''Anyone who says that within the next few years an agreement can be reached ending the conflict (between Israel and the Palestinians) simply doesn't understand the situation and spreads delusions," Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said last week.
But United States President Barack Obama does say that. In fact, they gave him the Nobel Prize for saying it, didn't they?
Mr Lieberman added: "We have to be realistic. We will not be able to reach agreement on core and emotional subjects like Jerusalem and the right of return of Palestinian refugees."
He said all this just as George Mitchell - Mr Obama's point man for what we used to call the "peace process" - arrived in Israel. Undaunted, Mr Mitchell gabbled about how "we're going to continue our efforts to achieve an early relaunch of negotiations ... because we believe that is an essential step towards achieving a comprehensive peace."
Doesn't he understand the "peace process" is no more? It has expired. It is an ex-peace process.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) under Mahmoud Abbas also pretends the peace process is still alive. It has to go on pretending, because if the PA admits the peace process is dead, it becomes no more than an Israeli instrument for indirect control of the Palestinians.
This was vividly demonstrated when Judge Richard Goldstone submitted his report on last winter's war in the Gaza Strip to the UN Human Rights Council. The document said both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants had committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, and a resolution was put before the council that could have led to prosecutions.
Israel, together with the US, mounted a diplomatic campaign to postpone any formal consideration of Mr Goldstone's report until next March. By then, it would be old news. Here's the bizarre part: the PA supported delaying the vote by six months.
Unsurprisingly, the PA's public display of subjugation to US and Israeli policy caused outcry among Palestinians.
The truth is the PA is just as complicit in the charade of a continuing peace process as the Israeli or US governments.
Only the radical Islamists of Hamas, from their besieged enclave in the Gaza Strip, openly acknowledge the same reality that Mr Lieberman describes: the "two-state solution" on which the peace process was built is all but dead. What they offer Israel, at best, is a long-term truce - but only if the Palestinians get their pre-1967 borders back now.
A long-term truce is all that Mr Lieberman is offering, too - and yet he has no intention of returning to Israel's pre-1967 borders. Neither does Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Mr Obama's pleas have failed to extract from Mr Netanyahu even a promise to freeze the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, let alone a withdrawal from them.
He has not moved from pleas to actual pressure because the Israelis effectively control the US Congress on the issue, and he will not risk alienating Congress over Israel while trying to legislate urgent issues such as health care. He can't even order Israel not to attack Iran. They will if they want to.
Still, there's no doubt Mr Obama's intentions are good. So are mine. Where's my prize?
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist whose work is published in more than 45 countries.
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