This excellent review of ‘Israel’s dilemma’ in The Israel Times has clarified the problem for me as nothing else before has. To put it in its simplest terms, I think, you’d frame the dilemma like this: Israel, given its border as it existed for a brief moment in 1948, was only going to be a viable state, ie defensible, if the surrounding Muslim populations were willing to accept it as a viable Jewish state - if the Muslims were not so inclined, and clearly they weren’t, then the border would need to be expanded - as it was in ‘49 and ‘67 - but bringing with that expansion a new set of problems. In short, an Islamist hatred of Jews that has existed in the Muslim world since Mohammed first decamped to Medina and proceeded to slaughter some Semitic tribes rendered an accomodation between Israel and the Palestinians that both could accept a virtual impossibility - and so here we are.
Seems then you have two options - Israel ceases to exist, Islam’s preferred choice but not gonna happen and therefore - Israel unilaterally establishes the borders it needs to maintain security and then as with Gaza simply withdraws and leaves to the Palestinians those territories it deems expendable. Jerusalem would be a separate and quite difficult problem to solve - can’t simply expel the Palestinians obviously, but also clearly Israel has no intention of ever again giving up control of the city, which I take to be the point of all the settlement activity around it - but having ‘control’ of the city doesn’t solve the problem of what to do with the ‘Israeli Arabs’ living there. And of course in creating a Palestinian ‘state’ in this manner you run the very high risk of creating another radicalized terrorist enclave like Gaza in the West Bank - not exactly a propitious outcome - so there’s that.
I think we see why progressives in the West like Obama so utterly fail to get Israel and therefore pursue policies that are doomed to fall short - the left cannot sympathise with Israeli security concerns in realistic terms because doing so would require them to embrace a view of Islam that is incompatible with their ideology which sees Western colonialism, capitalism, and white privilege as the roots of all that’s wrong with the world - seeing Islamism as an intolerant, supremacist political system with a special fondness for hating Jews as the problem simply would not fit the progressives’ narrative - no, Israel, acting as the West’s proxy, must be where the fault lies. This is why when the new UN Secretary General a few weeks ago stated an incontestable fact regarding a Jewish connection to the Temple Mount stretching back thousands of years and the Palestinian Authority was outraged by such a suggestion the left couldn't extrapolate from that and get to a logical ‘ah, now I see’ moment - to do so would shake the foundational assumptions upon which their worldview rests.