With one hand holding an olive branch and the other holding a hitlist, Corbyn has no real intention of making peace

It was Owen Smith, not Jeremy Corbyn, who advocated round the table negotiations with Isis, and with radical ideas like that perhaps his party leader might consider appointing him as special envoy to the Labour Party’s own peace process that will begin on Saturday.

That is when Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected as Labour leader and will begin his “reaching out” process to his MPs, 80 per cent of whom recently passed a vote of no confidence in him.

The problems are complex and intractable. Generally speaking, politicians are motivated by the pursuit and the exercise of power. In a democracy this tends to be done by appealing to more voters than your opponents (you may already know this). That the Labour leadership considers itself above such parochial concerns, and is instead fundamentally committed to its own electoral annihilation is, for these same MPs, something of a stumbling block.

Plus, it’s possible a man growing an olive tree on his office balcony while simultaneously compiling a hit list of his enemies, will not take an entirely honest approach to the peace process.

Among those with whom peace must be made is Peter Kyle, who will feature on a Channel 4 Dispatches this week, which appears to shows activists from Corbyn’s leadership campaign, plotting a takeover of his local party to deselect him from his seat.

In Kyle’s own words: “Jeremy Corbyn is the first person to use an olive branch to beat people with.”

After that will come the plan to have a third of the shadow cabinet directly elected by the party membership, a third by the leader himself and a third by the MPs. (What’s not been made clear is who gets first pick. With two thirds going to a combination of the pro-Corbyn members and Corbyn himself, will there be enough Corbynites to go around?)

As a staunch defender of the nation of Israel, Corbyn will of course have no problem with the observation that this all has a rather Israeli feel to it. Analysts of the Israel/Palestine question like to speak of “facts on the ground” – for example, while Israel talks of finding a peaceful solution, it quietly builds more settlements on Palestinian territory, shifting the “facts on the ground” in their favour.

It is likely, of course, that Labour will itself have to find a two state solution. Corbyn claims that “there is a lot the party is in agreement on”, the economy in particular, and an end to austerity.

But Labour MPs know well enough that a big reason it lost the election is because people didn’t trust it on the economy. That trust is difficult to regain when the man who is now Shadow Chancellor was happy to be filmed two years ago, calling himself a Marxist and welcoming the financial crash “that [he’d] been waiting half [his] life for.”

No olive branch, not even offered in earnest, will be sufficient.