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I have been struggling, belatedly no doubt, to understand this Israel-Palestine thing, and this is what I have come up with from various sources. I would be grateful if someboy would correct any part of this that's wrong.

Israel is at once a secular democratic state, a nation (= people-culture-heritage) and a land. Nations endure even if states come and go. Think of Poland, which disappeared off the map as a state more than once, or of Palestine, which never existed as an independent state but has a quasi-national identity.

From a geographic point of view, Israel is a TINY sliver of land. On my computer monitor-sized map of the world, it's almost invisible. It should be noted that the Arabs who claim ownership to the land, themselves have 22 countries which together are 640 times the size of Israel.

There never was an independent state of Palestine. The territory called "Palestine" was a province of various empires: first the Romans (who were, I think, the first to call a swath of Eastern-Mediterranean territory "Palestine") and subsequently others, including the Ottomans, and finally the British Mandate.

The British developed a political plan in which what was called "Palestine" (by the Ottomans) was divided into "Jewish Palestine" and "Arab Palestine". Jewish Palestine eventually became Israel, and Arab Palestine became Jordan.

OK. That was "the two-state solution".

Jordan is 4 times the size of Israel, and, for the record, neighboring Syria is 10 times the size of Israel.

Wouldn't it make sense for the Palestinians to move into their very own, relatively huge, Arab Palestine (Jordan), rather than keep relentlessly claiming chunks of Israel's tiny splinter (which is, I am told, less than 1/7 the size of Florida)?

Does this make sense?