Much comment in recent days has assumed that real progress was possible in what is called the Middle East peace process if the old bear had survived in power. This view seems ill-founded. Sharon was able to lead Israel out of Gaza because only a small minority of Jewish settlers valued anything that was there. He had no intention of allowing any dispensation on the West Bank that might enable the Palestinians to create an economically and socially viable state.

Sharon wants peace but is also committed to ensuring that Israel’s permanent borders are a substantial improvement on those of 1948. The persistence of Israel’s ambitions on the West Bank represents an absolute barrier to any meaningful accord, whoever leads the government. Yet Israeli hawks say: “What is sacrosanct about the 1948 map? Those borders merely reflected the ground we held when fighting stopped, after the Arab states tried to crush Israel at birth. Why should we be different?’’ It is true that many frontiers are contested. Nations jostle for each other’s land. We might fare better in assessing the Israel-Palestine conflict if we viewed it in the context of other such disputes.

The confrontation between India and Pakistan about Kashmir is the most dangerous example, because it is capable of precipitating a nuclear showdown. Only this month, Russia highlighted its eagerness to regain hegemony over Ukraine. China’s obsession with recovering Taiwan is the greatest threat to peace in Asia. In Indonesia a significant number would prefer to shed their allegiance to Jakarta. Tokyo still seethes about Soviet possession of the Kurile Islands, its so-called Northern Territories, seized in 1945.

South American states succumb to outbreaks of border conflict. The future of Quebec within Canada remains as bitterly disputed today as for the past two and a half centuries. We have the Balkan ferment and a Cypriot partition imposed by the Turkish army. The Gibraltar issue poisons British relations with Spain. Many Germans and Poles remain resentful about the redrawing of their borders by the victors in 1945.

Few citizens of the UK would have deemed it possible 40 years ago that we would play host to a long and bloody border dispute through the last third of the 20th century. Even if few Irish people were minded to resort to arms, the vast majority have always resented the 1921 settlement, which granted the south independence at the price of partitioning Ireland to accommodate the wishes of a million northern Protestants. It is likely that, before we are all dead, we shall see a significant shrinkage of the borders of the UK to accommodate the reunification of Ireland. It is likewise not impossible that, within the next half-century, Scotland will opt for independence. I am reflecting on the fact that the frontiers of even long-established states can alter significantly with circumstances.

Unsurprisingly, though many powers have retreated from overseas empires, none has surrendered land close to home except in the face of overwhelming political, economic or military force majeure. A common denominator in almost all border disputes is that rival governments assert their determination never to cede “sovereign territory’’. It surely makes more sense to consider the Middle East conflict against this background, of widespread impatience with inconvenient frontiers, than to perceive the predicament of Israelis and Palestinians as unique. It seems hardly surprising that some Israelis want to assert what they perceive as historic territorial claims in Judea and Samaria, when so many other peoples are doing the same sort of thing in other places.

Most nations with territorial demands are reaching out to minorities from which they have become separated. Israel, by contrast, is seeking to colonise land currently inhabited either by Palestinians or by no one at all, like parts of the Jordan valley. The key question in seeking to resolve a border dispute should always be: what outcome is most likely to lead to future tranquillity? It seems almost lunatic for Israel to seek to live as a neighbour with a Palestinian community dominated by Israeli strategic roads, fortified settlements and a vast wall. The only plausible outcome is a chronically embittered society, which continues to behave with violent irresponsibility because it perceives no incentive to do otherwise.

It is said that only Israelis and Palestinians can resolve their differences, that even the US has no real power of mediation. Yet the history of territorial disputes suggests that resolutions are seldom achieved by rational bilateral negotiation. Yet the arrogance of military supremacy has caused Israel’s ambitions to overreach themselves. The Israelis will remain insufficiently despairing to make indispensable territorial concessions. The Americans will not oblige them to do so. The Palestinians will remain unable to muster a credible negotiating position. Sharon’s departure will not alter these fundamentals. — The Guardian