Israel has repudiated the illusions of the Left, but it has hardly returned to the equally fantastic alternative of the annexationist Right.

Yossi Klein Halevi is the Israel correspondent for The New Republic and a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report. His new book, just published by William Morrow, is called At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. Reprinted from The National Interest, © The National Interest, all rights reserved.