There have been numerous attempts to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and each and every one of them had failed. Since Gunnar Jarring in the 1970's, all mediators have arrived energetic and hopeful, reported swift progress, yet failed to reach any substantial agreement. Even the Camp David accord and the Oslo agreement, which were accompanied by practical arrangements on the ground, had failed to achieve anything near to a lasting peace.
It seems to me that the main reason that all mediators fail, is that they are trying to solve the wrong problem. They listen to both sides, and try to form an agreement that would redress the wishes of both sides as they express them -- namely, peace and security for Israel, freedom and independence for the Palestinians. This is the substantial mistake: while these items may well be on the opponents' "nice to have" list, these are not what they really want, therefore no agreement which any mediator can formulate on this basis, would ever solve the problem.
So what do the warring parties really wish for? Judged by their behavior rather than their talk, each side wishes for no less than the complete conceptual and physical elimination of their opponents. This does not necessarily mean that they intend mass genocide (though some extremists on both sides do), but even people who seem to be otherwise sane and rational, behave as if they'd wake up one morning -- in the rather near future -- to find the other people gone, and have the country to themselves. In this frame of mind, any agreement is viewed as at best a passing nuisance, to be ignored until it goes away.
The source of this seemingly strange aspiration is that it had actually been achieved at one point in the past! In 1948, after fighting had subsided, about 50% to 70% of the Arab population of the areas which ended up in Israeli hands, was gone. On the other hand, it is a less publicized fact that of the Jewish population who had lived in areas which ended up under Arab control (Jordan and Egypt), exactly 100% were gone (that's the only case I know of in history of a perfect ethnic cleansing).
I am not completely despaired though. Our late former foreign minister Abba Eban used to say, "peoples and states would behave rationally, but only after having exhausted all other possibilities". I think both sides are pretty close to the end of their rope, so at least mainstream leaders may be persuaded to enter some practical agreement; the pact just has to be presented as a temporary arrangement to ensure that it lasts.
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