6 so-called "refugees" — those who fled or left Israel during the 1947- 49 Arab attacks against the Jewish state, and their descendents — be allowed to "return" to Israel. New borders would be meaningless if this demographic bomb were to be dropped on Israel, turning it into yet another Arab state with a Palestinian majority. Everyone knows, as a matter of reality, that this is not going to happen, just as everyone knows that Israel will eventually give up most of the West Bank as it did the Gaza Strip. But it is critical to any successful negotiation that these two issues — borders and "the right to return" — be negotiated together. The Israelis will never agree to generous borders for the Palestinians unless they are assured that their identity as the nation-state of the Jewish people will not be demographically undercut by "the right of return." And the Palestinians will never give up their emotionally charged right of return unless that is an unambiguous prerequisite to achieving statehood with generous borders. The Obama strategy — to demand generous borders from Israel first and leave the right of return to subsequent negotiations — is a prescription for stalemate. The President also helped cement the status quo by expressing his agreement with Israel's refusal to negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas — unless that terrorist group first renounces violence, accepts Israel and supports prior agreements. The current position of the Israeli government is to invite the Palestinian authority to begin negotiations now, but to insist, before any final agreement is reached, that Hamas either accept the President's current conditions or be excluded from the government. By going further than the Israeli government — by seeming to justify an Israeli refusal even to begin negotiations with the Palestinian Authority until Hamas accepts those conditions or the Palestinian Authority rejects Hamas — the President has made it harder for the Netanyahu gover