Some say the upcoming elections are mainly a lifeline to save Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from criminal conviction. Others believe that on April 9, Israel’s citizens will choose between perpetuating the rule of a right-wing, clerical government and supplanting it with a centrist, liberal one. President Donald Trump’s much-touted “ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians, which was supposed to prioritize resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, will instead merit a footnote in the annals of the 2019 election campaign, at most. Jewish politicians who roll around the word “peace” on their tongue, or mutter the letters o-c-c-u-p-a-t-i-o-n, are considered weird, at best, and dyed-in-the-wool leftists, at worst.

Internal Palestinian struggles are also contributing their share to the growing doubt by Israelis and Palestinians of the two-state blueprint. Calls for a unilateral annexation of the West Bank by the Israeli side and for a one-state solution between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River on the Palestinian side are filling the diplomatic vacuum. The result is identical: death, violence, suffering, theft and despair. But contrary to prevailing public and political discourse, such a fate is not predestined. There is a way out of it.

Indeed, the prospects of the next government, whatever its makeup, vaulting over all the obstacles and reaching the finish line of negotiations with the Palestinians are about as likely as leftist Meretz Party leader Tamar Zandberg replacing Netanyahu in the Prime Minister’s Office — in other words, slim to nil. A decade of rule by the settlers and their political representatives, led by Netanyahu, has deepened Palestinian mistrust of the diplomatic option. That is understandable. The most significant change in half a century of Israeli occupation, affected by the 1993 Oslo Accord and thousands of hours of negotiations in the ensuing quarter of a century, is the addition of over 300,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

And so, the only way to convince the Palestinians and the rest of the world that the two-state solution is a viable option is to change the facts on the ground. Seeing a handful of thugs evacuated from their outlawed hilltop outposts on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank is far better than listening to numerous news reports of a “breakthrough” in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.