FEW believed that John Kerry, the American secretary of state, would manage to haul the Israelis and Palestinians back into the negotiating room, let alone get them to discuss anything of substance. Yet six months since talks began, he may be able to present, within weeks, a “framework agreement”, after which final details must be hammered out. Diplomats who had mocked his dogged prophetic conviction now sound shocked by his progress. Rejectionists on both sides who quietly presumed that the process would collapse under its own weight now express alarm.

Consternation and confusion are visible on the faces of some ministers in Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government. The day that its justice minister was championing a negotiated two-state settlement at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, its trade minister was damning it at Tel Aviv’s. No sooner had the foreign minister called for moving Israel’s Arab citizens into a Palestinian state as part of a land-swap, than the interior minister made a rare visit to a northern Arab town to hail its inhabitants as integral to Israel’s body politic. Mr Netanyahu, for his part, floats above the fray. “We’re lacking a leader,” says Dov Weisglass, once the close adviser of Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister who, as The Economist went to press, was on the verge of death, after six years in a coma.

Mr Kerry’s methodical midwifery may be paying off. His team of 120, including four generals, has almost as great a command of detail as do the Israelis and Palestinians. “What matters is a settlement, not lots of settlements,” says Mr Kerry.