Palestinian violence is not a response to the capture of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian nationalism's roots are not so shallow.
I don't think a Palestinian state is going to be created at a conference table; it will be created on the ground in the West Bank, and some day, a peace conference will ratify that which has been built on the ground.
We use American influence with Israel not to promote economic growth in the West Bank, but to try and impede Jewish - never Arab - construction in the capital city.
At Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat 94 percent of the West Bank; ten years later, Ehud Olmert offered Abbas 93.6 percent with a one-to-one land swap.
Needless to say, if the Arab-Israeli conflict is about interstate disputes and the need to resolve the future of the West Bank and Gaza, it can be solved; if it is a religious conflict, nothing but violence is ahead.
Israel will not and should not leave until it is clear that the West Bank can be policed by Palestinians and that the region will not be a source of terrorism against Israel, as Gaza and South Lebanon became when Israel left there.
Perhaps areas of Israel where current large Palestinian populations and demographic realities exist could be exchanged for Israeli expansion into the West Bank to include most of East Jerusalem.
You can look at the West Bank. Cities are like prisons. They can be closed quickly by the Israeli forces, and everything stops in these cities. This is the result of Oslo.
If you put too much pressure on the Palestinian Authority, it will collapse - it will disappear - and Israel will have to formally re-occupy the West Bank and assume responsibility for the Palestinians there. The United States doesn't want that. Israel doesn't really want that.
As long as Hamas needs the support it could conceivably get from the international community through the Palestinian Authority, it has an interest in playing nice with Fatah. And Fatah has an interest in playing nice with Hamas because it needs some source of legitimacy on the West Bank.
