And what if the Palestinians don't actually want a state, if they have to give up on destroying Israel? That has been their position for the last three years, certainly. What you propose is as you say, very close to the Taba plan - but they refused the Taba plan without a counter-offer.
As Yossi Klein Halevi writes in a current TNR debate:
I know you agree that Palestinian rejectionism is the principle cause for this war. But there remains a part of you that resists drawing the full conclusions from that insight, perhaps fearing you'll encourage despair. But the fear of despair can also pose a danger. You write that "we can argue endlessly" about whether the victims of terror died because of Oslo or because of the failure of Oslo. But that's exactly what we should be arguing about. Because if Oslo was, as I believe, a Palestinian ruse--or Trojan Horse (the phrase belongs to the late Faisal Husseini)--then Oslo failed because it was meant to fail. And that requires a self-reckoning, yes, an atonement for self-deception, among those of us who initially supported Oslo.
If I say there is no possibility, at this point in history, of achieving peace, it isn't only because of the collapse of Oslo, but because of numerous conversations I've had over the years with Palestinians, from all levels of society. When I'd ask the question, "What will happen after the peace?" the answers almost invariably focused on the next phase of repatriating Palestinian refugees and transforming Israel into a bi-national entity. When the war over Israel as a state ends, the war against Israel as a Jewish state will begin.
We've made a mistake in demonizing Arafat. Not that he isn't demonic; but because the problem is hardly Arafat alone, but the widespread Palestinian and Arab refusal to grant us genuine recognition. Gambling on Arafat wasn't just a miscalculation about his personality, as the Israeli novelist David Grossman once suggested; it was symptomatic of our refusal to recognize the depth of Arab rejection. The widespread resistance in the Arab world to granting legitimacy to Jewish history, from Holocaust-denial to Temple-denial, isn't a side-effect of the conflict. It is the conflict.
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