Joe, did you really say that Palestinians do not want a state, or did I misread that? Maybe I am out of date, but when I was there in 1998 it was what everyone I spoke to wanted. For them, there would have been no obvious difference between ending the military occupation and setting up a state.
I guess that there might be some ideological confusion sown by the problems the Palestine National Authority has had since then, and also by the confusion between the demands 'two states' and 'democratic and secular state of Palestine' (i.e. embracing both occupied territories and currently Israeli territory), but I am still surprised.
On the question of ‘natural rights’, that seems to me to be a dubious concept, if we are speaking political science, but not really objectionable in popular rhetoric.
‘Indigenous rights’ – I have to say is a very problematic concept, and (referring to my own recent book on the subject, The Aborigines’ Protection Society, Columbia, 2011) one that has in 99 per cent of cases where there have been attempts to give it institutional expression, generally made people worse off, not better off (think, for example, of how Australia’s aborigines have failed to prosper in the reserved territories).
Generally speaking, national rights have a priority over civil rights, because without a national polity there is no institutional structure that can defend civil rights. I can appreciate that Israeli Arabs should wish to defend their rights within the Israeli state, but the record is that Israel is structurally incapable of protecting the rights of its Arab citizens.
[Joe wrote: ‘Probably not, but who knows? (I'm aware of no post-1948 democratic vote or scientific poll that has been conducted among Palestinians as a whole, on anything.) It's certainly not a national consensus in the same way as, say, ending the military occupation of the 1967 territories.’]