First off, you have to recognize that the Israeli logic is the same logic the US has used repeatedly in the wars it fought. This organization doesn't realize this, and therefore its proposed solution will never get off the ground.
That logic is encompassed in the Powell Doctrine (ignore the strident tone of this site; it still makes a good point. I thought of the point before finding this place, and was surprised that someone else had thought of it. Maybe I don't get out much?): strike with overwhelming force. The other parts are to have popular support, a clear objective and a clear exit strategy. Those last two are lacking in the Israeli response, it seems to me from this distance.
To understand the Powell Doctrine, you have to understand a little American history. Lincoln went nuts trying to find a general who would apply the overwhelming force the North was easily able to apply to the South in the US Civil War, and only found Grant in 1863, when he won Vicksburg and, therefore, undisputed control of the Mississipi, on the same day that Lee was defeated at Gettysburg, July 4, 1863 (according to Shelby Foote's authoritative history of that war, July 4th wasn't celebrated in Vicksburg again until WWII). When Grant came over to finally confront Lee in 1864, he said "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer", and proceeded to throw everything he had at Lee, including the kitchen sink. It was bloody and it was awful, but it worked.
Sherman, in the meantime, was burning everything he found to the ground, so as to insure the South would never again even so much as think of rebellion.
It never has.
In WWII, Patton proposed ending the Battle of the Bulge by sweeping around the German armies and cutting them off, in a maneuver that would have been something like the land equivalent of MacArthur's landing at Inchon in the Korean War. He was vetoed by Eisenhower, who instead opted for simply pushing the German forces back. Once again, the US opted for simple application of overwhelming force. My opinion is that this was partly a political decision, fueled by the desire to insure no German would think, as Hitler and his supporters did after WWI, that they had lost the war because someone betrayed them. The idea, I'm sure, was to make sure Germany never tried a war of conquest again.
Now, back to the subject at hand: Israel is where it is because it has repeatedly applied disproportionate, overwhelming force. None of the frontline nations would ever even think of getting into another war with it again. The PLO is history, and while Hezbollah can be a pest, they can't be anything more than that.
All that's left is Hamas. They will apply the same overwhelming force to that problem as they did to all the others. Whether it will work on Hamas as it has worked on everyone else is still an open question, but I wouldn't bet against it. At some point, people simply say enough.
And there is nothing in Israel's history so far to suggest that they would take any other path. Why, when this one has cowed all of their enemies so far?
In order to get two parties to negotiate after a war, they have to be roughly equal. Otherwise, the stronger party will push the weaker one until it surrenders. This is the logic of war. The Versailles Conference after WWI is an instance of this logic. Misapplied, of course, since all it did was set everyone up for WWII. But in order for a defeated party in a war to get any sort of consideration, the victorious party's interest has to be seen to be clearly served by that consideration. France after Napoleon is an example, because everyone realized that they had to be generous: France was simply too strong, and a vindictive peace that made them angry was obviously in no one's best interest.
The Marshall Plan, the other outstanding example, which always seems to pop up as a proposal for ending all kinds of things, was in the US interest, and has to be understood in that context: first Churchill made his speech about an Iron Curtain, then in March 1947 Truman announced the Truman Doctrine, and in June the Marshall Plan was presented to the world. It was clearly meant to stop the Soviets. It helped the defeated Germans, but only because of the Soviet threat.
The simple, bloody truth is that somewhere along the way either the Palestinians unconditionally surrender, or some Arab state succeeds in actually defeating Israel soundly enough to force it to the negotiating table. Neither of these outcomes is at all likely. Therefore, this will continue for the rest of my life certainly, and for the rest of yours probably. So, best not to get too involved in trying to solve it. As in every other conflict of this sort, it will end only when one or both sides is finally, definitively exhausted.

"And there is nothing in Israel's history so far to suggest that they would take any other path. Why, when this one has cowed all of their enemies so far?"

This seems to be treating the PLO, Hezbollah and (potentially soon) Hamas as separate entities. They're not the same people, yes, but is it really fair to treat them separately in your analysis (which was very interesting, btw, thanks)? There also seems to be a bit of an issue with this logic in the Lebanon war a few years ago, though I suppose that wasn't a full use of Israeli force.

Won't this proposal linked to fail immediately, since none of the palestinian groups are willing to recognize Isreal?
The ad also calls for an international peacekeeping force, but Hamas has, at least as a reported on Hard Talk recently, utterly rejected anything involving foreign troops in occupied territory.

