I'm talking about, specifically, what is needed to get the armed factions within Palestine to agree to any sort of peace deal. For anything to work, they have to be brought onside.
It's not "left wing" to expect Palestinians to agree that ALL of Jerusalem has to be Israeli- East Jerusalem has had a Palestinian majority for decades- they have a long tradition in that part of the city. They can't be expected to agree that they have no right to be where they've been all this time.
It's also not "left wing" to expect ordinary Palestinians to accept no right of return AT ALL- at the very least, what harm would it do to let the last pre-1948 elders come back and die in their own homes? Israel isn't even offering to let refugees or their descendants live in the West Bank- given that the West Bank has to end up being part of a Palestinian state for their to be peace, how can it deny them that? What harm can that do?
As to compromise, why isn't it compromise enough simply to accept Israel existing next to a Palestinian state, as opposed to a unitary, secular, democratic state for all- why should they have to compromise ON their previous compromise?
To create a negotiation-friendly position on the Palestinian side, Israel is going to have to let up on the relentless "collective punishment" stance- retribution against all Palestinians, including the vast majority who go through their lives without committing a single violent act, for the deeds of the armed factions. Instead, the Israeli government needs to take off the "Iron Glove", let go of its fixation with the meaningless, unachievable concecpt of military victory, and offer ordinary Palestinians some reason to believe that they will get something, that life could get better for them, if they went back to being open to peace (as most of them were in the 1990s).
Admitting that Palestinians aren't driven solely or mainly by antisemitism- there are some antisemitic Palestinians; I think we can say there's an equal percentage of anti-Palestinian/anti-Arab bigots among the majority community of Israel, combined with a large percentage of purely nationalistic zealots who are fine with the heroic, egalitarian early vision of what Zionism might be with the useless, 19th Century right-wing nationalist objective of taking land for the SAKE of taking land- the objective which led to 10-20 million young men slaughtering each other over lines on a map between 1914-1918- and it's not sustainable for the Israeli leadership to keep simultaneously claiming to have "the most moral army in the world" AND, at the same time, saying, effectively, "F__k you- we do what we want!".
As to the Israeli left wing- the Meretz party was wiped off the map in the last election; Labor was reduced to 4 seats. There's Hadash, but you don't approve of them because they are non-Zionist and because both communities work within their party as equals. That's about it for the actual Left in political terms there- if Labor can still be called Left in any real sense.
The closest thing to a MAJOR "left" party is the centrist, hawkish, viciously anti-Palestinian Yesh Atid party- whose leader, Yair Lapid, brings up the fate his relatives experienced in Czechoslovakia during the 1940s- many of them died, at the hands of the Germans, who again were Christian and European- as justification for showing no empathy towards Palestinians-who were blameless in what happened to his family- and no willingness to bend at all from the consensus goal of the Israeli political establishment- the delusion that peace can be made without Palestinians getting a state or any recognition that they are a national community at all.
There are heroic activists and dissidents, whom Netanyahu has slandered as "foreign agents"- as if nobody could be truly Israeli and disagree with his approach, as if the only reason anybody could monitor human rights and what the IDF does to Palestinians is malevolent intent- but they are badly outnumbered and I fear for their future, since Netanyahu seems to want to make it illegal for them to function at all- nevermind that no possible greater good could be served by preventing groups like B'tselem to function legally at all, and effectively ban any dissent against his "Iron Glove" policies at all, even though there is no chance those policies will ever lead to anything remotely resembling peace- assuming he and his party want peace at all. Remember, this is a man who has written THREE books opposing the very concept of a Palestinian state, even though he knows peace can't ever be made without one being created and without any Palestinian leadership being protected from looking as if they were humiliated under any terms they agreed to.
