Neither side will ever give up its basic demand: for the Palestinians, the return of the land; and for the Israelis, the survival of their state. The Camp David Accords, the Oslo Agreement, the American "road-map" and the interminable "peace process" have never gotten anywhere, and never will.
Richard Cohen may have been right to argue recently, in The Washington Post, that establishing a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab Middle East was a "mistake"; but, if so, it was a mistake made 58 years ago, and there is no undoing it now.
What the festering controversy between Israel and the Palestinians can do, however, is serve as a useful distraction from other issues -- as Iran is clearly using it now (by encouraging Hezbollah to attack Israel) to draw attention away from its own defiant aim of becoming a nuclear power.
That is the general state of play in the Middle East today, and to call it a "mess" is to understate the case. If it doesn't escalate into a more general conflict, complete with nuclear bombs, it will be only because none of the world's major powers who possess such weapons have a serious stake in the victory the militant Islamists are seeking to achieve.