THE US State Department, like the pet-shop owner, insists that the obviously dead peace process in the Middle East is still alive. It's a necessary fiction.

Nobody in authority will publicly admit that no Israeli government will take on the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and force through a 'land for peace' deal, or that there is no unified government for Israelis to talk to on the Palestinian side anyway — that there is, in fact, no prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement in this generation. But that is the reality; the rest is the theatre of the absurd.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to a 10-month freeze in new construction in Jewish settlements as a condition for entering into direct talks with Mahmoud Abbas, president of Palestinian Authority, but the 10 months expired just after the talks opened, and he refused to extend the freeze. The US even tried bribing him with a multi-billion dollar pledge to give Israel new F-35 fighters, but to no avail.

Did Netanyahu refuse to grant Barack Obama the extra time because he was afraid that otherwise the settler lobby, which has powerful backers in his cabinet, would bring his coalition government down? Or just because he has always secretly opposed a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians anyway?

As for Mahmoud Abbas, he only controls the West Bank and must guard his flank against the more radical Hamas, which rules in the Gaza Strip and rejects peace with Israel. Abbas had gone as far as he safely could in agreeing to direct talks while building in the Jewish settlements was frozen.

Netanyahu knew that refusing to extend the freeze would force Abbas to end direct talks, but he was under great pressure from Washington to extend it. To divert that pressure, he introduced a new Israeli precondition for talks. If the Palestine Liberation Organisation wanted the freeze to continue, it must recognise Israel specifically as a Jewish state. That's a lot to ask of people whose parents or grandparents lost their homes and became refugees as a direct result of the creation of Israel, so that ended the risk of returning even to talks about talks.

Meeting in Cairo on Dec 15, the foreign ministers of the Arab League declared that “resuming the negotiations will be conditioned to receiving a serious offer that guarantees an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict”. By a 'serious offer', they mean a US-backed proposal for a comprehensive peace settlement.

No US administration would dare make such a proposal: it would be torn to shreds in days by the Israeli lobby in the United States and its allies in Congress. So there really is no peace process. Most Israelis want a peace settlement in principle, but there is just no consensus in Israel on the territorial compromises that would be needed to bring it about.

Increasingly, there is no consensus on the Palestinian side either, with many people losing faith in the very idea of a 'two-state solution'. The only reason that a fake 'peace process' continues is because the United States needs it to reconcile its huge emotional investment in Israel with its concrete financial and strategic interests in the Arab countries.

Is this an unsustainable situation? Not at all; it has lasted more than a decade already. It could last for several more, with occasional interruptions by further Israeli punishment attacks on south Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. It cannot go on forever, of course, but forever is a long, long time.