Israel is far from an perfect state, and it is an intractable problem.

After centuries of pogroms against Jews, and even expulsions, in other countries, it's not surprising that in the era in which the the concept of the nation-state became the widespread political ideal that some Jewish people would decide that they wanted one, too. So Zionism began, originally as a trickle, back to their ancestral land, where the tie was strengthened by a remnant population that had always been there. And it's worth remembering that Zionism began simply with people moving to the region and buying property that others were selling - it was peaceful and voluntary.

After the unspeakable depravity of the Holocaust, it makes perfect sense that Jews in the British Palestinian mandate would take the opportunity to declare their own state.

I'm no fan of the nation-state ideal (unless it's civic nationalism within a multi-ethnic state, such as the US), but if ever a nationality deserved their own state, it's the Jews. (There are a few other ethnic groups one could mention as well, but the Jews are inarguably among them.)

But moving to a place in substantial numbers, where the ultimate rulers were, in a sense, absentee landlords (whether Ottoman or British) is one thing. Declaring not just a state but a nation-state is quite another.

That's because over the many centuries of the Jewish diaspora, other people - non-Jewish - from the region had moved in to the areas the Jews had largely vacated. It's not that the Jews don't deserve a nation-state, and it's not as simple as them being invaders, because they came peacefully to the place of their ancestors and where they'd never fully left. But those other folks, collectively called Palestinians, although actually having some disparate ancient heritages and as well being identified as Arabic,* were undeniably there, and in large enough numbers that they could not be ignored.

In 1948 Palestinians did not clearly deserve their own nation-state in the way the Jews did. Palestinian was more of a regional identity than a strong ethnic identity. The Ottoman Empire, for example, did not recognize Palestinian as a political identity. They were simply subjects of the Ottoman Empire. "Palestinian" as a politically meaningful identity came into being with the post WWI mandate system of the Brits and French, who had captured the territory. (I presume that people in Palestine were understood to be, variously, Arabic or Jewish, in distinction to the Ottoman Turks, but more as a social recognition of ancestry, not as a political identification.)

When the Brits and French drew their lines on a map to create the post-Ottoman mandate system, all Ottoman citizens, Jewish and Arab, in the region designated Palestine, became Palestinian citizens, but Palestine did not become a state.

And it was not inevitable that Palestine would be drawn as it was. Syria believes the geographic region called Palestine is properly part of Syria. Had Palestine been incorporated into Syria, the Palestinians would have a home country (although it is an interesting Aly-history question as to what the Zionist Jews would have done, and what the consequences of their choices would have been).

Or the territory could have been included in the kingdom of Jordan, which did eventually annex the territory identified as the West Bank of the Jordan River and granted the population Jordanian citizen. There was even a time when some in Israel supported a division of the West Bank between Israel and Jordan (although not the Israeli hardliners). The potential for that division to have occurred and solidified is another line of interesting alt-history.

Significantly, the Jordanian action was not widely legitimated by other countries, and the Arab League defined it as the area being held in trust for the Palestinians until their status was resolved. So they kicked the can down the road, and instead of most West Bank Palestinians becoming identified as Jordanian, the fairly new Palestinian political identity was strengthened.

Even today, Israel would prefer to give up parts of the West Bank to Jordan than let the Palestinians there have self-determination, as the Zionist movement demanded as a right of Jews.

Eventually, Israel seized the West Bank in the Six-Day War. They also seized Gaza, which had been under Egyptian control. They have treated each area in a mixed fashion. They have provided aid to both regions, they provide power and water to Gaza (despite, I believe, Gaza not paying as they nominally are supposed to), and they have in recent years provided more work permits for Gazans. But they do not allow either region real freedom, out of fear of attack from them. It's an ugly situation in which their security concerns require a heavy hand which further exacerbates Palestinians' feelings of oppression, which further reinforces the security risk. But because the risk does not go away if Israel lets up, they cannot let up.

