I have no easy solutions to the Israel/Palestine conflict, but I do know that both need to be economically viable and both need to exist as functioning nations before peace is possible. Of course how to get there is a whole different story, but I think the projects I mention are small steps in the right direction.

I am not going to argue the first part of your comment. I think I disagree, but I also know where you are coming from on it. There is considerable room for debate as to what solutions are viable.

But the end of your statement is dead wrong. You are wrong legally and scientifically.

The modern state of Palestine was created at precisely the same time and in the same manner as the modern state of Israel. The legal justification for one is the same as the legal justification of the other. Deny the right of an independent Palestine and you deny the right of an independent Israel. Those are the realities. The fact that an independent Palestine was never allowed to exist because of the invasions by the Arab nations does not change the fact that such a nation was created as part of the 2 state solution enacted by the UN. Israel has no modern existence EXCEPT in the context of this 2 state agreement that created a modern Palestine as well.

As to a Palestinian people, well genetic studies suggest otherwise. Modern Jews are fairly closely related genetically. In fact they are unusually closely related for a dispersed population. The only explanation for this is a common descent. The way you place where that common descent occurred is to compare Jewish genes with other people's. There is one population that stands out as closely related to Jews genetically: the Palestinians. Palestinians are more closely related to Jews genetically than either is to Arabs. This defines both as gentically distinguishable from other Middle Eastern populations and closely related. This comes as no surprise to anyone who knows the archaeology because it is pretty clear that both Palestinian and what became Jewish (really Israeli or Hebrew) genetic groups developed out of the indiginous (probably) Canaanite population. The archaeology suggests that and the genetics suggests that.

There are some to try to tell me that Jews came from Europe and not the Middle East. The genetics shows they are wrong. And there are those who try to tell me no distinct Palestinian population ever existed. The genetics shows them wrong. But this is also something of a moot point. Croats and Serbs are not really distinct people. But they certainly have BECOME distinct people and it would be politically pointless to try and reconstruct Yugoslavia based on a denial of the distinctness of Croat and Serb cultures. Similarly, there are two populations in the region that have been given legal nation state status by the UN: Israelis and Palestinians. This is a modern fact and denial of it serves no reasonable purpose.