Israel vs. Hamas by the numbers.

[lapfog_1]

22. and that depends on who "they" are or consider themselves to be.

"Many Palestinian villagers claim ancestral ties to Arab tribes that settled in Palestine during or after the Arab conquest"

so the Palestinians, if you ask them, consider themselves to be descendants of the Arab conquest. I.E. after the 6th century CE. Long after the Jewish people established the kingdom of Israel ( King David and all that ) which was 1000 years before the Arab conquest.

In any event, after 1946, the state of Israel was established because

a) the rest of the world, while horrified at the holocaust, did NOT want the Jews in their country.

and

b) It was believed the only way Jews could live and be free was if they lived in a majority Jewish state... so that the power the state would not discriminate against them because of their religion.

like it or not, that is the history.

Of course, it would have been much better if they ( the British that controlled the region after WW1 and WW2 ) had gone to the Palestinian people and said "How much do you want for your land?" and paid them whatever was demanded. Instead, as has been the practice over the thousands of years in that land, the British had no thought of paying Palestinians for the "worthless desert" and left as soon as was expedient having "done their duty". The UN concurred (again without the consent of the Palestinians ).

Now we are almost 80 years past that time and how many wars and skirmishes? How many terrorist attacks?

And every time there is a war the Arabs have lost ( yes because the USA and others help Israel with money and military hardware, but also because Israel, up until now, has been very smart in their war efforts ). Now almost all of the Arab nations recognize Israel right to exist, and while sympathetic to the Palestinians, not one surrounding nation has offered the Palestinians sanctuary... even while Gaza is being bombed. It is almost as if the Palestinians are now the Jews of the Muslim world... like the way the Christian nations of the west treated the Jews when they were fleeing the holocaust.