This is the reason the Palestian-Israeli Conflict exists...

That's why I called it collective stupidity. I don't have the links at my fingertips but I recall that most opinion polls over the past decade have shown that a signifigant portion of Israelis if not a majority of Israelis don't support building or maintaining settlements. The pullout of the Gaza settlements was supported overwhelmingly except by a radical element. Israeli politics though being dependent on coalitions settlement supporters wield an inordinate amount of power in the Knesset beyond what their numbers would indicate.

The PLO were attacking Israel but in the years immediately following the Oslo accords the PA were arresting Palestinian terrorists and even cooperating with Israel. From about 1993 to 1995 the most prominent terrorism was being committed by radical Jews such as the massacre of Arabs in Hebron and the assisination of Rabin. The Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon governments engaged in a policy of collective punishment that damaged the PA far more than it did Hamas or Islamic Jihadh.

Egypt and Jordan do have much to lose accepting the wall as anger over the wall and displaced Arabs affects their own population and destabilizes their governmentsy and the whole region. The whole World recognizes this including the current US Admin. which is why Israel has been criticized over it by even the Bush Admin..

The problem is that you are ignoring the historical context that led to the creation of Israel. The image of Israeli troops driving Palestinians out at the point of a bayonet isn't going to be an image that even many Israelis will accept as it will conjure up images of the Holocaust. At the same time if the Palestinians in East Jerusalem are also going to be driven out that includes a huge number of Palestinians. East Jerusalem is also very dense so to forcefully drive them out that would mean street to street fighting along the lines of Stalingrad in a location holding the sacred shrines to three major religions. That's not something the Israelis would want to take on since they couldn't just level the city.

The problem with your view that Israel should just build the wall and force everyone out is that it is overly simplistic without addressing the complex geography and politics of the region.

I will say that there is a collective stupidity on the part of both Israelis and Palestinians that have kept them locked into the situation. The solution you propose is no more workable than the idea that the Israelis will be driven into the sea but the internal politics of both sides allow the extremists that support those ideas to have innordinate power. I again don't have the polling data off the top of my head but I do recall that polls of Palestinians have shown that most accept the idea of a two state solution based on the 67 borders. The problem is though when they have no effective government to exercise such negotiations radicals can step in to fill the vacuum. On the Israelis side the coaltion politics in the Knesset have allowed radical parties who believe in nothing short of Biblical Judea and Samara to influence political decisions. On both sides there is a lack of both strong and pragmatic leadership to face up to their extremists and work out what is the obvious solution.

 

What religion did the Palestinians have 5000 years ago?