” there will need to be a Palestinian civil war in which”

……..the problem is that Hamas is going to win it…….in the skirmishes of the past couple of years Israel has put their finger on the scale to assist Fatah who are widely seen as corrupt and incompetent……..Needless to say all that the Israeli actions have done is to increase the clout of Hamas……….History has usually demonstrated it makes more sense to negotiate with the radicals.

4 lfc // Oct 27, 2009 at 3:12 pm

“It will have to pull people out of some of the most far-flung settlements, and will have to extend the wall, but they can effectively create a two-state “solution” of their liking and leave the Palestinians to sink or swim on their own. Sure, the Palestinian will fire more rockets, but Israel can retaliate in kind, create an empty and enormous kill zone on the Palestinian side of the wall.”

……..You’re assuming all this is taking place in a Israeli/Palestinian vacuum……it isn’t…….so they kill loads of Palestinians in totally disproportionate uses of force……this is an Israeli victory?…….Israel is strategically in the worst situation she has ever been in ……..she is more diplomatically isolated at the official level than she has ever been…….world opinion has undergone a tremendous shift in the past 15 years against her……the Arabs have learned how to use assymetric warfare to blunt Israeli military superiority…….and at least three highly competent and much more powerful adversaries have appeared on the scene (Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran) to replace the corrupt and ineffectual Fatah, Egypt and the oil states of the gulf………time is not on Israel’s side.

I still think that things will get worse, and Israel will pick it’s own (defensible) borders. It will have to pull people out of some of the most far-flung settlements, and will have to extend the wall, but they can effectively create a two-state “solution” of their liking and leave the Palestinians to sink or swim on their own. Sure, the Palestinian will fire more rockets, but Israel can retaliate in kind, create an empty and enormous kill zone on the Palestinian side of the wall.

As much as I’d love to see it, I personally don’t believe that a negotiated two state settlement is in the cards. I don’t think any Palestinian leader will ever back off on the absolutely unreasonable demand of “right of return”.