Ran into this interesting debate on the Israel/Palestine subject here: Norman Finkelstein & Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami Debate: Complete Transcript

I don’t think there’s a harder problem in the world today, partially because there’s no real possibility of achieving a “fair” solution. Both sides are wrong. Very wrong.

The hardest part is how to reconcile what probably should be done, ideally, and what can be done given the realities of the situation.

There’s zero debate about how the formation of Israel screwed the Palestinians. A large land area was taken that had about 6 Palestinians for every Jewish person and was converted into a basically homogeneous Jewish area through forced eviction.

I have no idea what the Palestinians should be willing to accept. Lately I have been thinking they should just accept the negotiated conditions from the talks with Clinton and start rebuilding their society. As crappy as it would seem to accept less land than they think they deserve, their current situation is the worst possible. Through armed resistance they’re basically giving Israel the justification (to itself) to continually knock them back hundreds of years.

Also, I do believe the armed resistance is futile. Israels allies (read: US) will never allow it to be taken militarily, for many reasons. Non-violent resistance would at least make the Palestinians seem to have the moral upper-hand, giving them more political capitol.

But, to make things worse, it seems the real players in the region don’t want the conflict resolved and are using the Palestinians as a pawn in larger schemes. If the worlds attention is divided between Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, this allows Iran to fly lower under the radar.