Israelis and Palestinians are now locked together in a brutal ugly game they cannot escape. Israel needs credible commitment that Palestinian attacks on Israel will cease, and that a Palestinian government will accept the existence of Israel before they can dare to ease up on the Palestinian territories. And because of their history of suffering pogroms and genocides, they cannot accept the risk of being outnumbered in a Palestinian state that runs from the river to the sea. The Palestinians, likewise, cannot give up their opposition as long as they see Israel expanding further into territory defined after 1948 as Palestinian, and as long as Israel maintains its chokehold on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Today, Jordan prefers not to deal with the interests of West Bank Palestinians, and Egypt prefers not to get involved with the Palestinians of Gaza. There is peace between each country and Israel now, and politically that is more valuable to them than the interests of the Palestinians.

Not do the governments in the West Bank, and especially in Gaza, care about their subjects, or they would end their own corruption and use foreign aid to promote their territories' development rather than lining their own pockets.

As another line of alt-history, we can wonder how things might have turned out differently had the neighboring Arabic states not attacked Israel with the goal of destroying it right at the start. If instead they had recognized Israel and set about helping their Palestinian Arabic brethren to develop their regions for political and economic stability. But for various reasons (the typical corruption of poor post-colonial countries, the socialism of the Ba'athist parties, and their often violent conflicts with religiously-based opposition parties) those goals were elusive even in their own countries, so they were poorly prepared to provide real political and economic development assistance to the West Bank or Gaza.

But within all this, over those decades the Palestinians became a distinct political-ethnic identity, and that is not changing soon. And they have now become one of the primary groups deserving of a state of their own. Hence the enduring appeal of the two-state solution (or, given Israel's claim on territory between the West Bank and Gaza, a three-state solution).

But that dream appears dead. Not enough interested parties were ever deeply committed enough to it. Even Palestinian authorities seem to prefer statelessness to the implicit defeat of accepting the continued existence of Israel: Their effective stance is "river to sea or nothing," and the likely outcome is nothing. Israel has never been deeply committed to accepting Palestinian statehood, out of concern of having less control of their security situation.

Setting aside the complex and impossible to disentangle moral quandaries of the situation, here's the hard political reality. Israel is never going to be defeated militarily, and they are continually willing to change their facts on the ground to their advantage. If their is to be a single country from river to sea, it will be Israel. They aren't necessarily seeking that, but looking long term - over a century or more - of their population continues to grow, they can choose not to become more densely populated but use that growth to fill in ever more territory. That has been their West Bank strategy, and it could become their Gaza strategy.

Throughout the history of the world, there are countless cases of populations replacing each other. It's rarely done in a just manner, but the realpolotik outcome is that it happens.

There may be no good strategies for Palestinians. That's why they were so excited about this strike at Israel, desperate to describe it as a victory, even though the ultimate loss through repercussions was readily foreseeable.

The best path, truly, is to forget about vengeance, forget about an unattainable river-to-sea Palestinian state, and to tend their own garden, so to speak. Put all their efforts into peace and economic development. Israel will not make reprisals when there are no attacks on them. Israel will not, however, make it easy for Palestinians to tend their own garden, out of mistrust. But this way, over time, trust between the two sides could be built millimeter by millimeter.

Israel could help tremendously by stopping the expansion of settlements, and if at all politically possible, rolling them back to the extent they can.

At the end of that long process, Palestinians might either get an official state or be in a decent enough position that they don't mind their anomalous status.

But this approach asks the Palestinians to be less resentful, and more willing to sacrifice ideal goals, than is normal for human populations. They are, after all, only human, my fundamentally different from the rest of us. So that's a huge ask, and it's unlikely to find acceptance politically. Many Palestinians might actually accept this path, but the politicians who prefer endless futile war to a victory-less peace will always have an advantage.

The analyses of the Israel-Palestine conflict always contain a mixture of normative empirical claims, and this one is no different. But the most important normative goal is peace for civilians to live and build their own lives. And for better or worse, Israel's ability to absorb whatever the Palestinians throw at it and retaliate disproportionately is the biggest and most ineluctable empirical fact.