Israel/Palestine

Barak and Olmert's offers would have left the West Bank filled with settlements(forcing Palestinians to go from one military checkpoint to another-or be prevented from going through those checkpoints-just to get from one part of Palestine to another. Every deal the Israeli side ever offered was predicated on the assumption that a Palestinian state could never really be trusted to live in peace with Israel, and that the IDF should have the right to perpetually hinder freedom of movement and the right to travel(none of these offers would ever have allowed direct airline service to Palestine, thus giving the Israeli government the ability to shut down both access between Palestinians and the outside world AND the Palestinian economy itself.

Why could there never be ANY offers that gave the Palestinian side any credit for at least having the possibility of being able to carry out its day-to-day existence like a normal country? How could the Israeli leadership ever have expected any Palestinian leadership(and I actually don't like the Hamas or Fatah leaderships any more than you do, its just that I believe that any negotiating process has to involve "parity of esteem"-the concept that made the end of The Troubles in Northern Ireland possible-and that negotiations based on the assumption that one side is legitimate and other isn't simply can't ever work) to accept any framework for anything that was based on the Israeli leadership saying, in effect "we have the right to be here and you guys don't".

The problem your ideas about how to deal with the existing Palestinian leadership is that, for any end to the conflict to happen is that that leadership are the people who have the weaponry, and an agreement not involving them can never end the fighting. Hamas and Fatah would just keep fighting on, and no other possible Palestinian leadership with any credibility could either agree to liquidate Hamas or Fatah militarily OR look the other way while the IDF stormed through a supposedly independent Palestinian state trying to finish those groups off(a goal the IDF has never come anywhere close to achieving even when it still occupied Gaza as well as the West Bank. Berating and condemning Hamas and Fatah can't work either...they would not be able to get the most violent among them to stop their actions unless they can show those people that they haven't been shamed or defeated by the Israeli side. They could never make anything stick or hold together if it looks as though the Israelis have humiliated them at the negotiating table.

That is why your insistence on blaming everything on the Palestinian side does nothing but damage to any hopes of changing anything for the better. You don't sound like you care about ending the suffering...you sound like you care only about being able to say that your side in the conflict "won"-and this isn't something that CAN be "won&quot in the Middle East, victory in the military sense is no longer possible, as everything that has happened since 2003 shows). It needs to end in a face-saving draw
for Israelis AND Palestinians.
And it's