No battle took place, and the two states compromised on the border issue.
Everyone knows, more or less, what the terms for a two-state compromise are.
Israelis fear that Palestinians now really want not a two-state compromise but the elimination of Israel.
Then came the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel, the collapse and scattering of Palestinian society, the frustrating search for a two-state compromise.
Even the most optimistic and dovish Israelis began to think that Arafat was interested not in a two-state compromise but, rather, in a condition of permanent conflict.
In the nineteen-nineties, Barghouti was a favored interlocutor of the Israeli left, a stalwart advocate of a two-state compromise, but in the first two years of the second Palestinian intifada both his rhetoric and his actions became extreme.
In fact, when you go back and look at what Ehud Olmert, Netanyahu's predecessor, offered Abbas — a real two-state compromise, including a deal on Jerusalem — and you think that Abbas spurned that offer, and you think that Netanyahu already gave Abbas a 10-month settlement freeze and Abbas only entered serious talks in the ninth month, you have to wonder how committed he is.
Late on Sunday, April 27, the Daily Beast's Josh Rogin reported that Kerry warned of the possibility that Israel could revert to an "apartheid state" if its leadership proved unable or unwilling to sign onto a two-state compromise.
In the view of the Southern states, the Compromise of 1850 had already annulled the Missouri Compromise by admitting the state of California, including territory south of the compromise line, as a free state.
The United States, the United Nations and the African Union will have to remain deeply engaged, prodding both states to compromise on these difficult issues.
On his grave in Itteringham, Norfolk, a stone book - erected by a young bank robber whom Barker had befriended - states: "No Compromise".
