A short post about why I sympathize with Palestinians even when they do terrible things.
Seventy years ago the Palestinians had a real home. It was stolen from them by force.
That was colonialism plain and simple. In the middle of the 20th century, Britain, France and their American business partners had spent so much time carving up the ME like their personal fiefdoms that stealing the land to make Israel was just business as usual. That is the broader context which Americans have been so much quicker to forget than the nations of the ME.
Anyone could have predicted that taking that land would lead to decades or even centuries of bloody conflict, but they didn't care.
They didn't care because they knew we are more powerful. They didn't care because they knew we would win the wars, that the Muslims would suffer more.
I don't doubt the Arab world would have done the same thing to Europe had the power disparity been reversed. I certainly don't see Muslims as generally better than Christians or Jews. All three religions are generally used to stir up hate against the "other" side.
But, in this case the Muslims got the short end of the stick, and the state of Israel is obviously historically rooted in an evil act of terror and violence, the forcible theft of a prime piece of land. It is maintained by further evil, capital punishment for a whole population which is understandably upset.
A level of evil one step below the Holocaust at best.
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