I don't really want to respond to this massively because I can guess who it is and I'd rather not engage with those types anymore than I am absolutely obliged to but settling and settler colonialism are not identical. This was actually an argument in early labour zionism, particularly from Bir Borochov who died days after the Balfour declaration. As far as he saw it, mass colonisation by charter as such would retard the development of the israeli-palestinian economy. What he called for was cultural assimilation of the Arabs (natives of Palestine) and heavy investment of Jewish capital (which was the wrong prognosis but that's neither here nor there.)
the bombings or hamas' bellicose nature, or even the events of black september are peripheral to this. If you read Hanan Ashrawi on this you can see why she was so furious at the reconcilliation letter which granted PLO recognition of the state of Israel, (very good) but the Israeli government only recognised the PLO as the legitimate authority of the Palestinian people, not palestinian statehood. It would be like England we don't recognise the Scottish state, of course, but we recognise the SNP (and only the SNP) as the legitimate representative of the Scottish people. It is doubly ironic that every tom dick and harry in the anglo world has adopted this self-hating inverted nazi paranoid idea that people in the middle east want to nuke israel off the map when that has been Israeli policy wrt Palestine written concretely.
There is no real state solution to this conflict anymore. The single state solution is what is taking place, the generalisation of apartheid to all of historical Palestine, what one might want to call greater Israel (although I am personally reluctant to use that term.) The two state solution is so unlikely simply because of the overwhelming settler ownership of land. How can you ask people to have sovereignty over lands they don't own, and what they own is 15-20% of their historical territories? This is not a state, it's not even a semi-state, it's just a generalisation of the conditions of gaza.
I know you hate blaming the US and whilst I share your sentiments this is really a global imperialist conflict. So far as Palestinians can coexist peacefully with Israelis (I'm almost tempted to say we but I won't grant the zionists the honour of considering their secular nationalist project to be in any way theological) an entire shift of nato, the arab countries and the middle east is necessary. The fact of the matter is, there is no good solution, and your friend engaging in whataboutism under the guise of criticism is heinous. We have to be sober and reasonable here.