I support the Palestinian's right to statehood and basic human rights over Israel's apartheid rule. But there are two immovable objects that will doom Israel and the Palestinians to a state of perpetual conflict. First, is Hamas. Hamas has had many chances over the past few decades to join in on very substantial efforts to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (Oslo accords) but has always held out in order to pursue its stated goal which is the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of the Jews by force. For all the talk of Israel's brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas has no interest in resolving that conflict and finding a path towards living peacefully next to the Israelis. Everything they do is not for the rights of the Palestinians and their human rights struggle. It is to try to destroy Israel. Hamas' main tactic is to carrying terrorist attacks against Israel in order to provoke a disproportionate response from Israel's vastly superior armed forces. They then hope that the Arab world will see what Israel has done so they will rise up against Israel and push the Jews into the sea. The problem is that while the Arabs hate Israel, they also think that the Palestinians are half breeds and see no reason to risk their lives to try and protect Hamas from Israel. And many Middle Eastern governments fear that a strengthened Hamas would be a threat to their rule. So, time after time Hamas strikes Israel and Israel strikes back in a horrible counter attack while in the rest of the Middle East everyone cusses and fusses about Israel and that is all.
On the other side is the hard right ultra orthodox and ultra orthodox adjacent Israelis. Over the past two decades, there has been a huge surge in the ultra orthodox Jewish community in Israel. They used to just be a bit of an oddity in an otherwise fairly liberal Jewish society in Israel. But as Palestinians started to play population games in anticipation of annexation of the occupied territories, the ultra orthodox communities in Israel did the same. The political response has been a hard shift to the right with the government paying ultra orthodox Talmudic scholars to sit around all day studying the Torah (basically the same thing as what the Saudis do with their cleric class) and to even exempt the ultra orthodox communities from military service. For these hard right wing Israelites, there is no negotiating on the borders of Israel. Under their view, God gave the Jews Judea and Samaria (i.e. the West Bank) and the Palestinians have no right to the land. Thus, the goal is to expel the Palestinians. Settlements on Palestinian land have been the primary means of achieving this goal. A map of Palestinian held territory in the West Bank looks like spots on a Dalmatian's back. Israel's settlements have chopped up Palestinian territories such that having a contiguous state of Palestine is all but impossible. But more recently, the far right ultra orthodox settler movement has started kicking Palestinian families out of their home in an effort to take Palestinian land house by house.
The only way for this to ever end is for the Palestinians to rise up against Hamas and for the Israelis to stand up to the far right ultra orthodox Jews. There is a slight chance of the latter. Netanyahu's government has made security its raison d'etre. And this is the greatest security failure in Israel's history. On the Palestinian side, people in Gaza love Hamas. On the West Bank, people have a more realistic view of Hamas and see it as often being more interested in its war with Israel than on any realistic resolution of the right of the Palestinian people.
This is pretty much the same place Israel was back when it invaded the West Bank in 2002 and placed Yasser Arafat under siege in his compound. The violence against Israel back then was different in that there was no mass attack but nearly daily suicide bombings. After that, the Palestinian leadership split with Fatah ruling over the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. And Israel abandoned Oslo and progressively moved further and further to the right. The same thing will happen this time and will set up the parties for another major conflict in another 20 years. And so on and so forth.
