When US Secretary of State John Kerry announced last July that he would have a final status agreement in his pocket by April 29 it is a fair guess that he never imagined the administration of President Barack Obama would be faced with a cascading collapse of the key elements of its political and economic program. Yet, that is the sorry state of the diplomatic landscape today. Instead of an agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), there is the emerging prospect of Palestinian reconciliation — for years, the very last item on almost everyone’s to-do list. And rather than declare historic progress on the creation of two states, Kerry finds himself in the dock for using the A-word to describe Israel’s sorry future in the absence of such an agreement.

“A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative,” Kerry explained to a small audience of senior officials and experts from the United States, Western Europe, Russia and Japan, as reported by the Daily Beast. “Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens, or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state. Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution.”

Kerry did not need the frustrating experience of the past year to convince him of the imperative to reach an agreement on two states to forestall what has been a defining feature of Israel’s policy of occupation of the West Bank since its earliest days. Would that Kerry had begun his quest for an agreement last July not only with such a clear-minded objective but also with the intention to act as more than a vacillator in a process marked by debilitating suspicion and lack of good faith.

Setting out such a more aggressive, Clinton-parameters-type option before the Trilateral Commission, Kerry declared, “We have enough time to do any number of things, including the potential at some point in time that we will just put something out there: ‘Here it is, folks. This is what it looks like. Take it or leave it.’”