I like Gershom Gorenberg's discussion of the centrality of the settlements to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the clip below.
It's long been my experience that when discussing the conflict with Jews, the settlements are the last thing to come up, and everyone agrees that they'll need to be settled in the eventual resolution. When discussing the conflict with Arabs, the settlements are the first thing to come up, and everyone agrees they stand in the way of an eventual solution. In the Arab discourse, the existence and expansion of the settlements plays almost the exact same role that terrorism plays in the Israeli discourse.
