Tracing back the cycle of blame and futility? Nothing could be simpler. One might start with Israel's decision to "eliminate" Mahmoud Abu Hunud last month, on the eve of the arrival in the region of Anthony Zinni, the Americans' last-hope would-be peacebroker.
Or go back one phase further, and ask why the Palestinian Authority President, Yasser Arafat, hadn't pre-empted that killing by arresting Hunud himself. Mr Arafat, after all, was purportedly committed to fighting terrorism. And no one disputes that Hunud was directly responsible for a series of attacks inside Israel, was planning more, and that if the Israelis could lay their hands on him, so too, had they wanted to, could the Palestinian security forces.
One could take a larger step back, to the start of this intifada/war, and pin the blame on Mr Arafat for failing to swiftly intervene in September-October of 2000, when the first violence flared, or on the Israeli police for reacting so violently to the rioting by Palestinians on the Temple Mount on September 29th, or on the then Israeli opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, for his incendiary visit to the site the day before, or on the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, for sanctioning the Sharon walkabout, or on Mr Arafat and his media chiefs for so stirring up Palestinian public opinion against the visit ...
Go back as far as you wish. The cycle of blame and recrimination and missed opportunity rolls back with you down the decades. But try to look ahead, to find realistic components of a path out of this conflict, and the picture clouds. With all that vicious historical baggage, reinforced by the extraordinary enmity wrought by 1,000 new deaths over the past 15 months, those who see any hope for the year 2002 are in short supply. In fact, only the ill-informed and the foolish are optimistic.
What is perhaps most shattering is the speed and sheer pervasiveness with which the prospects of a genuine peace accord have been dashed. And nowhere more so than in the Israeli "peace camp". It was only two and a half years ago that this "camp" actually constituted a majority. The Israeli electorate, by a 12 per cent majority, booted out prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu not because the country felt unsafe - quite the reverse: there were only a handful of self-detonating human Hamas bombs in the three years he held power - but because it worried that the prime minister was making no serious effort to reach a permanent accommodation with Mr Arafat.
In swept Mr Barak, empowered by his populace to relinquish almost all of the occupied territory - and challenging his electorate's will to compromise by offering to share Jerusalem as well.
The Palestinians dispute Mr Barak's account of what happened at the Camp David summit of July 2000, but most Israelis accept it: that he and Mr Arafat essentially resolved the territorial aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, but that the talks failed because the Palestinians sought to sever all Israeli ties to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif - the holiest site in Judaism, and the third-holiest in Islam - and because Mr Arafat insisted, at least in principle, on a "right of return" to sovereign Israel of a potential 3.7 million Palestinian refugees, an influx that would destroy the Jewish majority in the Jewish state.
So widespread is the sense in Israel that Mr Barak offered not merely the most generous peace terms ever, but everything short of national suicide, that the peace camp that brought him to power no longer exists for any practical purposes. Many of those who voted for Mr Barak in 1999 insist that they are as ready for compromise as they ever were. That they are prepared to withdraw from the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, dismantle all the settlements, share sovereignty with the Palestinians in Jerusalem, find a gracious middle ground to resolve the status of the Temple Mount and devise a mechanism for refugee-return and compensation that at least partially satisfies the Palestinians without overwhelming the Jewish state.
But that, they say, is pretty much what Mr Barak suggested at Camp David, and he was rebuffed. If new Palestinian leaders emerge who genuinely want reasonable compromise, Israel's disillusioned moderates say they will regroup to meet them half-way. But where, they ask, apart from the isolated calls for common sense by the likes of the unworldly new Jerusalem PLO point man, Sari Nusseibeh, are those Palestinian moderates?
How marginalised are those Israeli Jews who believe it was their own government that missed the boat at Camp David? Entirely so. The Peace Now group is so broken it can hardly raise the funds to advertise its cause in the Israeli media, so broken that its demonstrations, which drew hundreds of thousands to oppose Mr Sharon's previous effort to impose a more convenient leadership on an Arab neighbour during the 1982 Lebanon war, now attract just a few dozen hard core activists on the rare occasions when they bother to demonstrate at all.
Yossi Beilin, the former justice minister and final impassioned defender of the Oslo peace process, no longer sits in the Knesset. Avraham Burg, a former key Peace Now activist, current Knesset Speaker and would-be leader of the Labour Party, has reached such eminence only after making clear his dismay with Mr Arafat. Another former Peace Now campaigner sits in the House as well: but Yuval Steinitz long ago switched sides to Mr Sharon's Likud benches, from where he disseminates scepticism not only about the prospects of peacemaking with the Palestinians but about the long-term viability of the existing Israeli accord with Egypt as well.
Labour has tried to move into the political centre, to no avail. It will be decimated the next time this country holds general elections - polls show the discredited "party of the Oslo accords" declining from 26 seats in 1999 to 18 or fewer in the 120-member parliament, with Mr Sharon's Likud picking up the electoral profits. Yossi Sarid's left-wing Meretz is holding its own with the 10 per cent of the public who voted for it last time. But even Mr Sarid, the arch-dove, says little in defence of Mr Arafat now; he challenges the pragmatism and morality of Mr Sharon's bulldozer and fighter-plane treatment of the Palestinian Authority, but not the fundamental assumption of Mr Arafat's primary culpability in the descent into violence.
And Shimon Peres? The man who shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr Arafat and the soon to be assassinated Yitzhak Rabin led a cabinet walkout of his Labour colleagues on December 2nd, when other ministers in the "unity government" voted to designate Mr Arafat's Authority "an entity that supports terrorism".
But a week later, that same cabinet authorised a statement that effectively severed Israel's ties with the Authority and branded Mr Arafat "irrelevant" to Israel - for what it deemed his failure to smash Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and to rein in those among his own loyalists who have taken to shooting Jewish settlers on the roads of the West Bank and occasionally partnering the Islamic fundamentalists in their suicide attacks. And this time Mr Peres staged no walkout - only subsequently protesting the illogic under which "Hamas attacks Israel, and Israel attacks Arafat".
Israel at the turn of this year then is a country certain it is far more sinned against than sinning, a country convinced of its own true desire to make peace and the absence of an equivalent desire on the other side and a country whose current and previous prime minister have persuaded it that the blame for the current confrontation lies almost exclusively with Yasser Arafat.
The bumper stickers on Israeli cars this new year have long since stopped eulogising Mr Rabin with the once widespread "Friend, we miss you" message. Mr Rabin is a symbol of conciliation in age where conciliation is deemed to have failed. The stickers don't even carry the old right-wing complaint that "Oslo is a nightmare" or warn desperately that "Judea and Samaria are here" - a slogan, coined by the once defensive settlers and their supporters, designed to intimate that, in giving up the West Bank, Israel would merely be inviting violence into its sovereign territory.
No, one of the two stickers most popular these days flatly declaims that "No Arabs Equals No Terrorism". And the other? That demands: "Put the Oslo Criminals on Trial".