Like two punch-drunk fighters hanging onto each other, arms flopped around each other’s necks, having made an intimate habit of their tiresome failures, the two belligerents are locked together in a static tableau. Failure is their shared way of life. They live and die by it. They talk about talking. They talk about talking about doing something different, but too many decades of stupidity, blindness, weakness and cowardice in varying proportions have brought them to the twisted embrace that they have come to consider normal. They clutch one another for dear life, these intimate antagonists, Israelis and Palestinians, who know each other so well and so little – each too weak to put an end to the agony, each too frightened to want a way out badly enough.
They are tediously, banally, wretchedly stuck. All hold their breath. Nothing moves.

Palestinians, the weaker party, talk about time running out. Even as the Palestinian Authority consolidates its quasi-state apparatus, settlements go on and on – declarations of confidence that facts on the ground will overwhelm wishes. In East Jerusalem, Dr. Nazmi al-Jubeh, who chairs the department of history at Birzeit University, told me recently that “only a limited time remains for a two-state solution. In two, three, five years, we will move to the next stage: one man, one vote.” To some Israelis, such talk is bluster. To some, it can be read as a threat. To Palestinians, it’s obvious.
Israelis, albeit with sad or stiff smiles, accommodate themselves to the occupation as if it were a permanent – unavoidable, even pleasant – state of affairs. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lives with, and by, the status quo. They rule. Their friends prosper. Their party adversaries are feeble, lost in fruitless maneuver. Only reason provides an incentive to do anything different (the demographically declining prospects of a Jewish state ), but reason’s rewards are mental, not sufficiently visceral. To the winners among Israel’s political class, the status quo might even be the best of all possible worlds.
Of course, not all Israelis find the status quo bearable. On a visit in October, I met many who were depressed, worn down by it – especially elders, people of my generation, who know how abnormal is this veneer of normality. They feel its eeriness, and the eeriness of denial in which their countrymen and -women are gripped. The Palestinians, of course, know the abnormality as abnormality, and feel the ground rumbling beneath their feet.

So how to break out of the shared prison? “There’s nowhere else to look but the U.S.,” Nazmi al-Jubeh told me. “The U.S. has to gamble.”
What should Barack Obama do, I asked Saman Khoury, once a leader of the first intifada, now general manager and deputy chairman of the board of the Peace and Democracy Forum in East Jerusalem. “Be more courageous,” he said. “For the sake of America, for the sake of the world. For the sake of progress, he should move with more vigor.

“We don’t want them to rebuke Israel in front of us or the world,” he added. “We don’t want to humiliate Israel. But we want them to recognize that Israel must end the occupation.”

In Ramallah, the Palestinian co-chair of the Geneva Initiative, Nidal Fuqaha, told me that, given manifest dangers of a confrontation with Iran, Israel would be foolish indeed if it failed to avail itself of a Palestinian alliance.

And on the other side of town, a weary retired Israeli agronomist told me: “Obama should come to Jerusalem, speak to the Knesset, offer American security guarantees in exchange for a two-state solution. Change Israeli public opinion as Sadat did. Change the game.”
There are heaps of reasons for Obama to demur. He has, to put it mildly, his own political problems. He took a “shellacking” – to use his word – in the off-year elections. Talking over Netanyahu’s head to the Israeli public would make enemies in both the Republican and Democratic parties. But the Israeli government is locked into futility, and so are the Palestinians in their own way. In the warped politics of mutually assured pain, the only degrees of freedom, as statisticians say, are America’s. As a leader of Palestinians in Washington told me later, what Obama has to gain is nothing more or less than a historic achievement.

By ordinary calculations, the costs of an American initiative look more conspicuous than the benefits. On December 9, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to renew the status quo when she reiterated that “negotiations between the parties is the only path that will succeed in securing their respective aspirations,” while adding a diplomatic nudge: the U.S. “will push the parties to lay out their positions on the core issues… will work to narrow the gaps asking the tough questions and expecting substantive answers… will offer our own ideas and bridging proposals.” Hardly enough to jolt anyone out of stagnation.

“Negotiations between the parties” is a prescription for nothing. Obama needs to do more than take a hand. He needs to take command. He has a prize to win – retroactively.

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the co-author, most recently, of “The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election.”