Ehud Olmert’s “convergence plan” will be meeting, it seems, with a more lukewarm reception in Washington this week than awaits Mr. Olmert himself. This is understandable. The Bush administration has enough problems right now without publicly taking up the cudgels for an Israeli plan that the Arab world is against, that Europe is against, and that even Mr. Bush’s own “road map” is against. (To say nothing of that great Middle-Eastern pundit and peacemaker Jimmy Carter, who the other day called the plan an “illegal action” and a “confiscation” of Palestinian land.)

No one therefore expects President Bush or his top aides to beat the drums for “convergence” right now. The question is not how loudly they will praise it but how much quiet support they will give it. And such support is crucial. Without it, there will be no unilateral Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank, and without such a withdrawal there will be not (as the cynical rulers of the Arab world and the hypocritical diplomats of Europe pretend to believe, and the eternally innocent 39th president of the United States really does believe) a negotiated peace settlement between Israel and a Palestinian state, but rather more decades of bloodshed and tragedy between the two peoples.

In the world of international diplomacy no one ever calls a spade a spade, but one has to assume that all but the more addled souls in places like the CIA and the State Department know the truth just as well as it is known on Downing Street and the Quai d’Orsay: Hamas or no Hamas, Israeli good will or no Israeli good will, there is not the slightest prospect of a durable Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement being signed in the foreseeable future – not this year, not next year, and not ten or twenty years down the road. The idea of it is a pure fantasy on which it can only be ruinous to try building.

Surely, the hope or expectation, widely expressed in Europe, that Israel will sit down and negotiate with Abu-Mazen while Hamas heads a Palestinian Authority in which anarchy and chaos rule is ludicrous. One might as well negotiate with the man in the moon. Abu-Mazen has about as much power. He is currently fighting for and losing his political life to extremist forces that will accept nothing less in the long run than the destruction of Israel, and nothing less in the short run than an Israeli retreat to the 1967 borders and their opening to the families of the 1948 refugees. How can such a man make even the minimal compromises, such as surrendering the refugees “right of return,” that would be needed to entice any Israeli government to come to terms with him?

And yet suppose that the improbable were to happen and that such an agreement were to be reached. It would be worth less than nothing. How could it possibly be enforced with a Hamas government that opposes it in power? Even if it did not lead to Abu-Mazen’s assassination, it would only strip him of what influence he has left within his own camp and lead to his further isolation.

Still, as long as we are supposing the improbable, let us go ahead and suppose even more of it. Suppose that the American and European boycott of Hamas holds up and that Hamas, lacking the wherewithal to sustain a functioning government and economy, is swept out of power by elections or a violent uprising and Abu-Mazen and his supporters are swept back in. Couldn’t a peace settlement be achieved then?

This, indeed, would appear to be the current U.S. game plan. Unfortunately, even if Hamas were to be ousted, a peace settlement would be as far away as ever.

Such a settlement, after all, would demand greater Israeli concessions than were made by Ehud Barak in the failed negotiations at Camp David and Taba in order to get the “moderates” on the Palestinian side to accept it. Yet what safe concessions could Israel make to a Palestinian government that presided over a people, perennially wracked by internal discord and lawlessness, that had recently elected a radical Islamic party allied with Iran and Hizbullah? What guarantee would Israel have that this people would not one day elect the same party or another like it again – which, with Palestine now sitting on the 1967 borders, would then proceed to renounce the peace that had been signed?

The answer is: None at all. And this being the case, Israel could not make such concessions. And this being the case, any agreement, even between the most dovish Israeli government and the most moderate, post-Hamas Palestinian Authority, is a pure pipe-dream.

And at the same time, Israel, having unilaterally evacuated one hundred percent of the Gaza Strip last summer, is now proposing to evacuate unilaterally an additional 85 or 90 percent of the West Bank, and to give the Palestinians living there their freedom. All it is asking in return is for the United States to promise that the borders it withdraws to, pending a final status agreement, will be considered its legitimate frontiers and that there will be no pressure on it to withdraw further.

The cynical rulers of the Arab world are against this because they would rather see the Israelis and the Palestinians go on bleeding than disengaged from each other on terms advantageous to Israel. The hypocritical diplomats of Europe are against it because they would prefer to pay lip service to an abstract ideal of international conduct that flatters their own sense of high-mindedness while real people continue to die and suffer. But why on earth should the United States be against it? This is something that Ehud Olmert will be asking George W. Bush in Washington this week.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.