OK I'll take the bait.
When you ask "why don't you follow the people?" My answer to you is that we are part of this people. What you like to call "[h]ighly educated, immersed in activism, boasting of Phd's, professors and authors" are part and parcel of the Palestinian people whether we live in exile, most often not by choice but forced, or in the occupied territories. I resent the implication that we are sitting in ivory towers, living in a world of fantasy completely dissociated and disconnected from the reality of life under the occupation and blind to the suffering and immediate needs and aspirations of those languishing under the boots of the Israeli occupation. Being part of the Palestinian body we have every right to engage in a dialog with our people and the rest of the world to propose ideas to reach a just and lasting peace in Palestine/Israel. After all, we have been lectured for decades by the "West" and the so called "civilized world" about the need for democracy and democratic discourse. It seems though that as soon as the results of this democratic discourse do not serve or mesh with what they have in mind then the chastizing, labeling, and accusations start flying.
Four years ago Bush won the presidency by a majority of the popular votes. Should the Democrats have abandoned whatever opposing views they had and follow what the people have expressed through the vote? Why are the Democrats convinced that they have the answers and that those who voted for Bush are wrong or have been duped?
Why should Palestinian society be any different than any other society where a multitude of ideas coexist and interact in a dynamic and healthy way?
To set the record straight, the PLO have always advocated the goal as being a Secular Democratic State. The difference between what the PLO advocated and what most of the One Staters  today think is that the latter talk about a bi-national state recognizing the Israeli Jews as a nation if that is how they prefer to define themselves. The adoption of the Two State formula by the PLO dates to about twenty some years ago. The reasons for this change are multiple and I will spare you the analysis. One major factor though which led the PLO to adopt this solution was pragmatism and a gamble of the US and its willingness to put pressure on Israel to accomplish compliance with UN resolution 242. As the years passed the realization became clearer that the so called "Peace process" was more about process than achieving peace, consequently, many Palestinians who supported the Two State formula had a change of heart and began calling for a return to the old stand especially as the territory of what would be the Palestinian State continued to shrink. Many became convinced that the more concessions Palestinians gave more is being asked from them as is clear from what Condeleeza Rice said when she was recently reminded that the Palestinians already gave up 78% of historic Palestine. Her response was "forget the 78% percent, it's the 22% that are being negotiated". This is the background in a nutshell, and serious simplification, and this is the context which generated increasing calls to abandon the two state formula (the gamble on the US and Israel have proven to be a failure) and a return to the original call of a single Democratic and Secular State.
One thing that strikes me in the article is the assumption that a society is static. In October of 2008, the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center (JMCC) conducted a poll among Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza showing that 43.7% of Palestinians favor a Two State solution while 28.6% prefered a bi-national state and 11.9% preferred a Palestinian state in all of Palestine. The One Staters are not the tiny minority you make them to be. What is even more significant is the fact that the percentage of Two State supporters has dropped 4 points since April 2008 while the supporters of the bi-national option rose by 5 points.
The situation is changing on daily basis, the encroachment on Palestinian land keeps increasing and the "Palestinian" territories keep shrinking as a result. As this happens people's opinions change. So what if Fatah and Hamas (de facto) accept the TSS? Are we all supposed to toe-the-line and stop dissenting or diasgreeing with their ideas? Should the American people have stopped dissenting and demonstrating against the war in Iraq because the Bush was elected by a majority of votes? Should those who were protesting the war in Vietnam stopped their protest because the country's elected leadership was pro-war and escalation?

Gersho Baskin co CEO of IPCRI, explores this topic in an article which appeared today Dec. 15, 2008 in the Jerusalem Post. Here's a link to the article:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1228728209241&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

A single state -- in which Jews, Muslims and Christians live -- has always been the fair solution, but this solution is incompatible with the Zionist objective of a Jewish state.A truly fair solution would require that Jews give up the racist dream on which Israel was founded. 
For Israel's Arab citizens, living in a Jewish state has proved to be much worse than they could have imagined in 1948. Sixty years later, Israel's Arab citizens are prohibited from living in most areas of Israel; in fact, most of them cannot even live in the towns in which they were born, from which they were expelled in 1948. They can't even buy back their own land.

Anyone in the world with a single Jewish grandparent can move to Israel, and even receive a government housing subsidy, but Israel police burst into Palestinian homes and drag out spouses who are accused of being from the nearby West Bank.
The support of Palestinians for a two-state solution -- rather than one state -- is likely based on observations of the current reality of living in a "Jewish state," where laws are so racist that a sea change would be necessary for Arabs to rise even to a level of second class citizenship. If the choice were between a truncated Palestinian state or a single state in which the rights of all citizens were constitutionally protected, I suspect most Palestinians would choose the latter.