Demographics, history and control of land are the only factors by which both Israelis and Palestinians realistically assess their future and by which the conflict can be understood.
The UN General Assembly divided Palestine in 1947, giving the minority Jewish immigrant population the majority of Palestine's land to form Israel. For the Israeli leaders this was but the first step.
In 1948 the Israeli military expanded well into the land designated for the Arab state and expelled more than 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine. Jordan shared the spoils by taking over East Jerusalem and the West Bank and took in most of the refugees, who now number about six million, the largest permanent refugee population in the world.
Israel's greatest diplomatic success in the Camp David Accords was removing consideration of these refugees from the peace process. That, however, has only halved Israel's demographic nightmare.
While about 20 per cent of Israeli citizens are not Jewish, the Israeli Government can usually manage to live with that minority.
The Israeli electoral franchise extends to Jewish settlers in the occupied territories but there is no vote for the nearly three million Palestinians in those territories. If Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank it would have to give everyone the vote. It has used an endlessly prolonged peace process to save itself from having to do this.
Israel has options.
It can annex the occupied territories, extend the franchise to everyone and accept that Jews are a minority.
Or it can withdraw to a more modest and legally less suspect geographical area within the limits set by the UN in 1947.
Or it can continue to ignore world opinion and international law, steal land to build settlements, characterise all criticism and disagreement as anti-Semitic, systematically destroy Palestinian homes, livelihoods and farmland, periodically bomb Gaza or South Lebanon and basically muddle on until it hopes the Palestinians will give up.
New Zealand, as the Western country most identified with UNSC 2334, needs to show Israel there is a cost to its third option. We can refuse to accept imports or Israeli visitors from the occupied territories.
We can pull out of the recent NZ-Israel Film Co-operation Agreement which lacks any distinction between activities in Israel and in the occupied territories. We can put a stop to a range of economic and academic collaboration between Israel and New Zealand.
Our Government should tell the NZ Superannuation Fund to divest in Israeli banks which fund West Bank settlements. And Murray McCully can tell Netanyahu we don't like countries declaring war on New Zealand for pointing out what international law is.
He could tell him Netanyahu doesn't need to send his recalled ambassador back to New Zealand until Israel behaves.
Janfrie Wakim is a long-time Auckland campaigner for human rights in Palestine.
