Optimism,” wrote Voltaire, the French philosopher and wit, “is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.”

In case you haven’t noticed, representatives of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel have been in negotiations over a peace settlement for several weeks now. But in the unlikely event that you have, the spectacle no doubt has elicited a mere yawn from you. This lack of interest is clearly anchored in how countless other efforts over the last 20 years, since say the Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawns in September 1993, in a carefully scripted ceremony that included effusive handshakes, failed to produce results.

Even the outstandingly generous Arab League Peace Initiative, sponsored by the Kingdom in 2002, that offered to normalize relations between Israel and countries in the entire Arab world in exchange for a complete withdrawal from the occupied territories, failed to budge leaders in the Zionist establishment. They ignored it, or rejected it as “spin.”

Meanwhile, two decades after the fanfare at the White House lawns, with little or no pressure exerted on it by the US, Israel continues its military occupation — at 46 years, the longest occupation of one people by another in modern history.

And though by recognizing Israel at Oslo, the Palestinians effectively ceded 78 percent of their ancestral patrimony, Israeli leaders today want more — a compromise, as it were, on what has already been compromised. What more could Israel— one may ask — wangle out of the Palestinians?

This lemon surely has already been squeezed dry. Yet Israel doesn’t see it that way. Its strategy is to make its demands so improbable that the negotiations would collapse — allowing it a long grace period to go on a frenzy of more road building and settlements construction on Palestinian land — before more negotiations are held again.

Israel, it now appears, is hell-bent on demanding that the hapless PA recognize it not only as a state ensconced in three quarters of historic Palestine, but as a “Jewish state” as well. Take it or leave it.

And truth be told, Israel is able to get away with this diplomatic skulduggery because, as the current president in the White House told its leaders, “We’ve got your back covered.” What Israel wants Israel in the end gets it, given the fact that it knows that the United States, all the way from President Harry S. Truman to Barack Obama, has acted as its defense lawyer.

All of which brings us back to the ongoing “peace negotiations;” negotiations that highlight the weak position the PA has in the balance of power, and the extreme, almost desperate, extent Palestinian representatives will go to appease Israel and please the US.

Consider this: Last Tuesday, President Mahmoud Abbas hosted 10 liberal members of the Israeli Parliament at his headquarters in Ramallah and actually expressed great optimism that a peace agreement will be reached in the nine months allotted the current round of negotiations. The dozen or more journalists who attended the meeting, including Jodi Rudoren, the New York Times correspondent in the West Bank, have written about the unabashed conciliatory tone of the Palestinian president’s comments, intended to reach out to Israel.

Reportedly, he never used the word occupation during his lengthy remarks. He referred only briefly to the “settlements,” which are universally identified as colonies, not only by Arabs but also by commentators in Europe and elsewhere around the world.

Abbas condemned violence, “even against the settlers.” He offered condolences to the family of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who had died the previous day, the very rabbi who had in the past made racist comments about Arabs. He omitted from his remarks any mention of the Palestinian refugees’ right to return. And finally, he expressed his opinion (hold on to your hats) that “we (the PA) know the problem between us will only be solved in negotiations.”

Now contrast that I’m-reaching-out-to-my-enemy posture with the speech that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had given the night before in which he dredged up the memory of Haj Amin Al-Husseini, head of the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine in the 1930s, who he claimed was a Nazi sympathizer, a speech in which he reiterated the Israeli diktat (what other word will do here?) that there would be no agreement with the Palestinians unless and until such time as they recognized Israel as a “Jewish state.”

And what, pray tell, is a Jewish state? It is doubtful that even the Jews can’t reach a consensus on how to define that term. Non-Jews can’t get into the head of Jews and glean what their inward preoccupations about identity, ethnicity and sensibility are, anymore than Jews can get into the head of three generations of diaspora Palestinians to glean their self-definitions, their experience of the nakbi and the ghourba. What we are is a projection of our selfhood, a sense of who we are, accumulated moment by moment, touch by touch, encounter by encounter over generations. We alone define all that.

Clearly, the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state derives from a well-known ploy. Namely, one posits an improbable, not to mention absurd, demand of one’s opponent, and if that opponent balks at agreeing to it, then all bets are off.

It all reminds us of what Moshe Dayan, who died in 1981 at age 66, brazenly told then US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in August 1977. “Whenever you accept our views,” he said, not altogether lightheartedly or flippantly, “we shall be in full agreement with you.”

No doubt about it, when it comes to chutzpah, as Yiddish-speaking Jews would have it, Israelis wrote the book.

• Jamal Doumani is a US-based academic.

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