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I also sympathize with both Israelis and Palestinians. The problems are numerous, starting with the creation of the Jewish state. What the UN should have done was to create two states side-by-side, a Palestine and an Israel. Sometimes the argument gets a little muddled as many think that Israel was carved out of the country of Palestine when at the time it was British territory. There hadn't been a Palestine or an Israel in thousands of years.

But that's beside the point since it did end up displacing many Palestinians from their homes, regardless of its geographic identity. For quite a long time they had lived dispersed among the various Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Syria for instance. Jordan, in particular, is heavily populated with Palestinians (if memory serves, about half) which is why you hear a number of proposals that any Palestinian homeland could be coupled to Jordan. It wasn't until much later that many of the Palestinians gathered together into what is now the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel eventually annexed as a result of an Arab invasion to use as a buffer zone, Israel being only 10 miles wide at its thinnest point. Yassir Arafat, for instance, spent most of his life in Egypt.

Here's where much of the injustice comes in from the Palestinians' own brothers. The people were encouraged to stay away from building towns and cities as much as they could, creating camps instead, to prevent the people from settling in, always guaranteeing that eventually Israelis would be driven into the sea and that the people could go home. It's tough to live in a refugee camp for generations. The Arab countries, themselves, flush with oil revenue could have easily taken care of them keeping them in fairly comfortable conditions, but a combination of graft and outright theft kept much of the money away from the actual people. Then there's the politics. The Arab countries in a way deliberately kept the Palestinian people in squalor for the reason of fanning the flames of hatred towards Israel. With the monarchies in the Middle East, you have a lot of very unpopular governments. They had to deflect anger away from themselves, so the Jewish state was a natural target for that anger. Decades of madrassas taught people to hate the Jews and to hate America, blaming them for every problem, despite the fact that America and Israel are some of the Palestinian's greatest benefactors, supplying them with hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

The situation now could be the closest we've come to an actual settlement between Israel and Palestine since 1948. The Palestinians have a government of their own, though it is a very divided government with a Fatah president and a Hamas Prime Minister. Part of that was Fatah's own problem. In the elections where pluralities ruled, Fatah often ran two or three candidates on the same ballot while Hamas wisely ran one. The divided vote ended up handing the legislature to Hamas even though Fatah actually won more votes. The problems between the two groups is nothing like what we think of when we think of political parties. Here, their disagreements are decided with firefights, not debates. Not surprising, I suppose, since both started life as resistance groups, not political parties. So in part, the divided government has kept the Palestinians from speaking with one voice, making an agreement with Israel much harder. Also the fact that Hamas refuses to recognize Israel and still actively advocates the destruction of the Jewish state has caused more headaches whereas Fatah was willing to recognize Israel to get its own country.

I feel, perhaps naively, that when the Palestinians can settle their own internal disputes, then perhaps the way could be open to an agreement. That would go a long way towards defusing the entire Middle East, though the hatred will still likely go beyond any of our lifetimes. The important thing, there, is to give the Palestinians their own homeland so that they can concentrate more on bettering their own lives than ending the lives of Israelis.