For those of us fortunate enough to not personally know a victim of the latest terrorist atrocity in Israel, it is hard to imagine anything more that could further increase pessimism about an eventual settlement.
As usual, the Palestinians are up to the task.
Via Tal G., I saw this article in Ha-aretz about Mohammed Dahla, founder of the Palestinian legal advocacy group Adalah. Dedicated to advancing the cause of the Palestinians through legal means, Dahla would seem emblematic of the segment of the Palestinian population most likely to work for peace with Israel.
Until you see what his idea of "peace" is based on:

In the meantime, it's metropolitan Tel Aviv. Gedera to Hadera. And Mohammed Dahla, my friend and my rival, says to me: Look at this architecture - it's so foreign, so alien to the place. It's as though some kind of invasion force emerged from the sea and landed on the beach. Without any sensitivity, without any connection to the land. As though the immigrants who arrived don't feel the land and its past. And you build with dizzying speed. You build arrogantly and high, and glued - absolutely glued - to the earth.
Look at the road signs, Dahla says. Most of them are in Hebrew and English, without Arabic. Because what you want, after all, is for a tourist from the moon to be able to come and wander around the country and believe that it really is a Jewish country. That there really is a Jewish state here. But I'm in your way. I and a million other Arabs are in your way. That's why it's so complicated for you with us. And in order to be able to continue with this adorable fiction of a Jewish-European state, you are trying to hide our existence. To erase our geography, our history, our identity. Now you are even trying to erase our parliamentary representation.
Does the idea of a Jewish state truly lack all justification? Don't the Jews have the right to self-determination within the boundaries of June 4, 1967? Mohammed says that the Jewish public now living in the country has the right to self-determination. But one can understand why the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan in 1947. And one must understand that there is no balance of rights here. There is no balance of our right v. your right. And that is because at the point of departure, the young lawyer Dahla says, the Jews had neither legal right, nor historical right, nor religious right. The only right they had was the right of distress. But the right of distress cannot justify 78 percent [of Mandatory Palestine becoming Israel]. It cannot justify the fact that the guests became the masters.
At the end of the day, it is the natives, not the immigrants, who have a supreme right to the country. Those who have lived here for hundreds of years have become part of the land, just as the land has become part of them. We are not like you. We are not strangers and we are not wanderers and we are not migrants. For hundreds of years, we lived on this land and we multiplied on it. Therefore, no one can uproot us from it. No one can separate it from us. Not even you.

In case his view of the Jewish presence in the land isn't clear, here's the kicker:

Then he tells me about his breaking point. It was during one the talks with Beilin, in Oslo, when they requested that the compensation that Israel would give the Palestinian state serve it in the same way that the German reparations to Israel served it. That was all they asked. It was a kind of gentle hint, not quarrelsome. But, nevertheless, Yossi Beilin's Israelis went wild. Because of that sentence the talks broke down. They returned empty-handed. Without even the shadow of historical justice.

This is further proof that David Brooks was right when he identified the driving factor behind the current war:

The Palestinians know that they cannot threaten the existence of Israel in a material sense. Israel's GDP per capita is over ten times that of its Arab neighbors, and its military might is unquestioned. But the Palestinians can hope to undermine the moral legitimacy of the Jewish state. More than anything, it now seems, this is what they want: for the Israelis to capitulate intellectually and morally; for the Israelis to admit that their state was founded on a crime; for them to apologize for what their existence has done to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians will not, it now appears, stop fighting until the Israelis acknowledge the justice of the Palestinian cause and absolve the Palestinians of all guilt for the terrorism perpetrated in their name. They're like a man in a bitter feud whose enemy's opinion begins to matter more to him than anything else: He craves his enemy's admission of guilt. To secure this, the Palestinians are willing to endure another century of refugee camps, road closures, violence, and conflict.
In other words, the Middle East conflict has been polarized and simplified. The whole dispute hangs on a simple question: Is Israel a criminal state? Arab populations have swung behind the idea that it is, and the Jewish population has swung behind the idea that it isn't. Not since 1948 has the issue been so stark and each side so unified. There is simply no middle position on this central question, and so all those who were trying to span the divide between the two peoples—the businessmen who want to trade with the other side, as well as the peace activists who want to build bridges—have found that the ground has vanished from under their feet.

And if the Israelis so capitulate, they will be helpless to resist Palestinian demands for the "right of return," autonomy for the Galilee and all the other items enumerated in the Ha-aretz piece that would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. In Dahla's view, this is the goal of any peace agreement.
And Dahla's demographic is that of the educated elite, in whom the Israeli peace camp placed such high hopes during the Oslo period. Reassuring, isn't it? If you want to know why Ariel Sharon is almost guaranteed to win re-election this month, look no further.
P.S. I suspect that Dahla might be the "Palestinian peace activist" featured in this Hirsh Goodman column which I blogged a while ago.