Everybody and his cousin has a plan to end the violence in Israel, and establish a lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, based on a mutual understanding, yada yada yada.

The problem with that whole line of reasoning is that every understanding short of killing all the Jews in Israel (basically, finishing the job that the Arabs in nearly all other Muslim countries began hundreds of years ago) is only a temporary understanding of what new land is going to be available for launching rocket and mortar attacks against Israelis, and for what new beachheads are going to be available for cross-the-border-and-kidnap-an-israeli-soldier operations (which the media translates into just plain "capturing a soldier"). [1]

Now, regardless of what your average Palestinian who's just trying to feed his family thinks about this whole Koran thing about murdering all the "infidels" of the world, comparing BBC and CNN reports of turnout for demonstrations with the total population of the PA reveals that your average Palestinian statistically goes out of his way to support the terrorists who make no secret of their intention to murder every Jew they can get their hands on. (This is back from Y2K, but while Israel today is only about half the size as it was on the map at the bottom of that page, virtually everything else is still the same. Statistically, Arabs hate Jews, and nobody has been able to change that, even with a bunch of handshakes with famous people, Nobel Peace Prizes, tons of financial aid, and many second chances. For whatever reason, it's obviously part of them.)

Now, one might think that Israelis kill Arabs, nuking any possibility of peace. The unfortunate reality is that the Arabs who get killed by Israelis (again, statistically - not every Israeli is a saint, either) are almost always actively trying to harm them, in general trying to kill them. The simple proof is the number of attacks carried out by Arabs against Israelis (almost all of which are aimed at civilians - the only real exception is kidnapping runs against soldiers, knowing that Israel will free hundreds (in some cases thousands) of Palestinian terrorists from jail in exchange for a kidnapped[1] Israeli soldier

The only way to achieve peace, IMHO, is through security. The reason that murderers don't roam the streets in the US, for example, is that the local government holds them accountable for their actions, and puts them away, if necessary. The way to keep murderers from roaming the streets in Israel is the same. Arabs have an incentive to pull off very risky kidapping raids against Israeli soldiers only because Israel values human life much more than the Palestinian terrorists, and is willing to sacrifice justice for a thousand people in order to win back the life of one. That puts Israel in the rather unenviable position of being the only side playing by the rules, and the Israeli people pay the price. (To a lesser extent, the Palestinians who really just want to feed their families and couldn't care less about killing Israelis (or anybody else) also pay a price. They don't deserve to live like refugees, either; they're just as human as you or I. It's just too bad that their government prefers to support terrorists (largely imported from Syria and Iran) rather than to care about its own people ... and if they're thought by their friends to be "Israel sympathizers" (i.e., people who just want peace), they risk being lynched the same way that Israeli soldiers are, and by the same people.)

Lastly, I'd like to make a small request. Please don't take my word for anything I wrote here. Go, find people/books/etc., sit, and learn the background of this whole conflict, before jumping to conclusions in either direction. Just keep in mind that most mass media is biased against Israel (and against Jews, in general - Antisemitism is one of the only things that's never gone out of fashion in over 2K years), so you'll need to look elsewhere for straight facts. Don't let me or anybody else tell you what to think. Judge for yourself. (Don't take my word for this, but I called it: Jews aren't bad people, and Israel doesn't want to push the Arabs into the sea. They just want to live in peace.)

Footnotes:

[1] the difference between "kidnapping" and "capturing"

Since the media appears to be rather confused on the subject, I thought it appropriate to set the record straight on the definitions of a couple of words in the English language. When somebody sends a soldier to attack you, and your soldier gets him to surrender and become a POW (subject to UN rules about POW treatment) until the conclusion of the war, the act of making him a POW is called "capturing him." However, when a bunch of guys raid an army base, grab a soldier, and run, it's called "kidnapping." Whenever you read in the news about a "captured" Israeli soldier, it's almost always a lie. While Israeli soldiers rarely surrender (since they're better trained, better equipped, and more scared of Arab "POW" treatment), Israeli soldiers are regularly kidnapped from Israeli territory (and not held according to UN regulations for POWs, anyway - in particular, lynching them is not allowed, for example), not by an advancing army after a formal surrender, but rather by a bunch of bandits on motorcycles, who simply cross the border in the hopes of stealing an Israeli soldier - a very valuable commodity. Remember, a single Israeli soldier (in some cases, an Arab Israeli soldier!) is generally sellable on the open market for 500-2K Palestinian terrorists serving life in prison for cold blooded murder. (Needless to say, those 500-2K guys don't end up serving their sentence, which only gives them more incentive to continue their crimes once they leave prison. Statistics show that this, in fact, is exactly what happens.)

Further Reading

Ilana Mercer has some useful background info about the one-way US<-Israel friendship in this article.