Read more: Abbas: No peace without defining borders | The Times of Israel 

This is a fair point. It does help to know where one country officially ends and another begins. And agreed borders here would remove a lot of the doubts and uncertainties that have dogged every discussion that has tried to deal with these matters. If limits and perimeters can be agreed and legitimately fixed as viable contours of the lands in question, then this would be the first and the most critically important step on the road towards mutual peace and prosperity between Israelis and Palestinians.

But, as we all know, such things are far easier said than done. Past and present conditions have conspired to defeat even the remotest prospect of an outcome along these lines.

Therefore, it can only be by radically changing prevailing conditions that a means of overcoming the problem may ever be found. At the moment, too many factors and factions prevent settlement of the matter in any manner even marginally acceptable to either side.

Then let us bypass whatever ponderously slow methods have previously been used in determining the rights and wrongs of the situation. We must elect to force the issue with a more direct approach, one with a much shorter timescale and an urgency befitting the need for its rapid deployment.

www.laxiankey.com – ‘ for those of us with better things to do.’

This could be the key that opens the door to a peace agreement better by far than any other in the entire history of the human race. And that, for reasons yet to be revealed, is the greatest understatement of all time.