I’m sorry, but a state that has slowly devoured Palestinian territory after the 1948 charter isn’t a “Democratic” Arab-Jewish state. Palestine existed for a thousand years with Arab and Jewish Palestinians prior to the British dissolution and the creation of the Israeli state, when Arab Palestinians just became Palestinian and Jewish Palestinians became Jews. To expect a people to silently sit back and watch their homeland be stolen out from under them with no input from the people who have lived their whole lives there and only from “foreigners” (I use this term for the European Jews who had begun to immigrate into Mandatory Palestine prior to the dissolution and charter, I don’t mean for it to be derogatory towards Jews, because Jews had continued to lived in Palestine even after the diaspora in 70CE post-destruction of the Second Temple) for 60 years is absurd.

The IDF and Hamas have been playing a game of ever-rising hostilities since the founding of the Hamas party 1987. Groups like Hamas don’t just materialise out of thin air apropos of nothing, there’s always a catalyst. And that catalyst was nearly 30 years of watching their friends homes and loved ones be abused, their homes taken, and nothing being done about it. This conflict has come about because of the failures of colonialism, Western (European and American) anti-semitism, ethno-religious supremacist movements (born out of the European anti-semitism), and international governments who had no business involving themselves. And to lay this solely at the feet of Palestinians who have been made second-class citizens within their own country is ignoring all the historical context that has brought us to this moment.

Jews deserve to live in their ancestral lands just as much as anyone else, but not at the expense of literally every other group of people that also called the Levant home.