• Israel has a right to exist
• A Palestinian state made up of Gaza and the West Bank has a right to exist

After 60 years of fighting, I believe most of the people in the area can agree on those two points (in conjunction, at least).

But what was, for the first 20 years at least, merely a desire to exist and be left alone, seems to have transformed into a miniature version of the Manifest Destiny, where many Israelis seem to have adopted a view that Israel should expand to include any land they could justify biblically as having been part of Israel.

I'm not sure when this changed. In the declassified documents from the '67 war, it is clear that the Israelis specifically conquered Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan with the goal of trading them back for a permanent peace. (Only Egypt took them up on it, thanks to some help from President Carter.) When it turned out that Syria wasn't willing to pay that price and Jordan really didn't want the West Bank anyway, I believe that at some point, the Israelis simply decided that they may as well start developing the land for itself.

When the UN passed the 1947 partition plan, which gave Jewish-Majority areas to Israel and everything else to Palestine, Israel was substantially smaller than today. Israel declared independence, the British left, and immediately all the Arab neighbors invaded. When the dust settled on the first Arab-Israeli war, Israel was significantly larger, and the areas that were to be Palestine that had not been conquered by Israel were instead absorbed by Jordan and Egypt (Egypt having taken Gaza and Jordan the West Bank).

What was lost in all the machinations and manipulations of 1948-1972 were the Palestinians themselves. (The 1972 Jewish population of the West Bank was 1,200. By 1983 it was 23,000, and now it's well over a quarter million.) It was easy to overlook the Palestinians, for there wasn't a Palestine. The Arab States felt that actually creating the Palestinian State out of the lands occupied by Egypt and Jordan would be a de facto recognition of Israel. I'm sure this desire not to create Palestine was not driven purely by altruism, but the fact is that the motivations of the Muslim states is not as important as the effect: a nation of peoples unrecognized and uncared for; a refugee nation.

For decades, the Palestinian resentment has been exploited by less than scrupulous Arab neighbors to strike at Israel with terrorism and acts of sabotage. The PLO (which, it should be noted, was formed by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt back when they controlled Gaza and the West Bank) was a rallying point at which disaffected Palestinians (read: all) could gather and inflict revenge upon Israel, all the while being oblivious to the fact that not only had Israel taken their land, but so had Egypt and Jordan.

In 1967, a war whose catalysts are complex, Israel won yet again, defeating the combined Arab might in another example of how promoting officers based on loyalty rather than merit and Arab infighting can lose a war in record time. The result is the current situation, with Israel controlling Gaza and the West Bank parts of what should be Palestine.

That Israel has been the target of repeated attempts at utterly destroying the country certainly must affect their psychology. It wasn't until after the 1967 war that the US even got seriously involved in Israel's predicament, instead providing 60% of Egypt's wheat and most of Jordan's tanks. (Israel's air force were French Mirages and their tanks British Centurions.) I feel much sympathy for their precarious and difficult situation.

But there is one inescapable fact that makes it difficult to absolve Israel of any responsibility for the current situation: all the lands that would make up the Palestinian State are under Israel's control. It is therefore only Israel that prevents the formation of Palestine, placing conditions (reasonable or not) on Palestinian behavior and an ever-shrinking amount of land, which started out as insufficient in the eyes of even moderate Palestinians. To be sure, the deal gets worse the longer the Palestinians wait to agree to it. Part of me suggests the Palestinians take the best deal they can get now and cut and run before all they're left with are the equivalent of Indian reservations. Better to stop the hemorrhaging and protest after you have been made a state than to be left with nothing.

Obviously, those Palestinians unwilling to refrain from violence make such a state all but impossible to implement. But by settling the West Bank, Israel is getting rid of the one asset that they themselves considered critical to permanent peace: the very land they wish to trade for peace they are making impossible to trade away.

Eventually, Israel will be almost wholly responsible for its own lack of security. With nothing to give back to the Arabs to barter for peace, what can they expect if not more violence?

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