My dad asked me what my thoughts on the Israel / Palestine
issue were, and why it could never seem to get a lasting negotiated peace
agreement of some sort. My answer was:

As long as there were people at the top who had a personal
vested interest in keeping it going, it would never stop, and pretty much all
the leaders (both secular and religious) in the surrounding Islamic nations
find having a Jewish state nearby to blame everything on very useful. So, IMHO,
it will never have a negotiated peace
for any significant period of time.

Historically, negotiated peace treaties are worth
less than the paper they are printed on; they are merely used to play for time.
War (on some scale) seems the normal state of most people of the world, and the
only time there was peace was when someone big and strong came through, crushed
all rebellion or dissent utterly, and made it clear that fighting was NOT going
to end well (i.e., heads on pikes, razed cities, leaders hunted down like dogs,
etc). The Mongols, the Huns, Alexander to Great, the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians,
the Ottoman Turks, the British Empire, Germany and Japan post-WW II. The list
is seemingly endless. Peace of a generation or longer comes not from negotiation
and good will. It never has. Peace comes from having strength and will enough
to make the cost of NOT-PEACE prohibitively high to the leaders that would ask for war. I say let Israel do what it needs
to do to expand and secure its borders, and if that means we can’t count the
dead in the radioactive wastelands of its newly established border-land DMZ
& Nature Preserve, well, so be it.