The Arabs are casting around for ways to get negotiations going again

“TRUST us,” say the Americans seeking an Israeli-Palestinian agreement leading to two states. But few people do. John Kerry, the American secretary of state, has little to show for shuttling around the region in five trips in the past three months. Deadlines for relaunching talks have come and gone.

Israelis, in particular, feel they have little reason to move. Things are pretty calm at home. Political violence by Palestinians is rare. By contrast, the Arab world is in turmoil. Mr Kerry’s visits hardly get mentioned in the Israeli news.

Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is more sensitive to noises on his boisterous right flank than to those on the doveish left. He remembers that Jewish settlers on the West Bank, abetted by religious nationalists, brought an end in 1999 to his first stint as prime minister, after he had sought to mollify America by withdrawing settlers from bits of the Palestinian territories. Now the settlers there are even stronger. Their firebrands are winning plum jobs in Mr Netanyahu’s party.

In response to Mr Kerry’s suggestions for getting talks started again, the Israelis have spent weeks arguing over how many dozen Palestinian prisoners to release among several thousand and in what stages. “These details are obscuring the bigger picture,” says a frustrated Palestinian negotiator.

When the Palestinians return to the UN in New York in September with a fresh bid to upgrade their status there, the Americans may hesitate before using their veto again; last time, embarrassingly, only eight countries joined them. And if talks continue to go nowhere the Europeans may be considering whether to stop paying for the Palestinian Authority (PA), which runs the West Bank under Israel’s eye, perhaps even causing it to collapse. A senior Palestinian official says he expects a third intifada (uprising) to break out in due course, possibly targeting the Palestinian leadership.

Some Arab officials still hope that Mr Netanyahu may yet keep the ball in play by promising in principle to withdraw from most of the West Bank occupied by Israel after the war of 1967. That might conceivably be enough to let Mahmoud Abbas, the PA’s president, return to the table. Mr Netanyahu has aired the prospect of a smaller “interim” Palestinian state. But Mr Abbas fears that, if he accepted that idea, it would allow Israel’s settlers to gobble up the rest for good.

If Mr Kerry gave up, would hopes for a two-state solution die? One regional idea has outlived all the others: the Arab Peace Initiative unveiled in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, in 2002. Since endorsed by 57 Muslim governments, including Iran’s, it offers to recognise Israel once it withdraws from the territory it captured in 1967 and deals with the plight of Palestinian refugees.

Israeli politicians across the political spectrum recently debated the Arab initiative in a side hall of their parliament. Nine Arab foreign ministers have publicly stated, in Mr Kerry’s presence, that they would go still further and accept modifications to Israel’s borders with land swaps, implicitly letting the bulk of the Jewish settlements, which are close to the old 1967 border, stay within an expanded Israel.

Questioning the Arab world’s long-standing policy of barring contact with Israel, an Arab dignitary recently suggested asking Mr Netanyahu to attend a secret Arab League meeting in Amman, capital of neighbouring Jordan. Another proposed a “roadshow” of Arabs and Israelis touring the region together. Others discuss how they might gradually normalise ties with Israel, as Israel normalises its own with the Palestinians. If the Israeli authorities would let Palestinian pilgrims have unfettered access to shrines in Jerusalem, Arab states could—it has been suggested—give Israelis equally unfettered access to Jewish shrines in the Arab world, such as that of the Prophet Ezekiel in Iraq, whence many Israelis stem.

“The Arab world has crossed the Rubicon, and moved from a platform of war to peace,” says a former senior Saudi official, who contemplates contacts with Israel. “But we’re waiting for Israel to respond.”