^ Well the hardliners / zionists are not helpful.
But Israeli foreign policy is shaped by the fact that they're surrounded by enemies. The heavy handed responses are intended to be a deterrent.
I'm not saying it's right. But I am saying before deciding you hate Israel you should maybe ask yourself what you would do in their position.
It's a fair point, but what is their position? It's basically a colonial state - it's sort of natural they're going to see surrounding countries as enemies, and just as natural for those countries to see the invader as their enemies. As a world we think we've moved beyond colonising now, so the situation is more 'difficult' for us than in our empire days (we assuage ourselves of the colonial 'burden' and then colonise them more effectively with finance anyway (all planned according to cecil
).
Wrong is wrong though - they can't say they want to live in peace while at the same time slyly building more settlements and generally bantustan-ising the fuck out of the place. If they were to say all the refugees they kicked out could come back and give the 67 borders the whole world (minus us cunts and togo) agree they should have, and from there on agree to have a democratic secular state, peace could happen. Unfortunately, the elite seem to calculate it as the old 19th century colonial authorities did: they play the numbers game - given enough time a dodgy occupation becomes a 'fact on the ground', and people will say 'we can't go back' or 'don't blame the problems of yesterday on us, we weren't born', and 'we are where we are' (which is how empires work politically over time). Like if hitler had stayed in czeckoslovakia for 40 years it would have been alright (not a comparison of the invasions, just the time).
The 'poor entrenched israelis' doesn't wash any more really with the size of their war machine, and them being basically on the same side as most of the best armed arab baddies in the neighbourhood (saudi etc). There may have been some justification (if you ignore the occupation itself) for that stance back when there were more independent arab states left (we've nearly finished them off now).
The war propaganda state they created back then stuck though, and it seems they don't know how to get themselves out of it - the lucrative business of the war machine probably has something to do with it, plus the fact that such populations are easier to govern - america's also caught in the same trap (same war machine actually (and us)). The public (always the real victims) also feel the 'benefit' of this propaganda and the nationalism and racism that it naturally marries to with the result that they buy the bollocks their leaders tell them even more than is normal for supine western consumerist democracies like ours. Add to this a bit of a frontier attitude and some racism (many/most israeli jews are obviously 'european' and different to the actual indigens (of whatever religion)).
Whatever israelis think, israel exists in current form directly because america wants it to (though it suits both parties to portray israel as an independent hot-headed country with nukes) - it's a useful pawn on the geopolitical chessboard. In terms of thinking of it as a clash of civilisations, that's as much a western idea as an israeli or jewish one (christian zionists, british israel, neoconservatives etc).
