It’s “money” dear, just “money”.

You’re right. I forgot about that. (It’s actually not a demand that makes a whole lot of sense, imo, but that’s a separate issue.)

re on-going violence, sure there are rockets coming from Gaza, but the violence (both ways) is mostly ‘controlled’. (Which isn’t to belittle the devastation for those who have to suffer it – but it isn’t an insurgency or any real threat to 98% of Israeli’s. It’s ‘limited violence’ waged by both sides for political purposes which could probably be ended with minimal commitment by both sides.

A consistent Israeli demand is that any Palestinian state be demilitarized, so “national armed forces” are probably not in the cards.

(1) I don’t want to get into the Arena post right now b.c I don’t remember the details of it that well and I haven’t re-read it.

(2) a small, semi-sovereign aid-dependent state where security is outsourced to local Israeli/US trained paramilitaries. But this doesn’t tend to turn out well.

“small” — any independent Palestinian state is going to be small. Israel is small, Jordan is small, Luxembourg is very small. Etc.

“semi sovereign” — I don’t know quite what this means. You may be, I’m assuming, getting at the distinction that is sometimes made btw empirical and juridical sovereignty. In terms of the latter, all generally recognized sovereign states are equally sovereign. An independent Palestinian state, recognized as such by the UN and most countries, would be just as sovereign in international law as any other sovereign state. It would be, for a while at least, a somewhat weak state, aid-dependent, but so are quite a few other countries.

“this doesn’t tend to turn out well” — the question is relative, i.e., compared to what. It is inaccurate to say that the fighting has pretty much stopped. As you will recall, Israel has bombed and wreaked destruction in Gaza twice in very recent years: once in Dec.2008-Jan.2009 here and again in Nov. 2012, here, both operations justified as responses to Hamas firing rockets into Israel. This can’t be characterized as a stable, peaceful situation. The West Bank has not seen the same major Israeli ops recently, but the situation there remains fragile and unsatisfactory as a long-term thing. If Hamas and the PA were to reach an agreement betw themselves, and if they and the Israelis then reached a two-state settlement, that wd be a big improvement over the current situation, no matter how weak and aid-dependent the new Palestinian state might be. It would be a fully independent, sovereign state under intl law with full membership in the UN and other intl organizations. As such it could persuasively claim to have fulfilled the aspirations of most Palestinians for an independent state. Security in such a state wd presumably not to have to be outsourced to paramilitaries since of the state’s first acts would be to set up a natl armed forces into which the various existing paramilitaries would be incorporated.

The right of return and 1967 borders are already adjudicated issues. Long time ago. Resolution 194 is 64 years old.

Yup (although I haven’t looked up Res 194 I’ll take your word for it. The more frequent reference is to, e.g., Res 242, I believe). But it doesn’t make a bit of difference in practice. Because the situation, as you well know, is one in which Israel is not going to sit down tomorrow and say “let us have a settlement on the basis of Resolutions XYZ. Period. Problem solved.” That is why the question of negotiations and power imbalance is important, as Kaveh said.

From what I’ve read (and I don’t follow this that closely), the PA govt and esp. the current prime minister on the West Bank have made some strides in the direction of constructing the internal infrastructure of statehood, for lack of a better phrase, and sometimes the Israelis have co-operated and helped them w this (though there have been many ups and downs). Part of what makes the whole problem so difficult, obviously, is the internal divisions in both the Israeli and Palestinian ‘camps’.

On the issue of how outside parties might, if they were so inclined, put some pressure on both sides to reach agreement, see this post of last November by Phil Arena:
http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/11/23/subsidizing-peace/

(That post drew a thread of 24 comments, including a couple by me, so I’m not necessarily endorsing the post, to the extent I remember it, just passing it on fyi.)

Most of the main settlements are basically large suburbs at this stage so would be incorporated into Israel (with land swaps with Palestine) rather than the settlers repatriated by force. Those deeper in Palestine (the argumenent goes) would be repatriated, or allowed to live under Palestinian rule. But the West Bank isn’t Gaza, so for strategic, political and historical reasons I personally don’t see it happening.
And that’s if you believe the Israeli’s want it to happen. Time will tell vis a vis Oslo etc who ‘is to blame’ for the current situation, but we’ve already seen when the Israeli archives have been opened (whether on 48 or Avi Raz’s new book on 67) that the official Israeli narrative has often been bulls**t. I think we see what any Palestinian state is going to look like in the short/medium term, and that’s pretty much what it looks like now.
Imo, l/t changes in demographics in Israel/Palestine, in US security strategy, in neighbouring countries more responsive to their citizens, and in a new generation – both among the public and policy makers (especially in the US) – less sympathetic to Israel will probably force a compromise on them. Or a cataclysmic war. Who knows.
And the one’s most to blame will be Israel’s strongest ‘supporters’, who have all but opted out of any rational discussion on this

The right of return and 1967 borders are already adjudicated issues. Long time ago. Resolution 194 is 64 years old. The word ‘negotiations’ here doesn’t describe something like haggling for a price of a chicken. It describes negotiations with a hostage-taker. If there is no power, then there is nothing to negotiate about; it becomes a matter of enforcing the law.

The issue of a “right of return” … is a dealbreaker for Israel

I confess this statement just does not make any sense to me at all. This confusion on my part is entirely because Israel is not the name of a person, or a committee.

Would it be correct to read this as meaning, more specifically, it’s a dealbreaker for currently-elected Israel state authorities maintaining their current priorities? That would make sense to me, but then, the whole point of BDS would be to change those priorities, because those priorities are perhaps bullshit, and perhaps mutable.

Or is the statement, more like, it is impossible for the state of Israel to continue to exist as a vaguely democratic state? Like, there will be no government of Israel? There will be no state known as Israel recognized as legitimate by the international community? Its administrative functions will collapse? Because, I mean. Really? That would be the kind of statement. acgh, nevermind.

So, like, literally what does the four word phrase “a dealbreaker for Israel” mean? Please do not break my brain. Israel is not a person’s name. A lot of … I don’t know. A lot of confusion is arising from basically using Israel as the name of a person. Conflation, I guess. Personification? Plenty of times it’s unambiguous to use a country’s name in this way, to personify a state. People know what that sort of thing means, in a lot of contexts. But not all of them. It’s like the whole problem here, in communicating back and forth.

Salient hit the nail on the head, calling out Mr. Guberman for dishonesty.

LFC @49, I think you point to a real, serious dilemma that will need to be dealt with, but one that I think it isn’t actually that important from our standpoint, as people on the sidelines. Israelis and Palestinians will need to work this out for themselves. We might be surprised how willing Israelis are to have Palestinians as fellow citizens, or (more likely?) how willing Palestinians are to give up on too many refugees returning to Israel. The really urgent need is to address the severe imbalance of power, so that Palestinians are actually in a position to negotiate.