Halper argues that the Palestinians plan to declare a Palestinian state alongside Israel with the pre-1967 borders, and ask the U.S. to recognize that state, is perhaps the best option for the Palestinians. Halper says that given the occupation and Israel's unwillingness to negotiate seriously, "something must be done, and given the failure of the international community to either protect the Palestinians or rein in Israel, I [Halper], for one, am at a loss to suggest alternatives that address the urgency of a way out of Israel's growingly genocidal occupation."

Warner argues that BDS does not work in changing government policy, although BDS may educate Israelis that their treatment of Palestinians is not normal, and Americans that their government is working to preserve the status quo.

Halper argues that recent United States foreign policy related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict around settlements and the Goldstone report have the effect of "deminishing American Credibility."

Regional approaches -- sometimes called the no-state solution -- to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not new. For example, in the mid-1950s the Eisenhower Administration proposed a regional water management union to address the water issues of Israel and Jordan, although Syria and Egypt were also involved in his administration’s failed initiative.

This article sets out the case for a regional solution to end the conflict.

While many will be dissatisfied with the author’s implicit ‘legitimatization’ of Israel, there is much to his analysis that would go toward explaining why it is that the “Walt & Mearsheimer” wing of the US foreign policy establishment are apparently succeeding in the Obama White House, as evidenced by the Cairo speech and the incipient confrontation over settlement expansion between Obama & the Israeli government.

We don't need to prognosticate the exact direction of this new turn of policy to notice an immediate degree of ‘change’- if not necessarily one we can “believe in”. But equating the suffering of the Palestinians to the Holocaust in a major address, and publicly contradicting the PM of Israel in their DC press conference signals a new direction of some kind. This is the first display (alas!) of the much advertized “audacity” along with the equally touted “hope” we heard so much about, and we can’t ignore it. This does not imply that a viable Palestinian state is immediately in the offing, but with a suicidal US policy in Afghanistan, maybe Obama needs a modus vivendi with Iran, and is willing to tamp down the Israeli land grab lunacy in the Palestinian territories as a token.