Palestinians, like all other existing peoples, has a right to not not exist. A people—Jewish, Palestinian, American—has no ontological right to exist, but once a people does exist it has a right to survive.

Palestinians exist. They have a right to maintain their existence. The only way to secure that right is to control their destiny as best they can. Today that means being a sovereign state with the socio-economic-military might to maintain that sovereignty.

If survival is a right, and having a state is necessary to survival, then yes, Palestinians (no less than Jews and Native Americans) have a right to their own state.

No. According to Torah when the Jews came to settle the Promised Land seven peoples were living in it: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are invade to conquer, many nations must be defeated: the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites— seven nations each more numerous and militarily superior than you, ² and yet the Lord your God shall deliver them to you, and you shall defeat them and completely destroy them. Make no treaty with them. Show them no mercy” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2).

The ancient Israelites got a land of their own the way people always get a land of their own: they take it away from someone else. Sadly we have yet to find another way to do this.

Maybe, but the Palestinians didn’t.

We Jews spent 2000 years in exile from the Promised Land, or what was left of it. Our experience was one of oppression and brutality, especially when we lived under Christian rule. This paved the way for the Nazi genocide of the Jews, what we call the Shoah, the Catastrophe, and others call the Holocaust. Without almost two millennia of Christian Jew-hatred Hitler could not have turned millions of Christians against the Jews. 

So, yes, Christian Europe owes the Jews. But they also owe the Palestinians. Both peoples are victims of European colonialism and are pawns in a geopolitical game of thrones. 

The tenor of Middle Eastern politics is almost medieval. So is the solution. The Queen of England should lock Prince Charles in the Tower of London, marry Bibi Netanyahu, and give Princess Margaret to Mahmoud Abbas.

It reimagined what it is to be a Jew.

There are two defining mythos regarding what it is to be a Jew: Yavneh and Masada.

According to the first, Rabbi Yochanah ben Zakkai, foreseeing the destruction of Jerusalem by the besieging Roman legions and failing to convince the Zealots who ran the city to surrender and sue for peace, faked his own death, was smuggled out of the city in a coffin by his students (burial within the city walls was forbidden by Jewish law), and surrendered to Vespasian, the commander of the Roman siege forces. Ben Zakkai negotiated a separate peace in exchange for the right to establish a rabbinic academy for the study of Torah and the perpetuation of rabbinic Judaism in the town of Yavneh. Vespasian agreed. In this way Yochanan ben Zakkai secured the future of Judaism.

Meanwhile, Jerusalem fell, the Temple was destroyed, and the last of the Zealots retreated to Masada, a mountain top fortress where, rather than surrender to Rome, they committed suicide.

For 2000 years Yavneh was the ruling mythos of the Jewish people, and study and scholarship were the keys to our survival. Today Masada is the defining mythos the Jewish people. The soldier has replaced the sage as the ideal Jew, and suicide has replaced scholarship as our preferred fate.

The difference is that in the original Masada only the Jews died, while in the new Masada, a war against Israel will most likely trigger a nuclear war that will take the whole world down with it.