If only the Palestinians would pull themselves up by their own boot straps!
It's a surprisingly common sentiment. A ton of people just have no idea how things work in Israel and the occupied territories, and assume that Palestinians are poor/disorganized cause of general Arab backwardness or something. A conservative poster here (TA?) said Palestinians need to "assimilate" to modern Israeli society, rather than resist it.
The only problem is that they're not allowed to assimilate. Palestinians don't get Israeli citizenship or the same rights and privileges. They're at the mercy of a government in which they are not represented, which dictates their freedom of movement, land development, access to utilities, etc. It's a government that subjects them to collective punishment and will not grant them either independence or equal rights.
I think this is a big reason Israel takes a ton of shit in the international community. Whatever you think of the legitimacy of other independence movements, you're by and large talking about people who are citizens of the country they're trying to secede from. Tibetans get the benefits of being Chinese, Catalans get the benefits of being Spanish, etc. And while I'm sure there's very real institutionalized bias and racism in a lot of those countries, it's nothing compared to the two-class system which is enforced by statute in Israel. Hence the use of "apartheid" by critics; it might not be underpinned by the same type of racist philosophy, but in practice it's pretty comparable.
Anyways Romney's an ass.