To Israelis, Kerry is saying: You want a Jewish state, a state in all of the Land of Israel and a democratic state. You can have two out of three. You can be Jewish and in all of the Land of Israel, but you will not be democratic, because the Arabs in the West Bank and Israel will constitute too big a voting bloc for you to tolerate democratically. You can be Jewish and democratic, but then you can’t hold onto the West Bank. You can be democratic and in all of the Land of Israel, but then you can’t be a Jewish state (see point No. 1). You choose. A better deal is not coming.

This is not a simple choice for Israel, given the Arab turmoil around it. Kerry’s strategy has been to get the Pentagon to design a security scheme for the West Bank and Jordan Valley that would rely on satellites and other high-tech infrastructure to take the security question off the table as much as possible, so the choice for Israel is ideology versus a workable peace. Israeli officials, though, argue that the U.S. plan is insufficient.

The truth is, no security arrangement is foolproof. The only thing that might be foolproof is, along with the best security tools, giving Palestinians a state worth their defending and preserving by surprising them with a little trust — exactly the way Nelson Mandela surprised South African whites. What Palestinians do and say matters. But what Israelis do and say also conditions what Palestinians do and say — and vice versa. Up to now, neither this Palestinian leadership nor this Israeli leadership has shown an ounce of “Mandela-ism.” Everything they do to and for each other is grudging and fraught with suspicion, so there is never any sense of surprise. Without some trust breakthrough, I don’t see how a big deal gets done.