In a few days Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be meeting President Obama in the White House. There is something imperial, almost Roman, about these occasions. The satrap of some distant province is coming to bend the knee in obeisance to the emperor wearing a laurel crown. Last time Netanyahu visited as prime minister, Bill Clinton was in the emperor’s role, and he let it be known that he greatly resented the visitor’s independence of mind. Wasn’t this arrogant fellow really just a petitioner, and didn’t the emperor have only to snap his fingers to have his way?

Nobody knows what is going on in the head under Obama’s laurel crown, but the vice-president and the national security advisor are among well-placed personalities to declare that the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock is about to be broken. They are going to put pressure on Israel to accept the famous two-state solution; peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians will follow once they live in states side by side. In the background, voices are prophesying that Israel will have similar negotiations with Syria, and that the United States and Iran are going to lie down together the way lions and lambs do, according to the psalmist in a rare liberal mode.

You hardly need to be a Middle East expert to realise that none of this is probable. Recent concessions by Israel — evacuating southern Lebanon or Gaza, for example — have merely opened new areas for terrorism against it. Like other Arab societies, the Palestinians are so irrevocably divided between secular nationalists and Islamists that they are in a state of latent civil war. Besides, both Palestinian parties are so richly subsidised by outsiders that neither truly wants a state and the demands of government that this would involve — better, easier, more continuously rewarding, to make nuisances of themselves and be paid for it. Syria makes the return of the Golan Heights a pre-condition of any talks. Iran has arrested, tried, and sentenced Roxana Saberi, only to release her, a cat-and-mouse game that allows the mullahs to conclude they can do whatever they like to anyone, and Obama is an imaginary emperor whose feet are clay.

The two-state solution is, anyhow, an anachronism. The failure of the Oslo accords and the character of Yasser Arafat killed the whole idea. The one conceivable move at present is to return to pre-1967 conditions, and for Egypt to have the Gaza Strip and Jordan the West Bank. The snags involved might be surmountable. But right on cue, here comes King Abdullah of Jordan to say at the top of his voice that Israel and the Palestinians must make peace immediately, and failure to do so means a war with a year or 18 months. No responsible leader should hold out such a threat — but let that pass, the king doesn’t really mean it. Palestinians already comprise three-quarters of his population, and he is fearful of acquiring the West Bank and a couple of million more. The threat of imminent war is a way of issuing a caution, “If the Israelis won’t have the Palestinians, I’m not having them either; get them off my back.” In other words, he’s anticipating that whatever Obama ordains won’t work out, and he’s not the only one to be doing so.