LONDON — Peace talks, it seems, are set to resume between Israelis and Palestinians after six visits to the region by Secretary of State John Kerry.

The heart sinks.

Israel and Palestine need a two-state peace. It would involve bitter compromises on both sides, but no more bitter than those accepted by Nelson Mandela in putting the future before the past, hope before grievance.

Without a two-state peace, Israel cannot remain a Jewish and democratic state because over time there will be more Arabs than Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged this in stating that avoidance of a “bi-national state” was one of his objectives.

Without it, Palestinians will face enduring humiliation, the pride of statehood sacrificed to the false consolations of victimhood. They will live under Israeli dominion, marginalized economically and condemned to the steady erosion of dignity and territory that has been their lot since 1948. A new spasm of fruitless violence, perhaps even a third intifada, is possible.

So the talks are critical. Yet the heart sinks.

Netanyahu speaks now of avoiding the bi-national state. Yet his Likud Party has been (and remains) a forthright proponent of just such a policy. After the lightning Israeli victory in the Six-Day war of 1967, Messianic Jewish thinking surged. If Israel now held all Jerusalem and the West Bank, how, in the minds of religious nationalists, could this recovery of Eretz Israel — a biblical term widely used to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River — not reflect divine will?It is this conviction that lies behind the steady expansion of settlements in the West Bank, where some 350,000 Jews now live, with another 250,000 in annexed East Jerusalem. Nothing as yet suggests Israel is ready to abandon the maximalist territorial temptation of the past 46 years.

And so the heart sinks.

Palestinians speak of the 1967 lines as a basis for negotiation, an idea President Obama once endorsed. Yet many continue to see the conflict not as the battle of two national movements for the same land — one resolved by the United Nations in 1947 in favor of two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian, in the Holy Land — but as a fight against a colonial intruder who must be banished.

For these Palestinians, represented in Hamas and elsewhere, Zionism equals colonialism and imperialism, rather than the legitimate struggle of a persecuted Jewish people for a homeland. It must be extirpated, like the French from Algeria.

Coupled with this view is the tenacious Palestinian attachment to the so-called right of return. Well, ask the Jews of Baghdad and Cairo, the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Turks of Greece and the ethnic Germans of Poland and Hungary about this “right.” As the Israeli novelist Amos Oz once told me, “The right of return is a euphemism for the liquidation of Israel. If exercised there will be two Palestinian states and not one for Jews.”Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister born into a German family from Hungary, once noted that if the 15 million displaced ethnic Germans of Europe demanded the right of return there would be no peace in the continent.

Yes, the heart sinks because acceptance on both sides of the ever more invisible “other” is still so stunted and attachment to the idea of holding or recovering all the land still so tenacious. It is 66 years since the United Nations mandated the division of the land into two states.

Israel has fallen since 1967 into a terrible temptation. No democracy can be immune to running an undemocratic system of oppression in territory under its control. To have citizens on one side of an invisible line, and disenfranchised subjects without rights on the other, does not work. A democratic state needs borders. It cannot morph into repressive military rule for Palestinians in occupied areas while allowing state-subsidized settler Jews there to vote.

Gershom Gorenberg puts the post-1967 issue with great clarity in his fine book, “The Unmaking of Israel”: “If Israel really believed that the territorial division created by the 1949 armistice was null and void, it could have asserted its sovereignty in all of former Palestine — and granted the vote and other democratic rights to all inhabitants.”It chose not to. The reason was evident: The size of the Palestinian population — 1.1 million in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in 1967, 4.4 million today — would have meant the end of the Jewish state. And so, “Israel behaved as if the territories were part of Israel for the purpose of settlement, and under military occupation for the purpose of ruling the Palestinians.”Peace talks offer a way out of this corrosive Israeli dilemma, back to the Zionist dream. They offer a way out of Palestinian delusion and denial to statehood.

The heart sinks. Yet I cannot help hearing Mandela from his hospital bed: Prove me wrong, you cowards, decide at last if winning an argument is worth more than a child’s life.