@Ulzana @Miriamm The West Bank settlements (seen in the last map) are a violation of international law, but in no way justify Hamas' violence.

However, the conflict was launched in 1947 by the Palestinians and their Arab allies through a war of aggression, contrary to international law, with the aim of extinguishing all Jewish life in the region. This war and its goals continue due to the constant Palestinian aggressions to this day and are anti-Semitic and deeply despicable.

@tw @RoterClaus @Miriamm

None of this is simple is the only truth I see today.

@tw @RoterClaus @Miriamm No it is not, because Jews originally came from that region. They were driven away from their homeland by the Romans almost two millennia ago, but they always kept the hope of one day returning to the land of Israel alive in their religion and culture. The antisemitism they experienced in their diaspora eventually led to the rise of Zionism, and in the aftermath of the Shoah, Zionism became a huge mass movements as huge numbers of Jewish survivors just refused to stay in Europe any longer.

Jews and Palestinians used to be the same ethnic group, originally, they just got separated by religion. You find the same "Semitic" faces amongst both Jews and Palestinians, with a few more European features in some of the former, their genetic sequences look very similar, it's just that one group decided to stick to its ancestral tribal religion and got punished for that by the Romans when, after a long series of Jewish rebellions against them, they decided to kick the Jews out of their Holy Land. The Palestinians are the descendants of those who converted to other religions, often peculiar Christian denominations splitting off mainstream Christianity early and never really spreading further than a few dozen kilometres, and eventually, they adopted the Arabic language and an Arabic cultural identiy, most of them becoming Muslims, after the Jordan valley was conquered by the Arabs.

Just like Serbs, Coats, and Bosniaks, are from the same ethnic Serbo-Croatian stock but divided by culture and religion, Jews and Palestinians share a common origin, the only difference is that the Jews were driven from their home and forced to live in the diaspora for so long that without their religion, they would have been assimilated by and absorbed into their surrounding cultures centuries ago. They learned to survive despite all the antisemitism, despite the murders and pogroms, but when the Nazis used modern industrial methods in their effort to murder them all at once, many of the survivors knew they had to return to the land that used to be their own and take it back.

Which of course was a complete disaster for the Palestinians who lived there, and who were now driven from their land. The UN proposed a plan to divide the land between the Israelis and the Arabs, but the Arabs refused, attacking the young nation of Israel and trying to destroy it, and then they lost, several times, and Israel began to occupy the entire West Bank. Then the rise of right-wing religious Zionism happened, and ever since, more and more Jewish settlers have been building settlements in the West Bank. After Rabin was murdered by a right-wing extremist, Israeli governments have been treating the expansion of Israel towards the Jordan river, the fragmentation of the Palestinian landscape and the disenfranchisement of Palestinians, more or less as their G-d given right, quoting scripture to decide which land belongs to Israel, and the two-state solution is basically dead, if it was ever alive in the first place.

What we've got in Israel and Palestine is basically two nations, two nationalisms, claiming the same piece of land for themselves, and both of them actually have legitimate claims, which makes this impossible to resolve IMHO. It is a tragedy, but one for which mostly the long gone empires of ages ago are to blame--and empires could never leave the Jordan valley alone because it is such an important river oasis in an otherwise mostly dry and barren piece of the world, and because it sits in a crucial part of the Eastern Mediterranean shore line connecting North Africa, Asia, and Europe. I fear this will continue until the Jordan dries out, until the entire country becomes a dry, hot, deadly desert forever, and that will eventually happen anyway because of all the CO2 modern industrial civilisation has put into the air. It is an ongoing tragedy, there is no side in this conflict which are the "good guys" and no side which are the "bad guys", although the Hamas and the Hisbollah are ruthless terrorists, and I can't see how this can ever end in any way which is not utter tragedy for everyone--unless the entire idea of nations and nationalism is completely abandoned and forgotten.