Conquered by King David, it is now a way-station on a desert road uncomfortably close to hostile neighbours. The road in from the south runs between minefields, while that to the north is overlooked by the Golan Heights. Beit She'an's sole piece of not-strictly-functional urban architecture is a telephone pole. That pole doubles as a war memorial, commemorating Israeli soldiers who lived in the town and died after they left there to fight in the army. Each soldier's death is marked by a chair, just prosaic, painted wooden kitchen chairs hung by hooks up and down the pole.

For students of administration and governance, Beit She'an's telephone pole teaches a melancholy lesson. The pole already has a dozen or so chairs hanging from its hooks, but there is room for a few more. The locals plainly expect more fighting, more casualties, more bereavements.

When I lived in Israel, the naval memorial at the other end of the country, in Ashdod, revealed the same grim foresight. Blank granite tablets which could be inscribed with the names of future dead were stacked around behind those commemorating sailors already dead. By contrast, our wars, however horrific, have been fixed, finite and finished.

Those chairs and slabs both denote a failure of belief in the future. Among Israelis and Palestinians, unending conflict has eroded and leached away the notion of a future better than the status quo. Trump and Brexit voters might sense that their futures have been constricted and compromised. In Israel and the West Bank, though, the future has been wiped away.

There, the past is insufferable, since that comprises two parallel, incompatible narratives about who has most claim to the land. The present is intolerable, because of the oppressive weight of security barriers, land seizures, terrorist attacks, threats from within and without, neuroses and paranoia. The future threatens nothing other than more of the same.

This syndrome is not new. When I lived in Israel three decades ago, I asked a senior servant of the state what his idea of the future involved. He told me that, as an observant Jew, he prayed each morning for the coming of the Messiah. As a loving parent, he added every day a prayer that his children might live in a land at peace, with itself and others. He added that he knew himself well enough to recognise that, if either peace or the Messiah did turn up, he would suspect them, question their integrity and help to destroy them. Other, less theatrical but equally bleak, Israeli friends used to dread the day their children would have to go to the army, sucked into the military machine for three years, obliged to go to war when necessary (as my friends had four times), and called on when needed for thirty more years. For their part, my Palestinian friends foresaw little more than an occupation without end, more dispossession of their family lands, further humiliation and uncontrollable radicalism among their children. They worried that Palestinians needed to be prepared to incur self-harm to attract international publicity.

I went back to Israel with the woman I love, three decades after having lived there. Time lapse photography, the disparity between my memories and our wanderings, was brutally sharp. In the 1980s settlements were a few shipping containers or trailers, with a watch tower thrown in, surrounded by barbed wire, perched on hilltops. Now the valleys between those hills have been filled with apartment blocks. The old road up to Jerusalem used to be littered with the destroyed hulks of trucks and armoured cars from the War of Independence. Now a modern highway is disfigured by the intrusion of a hideous security wall.

What has remained the same is the unending cottage industry of experts stating the obvious about the possible terms of an end to the Middle East dispute. As Henry Kissinger observed, everyone knows what a settlement would look like, but nobody has the courage to take the risks and accept the costs required to make a deal.

Students of governance might ponder the precarious balance between framework agreements and confidence-building measures, leadership and pandering, past and future. They might wonder how to find a leader combining bold vision with command of intricate detail. They could rail against the status quo while noting that it would be easy to imagine something worse. With Israel and the West Bank, the governance students would do well to recall the Egyptian joke about a scorpion and a frog crossing the Nile, and the difficulty in finding points of leverage – or, as Yasser Arafat reputedly put it, "the Achilles heel of the Trojan horse".

On our travels, we saw not a two-state solution at work, between Israelis and Palestinians, but an at-least-two-societies solution within Israeli society. The most graphic cleavage was on a bus to the artists' colony-cum-kabbalistic centre of Tzfat in the Galilee, a town which sold Hot Orchid milk and boasted a Messianic Art Gallery. Half our fellow passengers were heavily armed, casually-dressed soldiers returning to their units after the Sabbath. The other half were primly dressed religious students, exempt from military service. They had nothing to say to each other. Each group seemed convinced they were essential to the future of their state, but the societies in which they lived would hardly intersect, once out the door of the bus.

Down on the coast, at Tel Aviv, hedonistic self-absorption reigned. Street stalls sold a bewildering variety of luscious fruit juices. Seafood restaurants flourished, the best poised on a cliff above the spot where Jonah was cast ashore by the whale and Andromache chained to the rocks. New gym equipment was being installed on the beach, to hone the skills and tone the bodies of those already toughened up by army service. National monuments were hard to find and fastidiously modest. The house of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was so little that we wondered where his wife and kids fitted in, the majority of habitable rooms having been colonised by bookshelves. Residents of Tel Aviv may rarely see a Palestinian in their city; for a younger generation, empathy and sympathy with the Palestinians may have to be learned, not assumed. Learning by osmosis will not do.

Up the hill, in the holy city of Jerusalem, society ran on a quite different track. The city was as wondrous as ever. Morning sun from the Mount of Olives lit and warmed the honey-coloured sandstone of the Old City. The remnants of three millenia and more of habitation, worship, war and reverence were still piled on top of each other. A bird watching station propped next to the parliament building. The Israel Museum was a tribute to artfulness in its displays.

Yet something felt wrong. Visiting the Dome of the Rock, surely the most remarkable religious site in the world, was virtually impossible, with entry for non-believers confined to one gate for one hour each day. Israeli T-shirts on sale awkwardly blended whimsy with arrogance. They declared, "Don't Worry America: Israel is Behind You", "Gods and Moses" or "Keep Calm: Mossad is Coming". Two observant Jews scattered Palestinians by riding pell-mell on a bike down the steeply tiered alleys leading to the Western Wall. Palestinian shopkeepers were ridiculously pleased when I used pidgin Arabic to buy pottery. Israelis and Palestinians seemed studiously to be ignoring, disdaining, denying each other. The security wall was close, and all sorts of historical, emotional, ethnic and religious walls were everywhere. The one relaxed person we met was a pretty bartender who, I was sure, leaned over to ask me, "would you like a shit?" I enjoyed the free shot.

How can you tell the story of the much too promised land? Before I left Israel three decades ago, I asked the then-prime minister, Menachem Begin, what he planned to write in retirement. Begin had led a ruthless extremist group, suffered political ostracism and made peace with Egypt. Oddly, he also possessed conspicuous literary talent. Begin outlined a seven-volume history of the Jewish people, from Hitler's election onwards. Asked about a title, he mused drolly: "From crucifixion to resurrection". He noted Christians believed such a resurrection had been done before, and thought the Jewish people had done it again. Begin was teasing, but at least he was thinking of the future.

Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.