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"The settlement freeze has only brought more poverty," complains Abdel Aziz Othman to the Christian Science Monitor.

Othman is a Palestinian living in the West Bank, who cannot find work because Israel has magnanimously agreed to a settlement freeze -- demanded by the Palestinian Authority and begged for by U.S. envoy George Mitchell -- halting construction and dissipating the job market for manual labor.

Israelis complain about the settlement freeze because many are disrupting their life plans in the service of a stalled and lifeless peace process. Palestinians complain about the freeze because it destroys job opportunities for them in the service of a stalled and lifeless peace process. American college kids seem to like it, though.

"Work in the settlements has decreased dramatically in the last few months -- it's nothing like it was before," Walid Mustafa told the Christian Science Monitor for that same article published Jan. 26. "But our lives haven't changed for the better and the leaders aren't any closer to peace, so what's the point?"

Mustafa says he works about one day a month now.

"While the politicians dawdle away the months, we have families to feed," Palestinian Fawzi Aqraba added.

Not to worry, responds Ziad Toame, director general at the Palestinian Ministry of National Economy. Toame is trying to force Palestinians to stop buying goods made in settlements in addition to the work stoppage -- but he'll attempt to compensate them with money from a new PA Dignity Fund, though that Dignity Fund has yet to include construction workers.

But wait -- weren't the settlements stripping the Palestinians of their dignity? And wasn't the settlement freeze supposed to infuse the peace process with a new energy that would propel the parties forward?

The peace process was launched to improve the lives of the Israeli and Palestinian people. So why have facets of the negotiations that make both sides miserable -- like this settlement freeze -- become central to the process? The answer is: The peace process has become almost completely divorced from its founding purpose -- something Michael Marder, a philosophy professor at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan in Canada, calls "Husserlian sedimentation," after Edmund Husserl, the German-Jewish philosopher eventually blacklisted by the Nazis.

Marder delivered a lecture at the 2010 Telos Conference about the revival and survival of political will during the Obama administration. Obama's election brought about what seemed to be an unprecedented rate of political participation on the part of the American public, especially younger voters and activists. But any surge in political will builds institutions on top of it, and those institutions tend to drift from their founding purpose.

"Husserlian sedimentation involves a forgetting of the concrete foundations of abstract knowledge in lived human experience, along with the founding impulse itself, thanks to the preponderance of abstractions founded, instituted, or established on that which has been forgotten," Marder said in his lecture.

Though Marder is speaking in the context of American politics and the future of the grassroots progressive activism that helped Obama get elected, there couldn't be a more apt description of what has happened to the peace process than this "sedimentation": the establishment of abstractions founded upon -- then suffocating and replacing -- that foundation.

Marder continues, further -- and unwittingly -- characterizing the conventional wisdom that permeates discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"For Husserl, the crisis erupts, precisely, when founded abstractions tend toward an excessive separation from their phenomenological foundations and when what we know about the world assumes the character of familiarity or obviousness," Marder said.

The peace process has a sense of "familiarity" about it, simply because we've repeated the same mistakes, compounding them rather than solving them. And the idea of a settlement freeze has this "obviousness" of which Marder speaks. Isn't it obvious that Israel should stop building on what might be future Palestinian territory?

As it turns out, no. The only thing that's obvious about it is that it hasn't helped either the Palestinians or the Israelis affected by it. It reminds me of an answer Elliot Abrams, a former deputy national security advisor for George W. Bush, gave to the Jerusalem Post when he was asked why he was skeptical of concluding a final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

He said everyone thought the final parameters of the deal were obvious, and so there was only so much more negotiation necessary to seal the deal.

"That was the conventional wisdom," Abrams said. "But it seemed to me that the opposite view was right: that if everybody knows what a deal has to look like, and year after year and decade after decade, it is not possible to reach it, isn't it obvious that it's because neither side wants that deal?"

Every once in a while, the conventional wisdom on the Arab-Israeli conflict is shaken up. Sharon did it, and so did Bush. But most of the time, it's perpetuated instead of challenged.

And the misery brought to the Palestinians by the settlement freeze demanded by their leaders is yet another example of the sedimentation of the peace process, burying the very Palestinians it was constructed to elevate.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.