| This keeps repeated over and over... Most people that voice their opinion on the conflict seem to have very little information / understanding of the reasons and of the current situation. And so do you. Most importantly, people don't know what "Palestine" is. Of course, it's not surprising since there were at least three international efforts to define its borders, all of which failed. Not to mention the sequence of successful and failed land grabs, some more justified than others. So, just to make it more painful for people voicing stupid political opinions: Palestine isn't about nationality (eg. you can be Afro-Palestinian, at least I met a few who identify as such). While Arabs are probably the majority of those who identify as Palestinians, there are also Bedouin for example. Palestine isn't about religion. While most people who identify as Palestinians are Muslims, a bunch are Christian as well as non-religious. Palestine, as a state has no history, so, nobody can trace their roots to some Palestinian ancestry. It's just a romanized Biblical name given by Jews to... iirc the Greek pirates who sometimes pillaged the area around Ashdod / Ashkelon and at some point even had a permanent settlement there, displacing locals. But the knowledge about the pirates wasn't there when the crusaders were in control of that piece of land, and they used the Biblical word for generic "enemy of the kingdom of Israel" to name everything that was not either Jewish or Christian in that general area. Simply because by the time they've arrived in the modern day Israel they've discovered that there aren't a lot of Jews left, so they've assumed that anyone who was there must be the descendant of the enemies of the kingdom of Israel. The modern-day Palestinians were created by UN in two steps: first by approving the partitioning of the territory previously held by the Brits, and second time by granting perpetual status of refugees to those who fled the area after an attempted pogrom that failed and made the perpetrators fear for their own lives. The first group of people was briefly under the governance of Jordan and Egypt, but then those lands fell under Israeli rule, which is the occupation Palestinian supporters are so upset about. Israel faces a difficult decision with these territories as no existing state wants to control them. Israeli far right wants to kick out the locals from these territories and re-settle them with Israeli citizens. Even the very far right, like Rehavam Zehevi didn't imagine doing this through military action though. They had the program they called "transfer", which wanted the locals from the West Bank and Gaza to cede territory in exchange for monetary or some other form of compensation. Israeli left has two different programs: the more realistic one is to separate entirely from the occupied territories, the less realistic is to incorporate the occupied territories into the state of Israel by giving the occupied population Israeli citizenship (this is a very small minority within very tiny Israeli left, basically, just Hadash). So, there are two substantially different groups of people with different motivation: first are the displaced former inhabitants of Yaffo and the like, who want to return to where they used to live in modern day Israel (but they still want to kill all the Jews, so they won't be living in Israel really). And there's the group that lives in the occupied territories, who want to split from Israeli rule (they don't really, but Iran tells them to). Those who live in the occupied territories, if they are smart enough, understand what a shit-show it's going to be when remnants of Israeli governance are removed: poverty amplified by corruption, dysfunctional infrastructure, nonexistent law-enforcement etc. A lot of them try to get Israeli citizenship if they have any chance. There's also the third group: the so-called "Israeli Arabs". Some of them identify as Palestinians, but their interests usually align with one of the two previous groups, except most of these want Israel to stay as it is. Israel, for obvious reasons really, really, doesn't want the first group anywhere near its borders. And, geographically, Gaza has the most refugee camps where people from this group live. This also explains why Gaza is a lot more violent and anti-Semitic in its rhetoric then the West Bank. So, the people who know zilch about the situation on the ground may claim that Hamas only represents 53% or w/e other percentage of Palestinians... they are missing that the other 47% or however many there is are represented by similar but less popular "political" parties, most of which have "liberation of Palestine" in their name. In other words, when it comes to Hamas' goals in terms of vanquishing all the Jews, pretty much everyone in Gaza agrees with them. Their political differences lie along the lines of how much of Sharia law they want to implement or whether communism is good or bad. There isn't a single political entity in Gaza or West Bank for that matter whose political program would be to say "you know what, we are sorry for trying to kill you like three times in fifty years, maybe we should leave that in the past and start fresh as respectful neighbors". That is not in the cards, and as long as this situation is convenient for Iran will never be. |