It also seems rather odd to say that the plan should be paid for, amoung other things, by the money that Syria and Iran are sending Hezbollah and Hamas. I mean, officially, Iran and Syria aren't sending anything to either terrorist orgs no?

It also calls for the palestinians to 'recognize' the 'Other' in Israel, but it seems like that is emphatically rejected no?

Also, as an aside, I wonder if palestinian support orgs will protest Obama's inauguration, since he seems to have sided with Israel on this issue?

pantom,
It is possible that the Israelis will recognize at some point in time that since they will never force an unconditional surrender, they need to help foster the birth of a functional Palestinian entity where people will have enough of a stake that unending wars of resistance and land reclaim will lose their appeal.
Then again, I've known Zionists who claim that Israel already tried this and it didn't work. I don't know enough about the facts to judge, but I think the economic blockade of Gaza and removal of Palestinians from the Israeli work force moves the situation farther from a stable solution. On the other hand, like other democracies, the Israeli government has to take popular sentiment into account, and the majority of popular sentiment does not seem to be especially patient or tolerant at this time.

No one knows what the solution is to this. Labor disputes start with seemingly unbridgeable differences and eventually end up with a signed contract, usually. This one never gets past the unbridgeable differences. I think it's because both sides figure they can just keep going, the Palestinian side because of all the Arabs offering to hold their coat, the Israeli side because of the US doing the same.
I figure WWI wound up with the awfulness of the Versailles treaty because, unlike in the Napoleonic Wars, the US was both involved and a world power. So, like both Israel and the Palestinans now, Britain & France figured there was no cost to pushing Germany up against a wall, whereas Britain & Prussia 100 years earlier knew they would have just as hard a time with France again if they pushed them to the wall after Napoleon; there was no US to provide a convenient backstop.
But both sides have a backstop in this one, and therefore no incentive to compromise. That's what makes it impossible.

But both sides have a backstop in this one, and therefore no incentive to compromise. That's what makes it impossible.

That's what I just can't comprehend; you'd think that the fear of seeing friends, family, and neighbors blown to smithereens, or possibly even being blown to smithereens oneself, would be some kind of incentive to try compromise, even leaving aside all the other costs of war (required military service in quite dangerous areas, restrictions on freedom of movement, economic damages, ad nauseam).

Or is everyone involved just so pigheaded that they think if they hold out long enough and make life miserable enough for the other party, they will eventually get what they want, and damn the consequences in the meantime?

I swear, all of these morons make me want to move to some small, uninhabited Caribbean island with no communication with the outside world. Do you think the student loan authorities would accept payment in the form of crates of mangoes?

Hmm. We're actually doing a project right now for the Student Loans folks. I'll ask and get back to you. You never know what they'd accept, times being what they are.

Well, I'm still gainfully employed for the moment. However, my field is more cyclical than most (if employers aren't hiring, they sure aren't willing to spend thousands of dollars per employee to sponsor work visas), so we've been scrambling to do some marketing things so that we all remain gainfully employed. Luckily, my loans are all Federally guaranteed, so they are deferrable if I'm not employed.

On the other hand, at the rate things are going, mangoes may soon have more value than dollars.

I agree that Rabbi Lerner is an unrealistic San Francisco hippie.

I agree that Rabbi Lerner is an unrealistic San Francisco hippie.

mvak: I completely missed your comment. Don't ask me how I did that, because I don't even know.
Thanks for saying it was interesting.
However, I'm confused: aren't Hezbollah, Hamas and the PLO separate entities?
Lebanon: not a full use of Israeli force? Also, don't know what this could mean. True, they didn't use nuclear weapons. Outside of that, it looked like the full force of Israel. It's true that if they really really wanted to, they could level Lebanon, just like they could level Gaza if they really really wanted to, but that would have been the definition of counterproductive on so many levels that, well, the fact they didn't do it - and aren't doing it, although I'm sure it seems that way to the people on the receiving end - shows just how counterproductive it would have been, and is.

I agree that Rabbi Lerner is an unrealistic San Francisco hippie.

Can you come up with what you consider to be a more realistic plan, then, preferably one that involves blowing up fewer noncombatants?

BTW what's with all the people posting lately from Russia-based e-mail addresses?

P.S. pantom, sometimes when comments are caught in the spam filter and released later, they show up where they would have shown up in the sequence of comments if they'd appeared as soon as they were posted.

P.S. pantom, sometimes when comments are caught in the spam filter and released later, they show up where they would have shown up in the sequence of comments if they'd appeared as soon as they were posted.

On balance, I'd say that "Rabbi Lerner is an unrealistic San Francisco hippie" is still a more constructive and less offensive statement than "Gaza sucks".