Israel's slide into reactionary politics spells the end of Oslo

Like the Norwegian Blue parrot in the legendary Monty Python skit, the Oslo peace process is not resting, tired out after a long squawk; the peace process, as we've come to know it, is dead. It has ceased to be. The question facing all sides of the Middle East equation now is what will replace it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent speech in Washington made clear that he simply has no intention of yielding voluntarily to Palestinian statehood based on the terms of the international consensus. And the speech's rapturous reception, both on Capitol Hill and back home in Israel, makes clear that Mr Netanyahu speaks for a sustainable consensus within Israel and within its most important foreign backer.

Like Mr Netanyahu himself, a majority of Israelis say they support a two-state solution - but when it comes to defining what that means, they support Mr Netanyahu's position that it's unthinkable for Israel to cede control of much of the territory it currently occupies outside of its 1967 borders.

There's nothing new about Mr Netanyahu rejecting the international consensus on a two-state solution: the prime minister built his political career out of fighting against Oslo, and regained the leadership of the Likud Party by opposing then prime minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza. What's changed, notes the former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, is that the Israeli mainstream has moved closer to Netanyahu's position.

Levy, writing in Foreign Affairs, notes that the party of Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo process has been marginalised in Israeli politics. "The rump Zionist left-of-centre in Israel's Knesset has shrivelled from 43 members in 1996 to just 11 today," he notes. The two largest political parties besides Likud - Tzipi Livni's Kadima and Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu - are both spin-offs of Likud.

Levy notes also that the social profile of Israeli society has changed profoundly over the past 20 years, with the rising influence of right-wing religious nationalists and Russian elements making the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin but a memory.

The ultra-Orthodox population has grown from 3 per cent to 10 per cent of Israeli society, and is the fastest growing Jewish population. Already close to one in three Israeli children is enrolled in the separate school systems run by the religious Shas party - the madrasas of religious nationalism in Israel. And, of course, a further 20 per cent of Israeli Jews are Russian immigrants who arrived after the Soviet collapse, and who largely back the parties of the authoritarian anti-Arab right.

Mr Netanyahu, in his speech to Congress, put the number of settlers currently living on territory occupied by Israel in 1967 at 650,000 - that's more than double the settler population in 1996. The settlers have become a powerful political bloc in the government, and an even more significant influence in the military, where they often form the committed core of combat units. It's unlikely that any Israeli government will test the loyalty of this force by ordering them to forcibly evacuate settlements on any mass scale.

Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, two veterans of the Oslo process and among its most astute observers, wrote in January: "Almost two decades after the peace process was launched, little remains of the foundational principle that each side has something of value to which the other aspires and thus something it can offer in exchange for what it wants." While it continues to occupy Palestinian land and control Palestinian lives, there's little downside for the Israelis in a status quo that "although not as satisfactory as Israelis would like ... is not as unpleasant as their adversaries would wish".

The Palestinian leadership had hoped that the US would press Israel to accept a just solution to the conflict, but the spectacle of Mr Netanyahu rebuking Mr Obama before his own legislature and being cheered for it demonstrated just how decisively Israel has won the battle for America's monogamous affection.

President Mahmoud Abbas has been forced, by two decades of disappointment and by mounting pressure from below, to break with Washington and pursue an independent path, which - whatever his intentions - will inaugurate a new chapter in Palestinian history whose outlines, cast of characters and outcome have not yet been written.

It's unlikely that the ageing and despondent Mr Abbas will be at the helm when the new chapter concludes. It promises to be a long one, after all, and of necessity goes beyond Mr Abbas's comfort zone of negotiations.

Palestinian politics today runs the gamut from salafist jihadis to activists waging unarmed mass struggle in a spirit similar to the Arab Spring; from competing currents within Hamas to technocrats running the machinery of the Palestinian Authority.

While the UN bid for recognition of statehood may be the centrepiece of the break with Washington, it will, of necessity, force Palestinian leaders to answer strategic questions on how they will proceed if thwarted, or affirmed, at the UN. How would they muster the leverage to persuade Israel to end its occupation? Will a new state supplant the PLO as the authority that speaks for Palestinians, and if so, how would it represent the refugees living outside its territory? How would it prevent terror attacks on a neighbouring UN member state? The list is long and complicated.

But the fact that these questions are even on the table indicates the profound change under way in the Israeli-Palestinian equation. For the first time in more than a decade, Palestinian politics has become unpredictable, entering a moment replete with perils - and with possibilities. Don't expect the region's most intractable conflict to be resolved any time soon. But it would be unwise also to expect that when the conflict is resolved, it will be on the basis of a script written two decades ago.

Tony Karon is an analyst based in New York. Follow him on Twitter @TonyKaron