KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — For an excellent and succinct exploration of how slim the hopes for a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians are in advance of the forthcoming direct negotiations, read this Ethan Bronner piece. I’m tempted to quote everything here, particularly about the mutual reinforcement between Abbas’ domestic weakness and Netanyahu’s disinterest. That should be the most salient warning sign: the domestic politics of both Israelis and Palestinians consider taking a deal to be a capitulation. Or, to put the happiest-possible face on a dismal situation, it would have to be some major, as-yet-unimagined deal that wouldn’t be considered humiliating.

But instead of quoting everything Bronner writes, let’s just consider this, from a different Times piece:

But American diplomats, their European counterparts and Mr. Obama made the case to Mr. Abbas to return to the negotiating table without conditions, administration officials and Arab diplomats said. American officials argued that they could do more to help the Palestinian cause through direct negotiations. By setting a one-year deadline for the negotiations, Mr. Obama, who met with Mr. Abbas at the White House in June, is implicitly giving the Palestinian leader the assurance that if the two sides cannot make progress soon, the United States will step in with its own proposal outlining what a peace deal should look like.

So doesn’t that create a disincentive for either side to negotiate seriously? If the expectation is that the U.S. will inevitably step in to bridge the gap in diplomatic positions, why would either side look to bridge those gaps on their own with anything but their maximal positions? I recognize that you can’t get the Palestinian Authority to the table without some kind of assurance. But how do the actual incentives align for the negotiations to result in two states?

The White House, according to Josh Rogin, offers one answer: the talks will weaken Hamas, which is in the presumed interests of both Netanyahu, Abbas and the Arab world. But that only works if Hamas is the rejectionist, positioned to spoil the aspirations of the long-suffering Palestinian people. And as it stands right now, both Netanyahu and Abbas have a disinterest in substantive negotiations; an incentive to be intransigent until the U.S. plays Deus Ex Machina; and no sense of how a U.S.-proposed/imposed deal is in their interest. So how will that marginalize Hamas?

There’s nothing wrong in principle with the U.S. actively offering proposals to bring the parties toward a deal. Indeed, there’s a lot right with that posture — again, in principle. It’s true that both parties have to live under a deal, but that can’t be an excuse for an inexhaustible conflict that threatens the interests of  people who don’t live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.  And I’ve written before that the stakes of peace-processing are too high for cynicism. We’re talking about millions of people’s lives. But that’s not to say we should have illusions about how extraordinarily difficult and freighted this emerging round of negotiations will be; or about how the incentive structures, as they currently stand, point away from peace.