Why throw away Israel for a bowl of soup?

Why throw away Israel – the 78% of Palestine absorbed in 1949 -- for a bowl of soup – the 5%?  If by some sorcerer’s black magic the 78% went missing one morning – what would the 5% of misappropriated West Bank land amount to – a big Jewish neighborhood?

New York demographics: ”After dropping from a peak of 2.5 million in the 1950s to a low of 1.4 million in 2002 the population of Jews in the New York metropolitan area grew to 1.54 million in 2011.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City#Jewish

400,000 Jews in the West Bank -- maybe not even so big.

I compare Israel’s fetish with West Bank settlements with the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) fetish with Northern Ireland’s six counties – to a native New Yorker, just a big British neighborhood.  I’d love to ask the IRA dopes: If Ireland were not an island (as in surrounded by water), how would they know that the six counties were Irish?  :-)

Approaching 50 years of infinitely more serious – and totally self-imposed -- “troubles” for a little more land in the sand, must Israel go on forever being as dumb as the IRA?