Israeli Vote Could Kill Peace Process Patient

She was mobbed by journalists but not by ordinary Israeli voters as she toured a Tel Aviv shopping mall canvassing.

On the eve of the country's general elections, Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli prime minister, told Sky News that Israel's left had failed to reach a coalition deal to see off the right because "there have been a lot of policy issues but I am campaigning for peace".

Rare is the politician who campaigns for the opposite. But today, January 22 2013, may be the election day when Israelis irrevocably kill the peace process with the Palestinians.

Let's face it. It has been in a coma for most of the last decade.

It briefly emerged from the darkness of the second intifada, which erupted 12 years ago, during the premiership of Ehud Olmert in 2007.

But a Palestinian refusal to accept then what many Israelis saw as dangerously generous terms offered by Mr Olmert, caused it to slump back into oblivion.

Tzipi Livni lamented the left's failure to reach a coalition deal

Its chances of revival now, according to William Hague, the British foreign minister, and many others both inside and outside Israel, are rapidly vanishing.

In Mr Hague's view, the Peace Process Patient has only a year to live.

Today though, Binyamin Netanyahu's coalition of Likud and Yisrael Beitenu (Israel is our Home) is expected to take around 35 of the 120 seats in the Knesset.

Aggressive horse-trading will follow the voting.

But a right wing block which will include a new party, Jewish Home lead by Naftali Bennett, is likely to be asked to form a government.

This will be an historic moment. It will be the moment when an Israeli government is formed that explicitly rules out negotiating a two-state solution.

It will be the moment when the Peace Process Patient is declared dead - or that further treatment is fruitless because it is in a persistently vegetative state.

Mr Bennett has made it clear in an interview with Sky at the Hebrew University which sits on the edge of the West Bank in Jerusalem that a two-state solution is off the cards.

"I think that a Palestinian state 200 metres from here within the Land of Israel - we're in Jerusalem right now, would spell eternal war, bloodshed and sorrow between us and our neighbours.

"We've tried it in Gaza and look what's happening we gave 100% of Gaza over to the Arabs and days after they stared shooting thousands of missiles at us."

He favours a deal in which Israel no longer occupies the Palestinians - they rule themselves, but have no open borders and Israeli maintains a security presence in the Palestinian state - in other words a continuation of the status quo but without the bother of actually running areas inhabited by Arabs on the West Bank.

This week Mr Netanyahu, who has said he would talk to the Palestinians if they drop their demands for an end to the building of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, announced that the "days of bulldozing Jewish areas are over" - meaning that he would never agree to a peace deal that would involve the dismantling of any settlement.

Any agreement with the Palestinians, including the Clinton proposals of a decade ago, would inevitably include the withdrawal of Jews from some settlements.

But Mr Bennett has said he would leave a government that agreed to any swap of territory in return for a long-term peace.

And Mr Netanyahu's government has announced the expansion of thousands of settlement dwellings into the West Bank in the first month of this year.

Israel has been steadily drifting into the hands of the hawks for more than a decade.

Naftali Bennett has taken an uncompromising approach to the peace process

Continued belief in a peace process with the Palestinians requires a subtle mind and an act of faith.

The subtlety is in understanding that, while it is true that diplomatic breakthroughs such as the Oslo Peace process in the 1990s, or the withdrawal of Jewish settlements in the last decade, were met with "Palestinian violence", the violence was not generated by all Palestinians.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad have a record of, literally, blowing up the road to peace with suicide bombs and missiles from Gaza.

But a majority of Palestinians want peace with Israel and are prepared to live alongside a Jewish State.

The need for Israeli "faith" derives from a gamble that if Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank then the Palestinians and their Arab allies won't use the newly-minted Palestine as a bridgehead to drive the Jews into the sea - a threat heard from Beirut through Baghdad to Tehran.

The last six heads of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal intelligence service responsible for spying on the Occupied Territories, interviewed in the Oscar nominated documentary 'The Gatekeepers' have subtle minds - and insist they have faith.

Every one of them said that Israel's future security depends on ending the occupation.

An opinion poll last December showed that 68% of Israelis still believe that a two state solution is desirable.

Yet this week it is likely that Israel will emerge from general elections with a far-right dominated government that will not engage with a two-state solution.

Gaza's missiles and the charisma of Mr Netanyahu and Mr Bennett have eclipsed the subtlety of the arguments of peace being advanced by the left - leaving the field open to the vocal minority on the settlements.

Many Israelis have simply lost their faith in peace and now want to hide under an Iron Dome.

As the bulldozers advance across Palestinian lands, chewing into ancient olive groves and farms, Palestinians see their land being eaten up by Israel and abandon hope.

This is a victory for Hamas which remains committed to destroying the "Zionist Entity".

"I think it's a disaster, it's a disaster from all aspects that you can imagine," says Yaacov Peri, a centre left candidate with the Yesh Atid party. He should know, he used to run the Shin Bet.

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