I think this is true, but I wonder why this olive branch of “right to exist” doesn’t also extend to the Palestinian government? Maybe the Palestinians need a stronger military force to establish their right to exist?
This allowed Israeli extremists to take the reigns, and after three decades of hegemony managed to convince most of the Israeli population that peace is a dangerous pipe dream and any sort of compromise will be met with violence. And to establish facts on the ground which would make a palestinian state practically impossible without rooting out masses of Israelis from their home by force.
The Israeli left kept warning of this scenario, because the end game is either a non democratic jewish state, or a civil war torn single state. This cost the traditional Israeli left (the labor party) to be almost electorally eliminated during these 3 decades. Now the hegemony opinion is that no peace is possible, and the Palestinians are to be basically ignored.
The conflict will continue until one side realizes that it has been utterly defeated. This hasn't happened yet. They have been defeated. They just don't want to admit it.
The right of a homeland for the Palestinians has been recognized since before Israel was even granted statehood by the U.N as part of the two-state solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_solution
The PA has been recognized since the Oslo accords in 1995.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_National_Authority
Hamas in the Gaza strip is not recognized by Israel and its allies, but Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist:
The goal is for both the Israeli and Palestinian states to exist and for there to be peace. An Israeli hegemony over the Palestinian state, with settlers and all, certainly doesn’t help that, and it may be a rational goal of the Palestinian state to become too much of a nuisance to be ignored. If peace means subjugation, I think many Palestinians probably wouldn’t be okay with that. The Palestinians are seeing a lot of “might makes right” arguments right now about why they should just accept subjugation.
For the Palestinians, perhaps reducing the Israeli would increase freedom in the short term. In the longer term, in the absence of Israel, it seems more likely they would end up dominated by either larger neighbors like Lebanon by Syria or experience low-freedom autocracies like Egypt, Iraq, etc.
And if one can understand why Israel would fight for its right to exist as a state, then why should it be surprising that the Palestinian state fights for the same reason?
Instead, the argument is that the observable fact is that continued violence has not helped the palestinian cause.
It simply has not worked.
That's not a moral statement. It is simply the descriptive truth that violence for decades has not helped their cause, and therefore it probably won't in the future.
Why do some Israelis build settlements? I mean, in the middle of what used to be Palestinian-controlled land? What's their goal? Also isn't it super risky/scary?
It seems to me to just be a needless provocation but that makes no sense, why would anyone risk their family's safety just to provoke? I'm clearly missing some key insight.
The land on the Palestinian side of that border are hills. Prior to when Israel conquered that land in 1967, Arab militants/terrorists would take pot shots at and occasionally kill drivers of cars and busses driving along roads in this region. It’s really that small, single digit miles wide. Apparently school busses were a favorite since they are large bright targets.
The settlements were originally limited in number and designed to offer the Israelis opportunity for physical security. This is still the case today when the preferred weapon of militants/terrorist is missiles.
After 1973 when the Right came to power the settlements adopted a religious connotation. They were massively expanded as a conscious effort to absorb the entire West Bank. Since then the problem has only deepened.
While many Israeli Jews (likely a majority) acknowledge that the West Bank is "occupied", technically, according to international law, for the above reasons, they insist that Israel has a legitimate claim to it. The West Bank is in Israel commonly referred to as "Judea and Samaria" because those are the names used in the Torah.
The goal of the settlements is to create "facts on the ground" to make it harder for future governments to relinquish the occupied Palestinian territories. As Israel's former prime minister Ariel Sharon phrased it: "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many [Palestinian] hilltops as they can to enlarge the [Jewish] settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." This is precisely why it is considered a war crime for an occupying power to transfer parts of its civilian population into occupied territory.
Most Israeli settlers live in settlement blocs and it is not dangerous for the setters to live in them. A smaller number of settlers are religious extremists and they establish "outposts" - settlements built without explicit permission by the government. These settlers are often well-armed and coordinate with the Israeli military. Palestinians, on the other hand, are for the most part not allowed to own firearms.
I do really wish my people's country could come up in the news without people breaking out in Zionism Derangement Syndrome in the comments, insisting genocide refugees are colonizers and racism is when we don't force minorities to fight in the army if they don't support the state. It brings to mind that academic crank who once said Israeli soldiers are racist for not raping Palestinian women. This kind of ZDS is why Netanyahu keeps winning -- it's all Israelis and Jews hear from people in other countries, and it affects our discourse.