For the Palestinians, the objective is independence, the creation of a Palestinian state and the ending of Israeli occupation. To achieve that objective, the Palestinian leadership has made its own concessions over the past 10 years, not least the public recognition and acceptance of the existence of the State of Israel as part of a two-state solution to the conflict. For Palestinians, the construction, expansion and existence of settlements is the one act which signifies the impossibility of establishing a state with contiguous territory, a state which will be free of what they see as legacies of occupation and foreign control. For most of us, it is meaningless that the Palestinians recognize our right to exist as a sovereign state in the region - whatever harm they can cause us at the individual level, the Palestinians are weak and can never threaten Israel's continued existence. We don't require their recognition to carry on our independent existence.
Terrorism is now worse than it has ever been and the loss of human life has reached new extremes.
And despite the so-called freezing of settlement activity, as many units have been built and families joined the existing settlements during the past eight years as in any other period. Each side has also began to respond in ways that it has not done previously. Israeli response to terrorism has been to use the military force at its disposal, culminating in the excessive use of the F16 warplanes in last Friday's retaliatory attack on Nablus. So speedy was the response that Israel was not even able to make use of the propaganda victory that could have been accomplished had the world media been forced to display pictures from the Netanya carnage the next day, rather than the scenes of destruction from the retaliatory raids. For their part, the Palestinians have also been responding in kind to West Bank settlement activity.