None of this is to say that Israel doesn't have a right to exist or that fringe Palestinian violence is justified. Add to this the fact that it's all being imposed by US-supported military might and you'll understand a small piece of what it is that Palestinians are rejecting. When talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the various perspectives involved, it doesn't take long for grown intelligent people to start talking like kids about who did what to whom, first. But life in Israel and the Occupied Territories is not some John Wayne flick where the forces of heavenly good are up against pure evil. In talking with hundreds of Palestinians from across the West Bank and Gaza, it's clear to me that they too have accepted this reality.
Time brings change.
As I walked around the Old City of Jerusalem, and then in visiting the Wailing Wall, it struck me how wonderful it must feel to be a Jew in a place where you can revel in your Jewish-ness with the relative security that you won't be expelled or exterminated en mass for just being Jewish. And for Palestinians who didn't flee, it has meant 52 years under military occupation by a vastly superior military force. Think Mike Tyson in a fistfight with Elian Gonzales. In the city of Hebron, which is in the West Bank, just down the street from where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Jacob are buried, is the office and home of the Christian Peacemaker Team - a small group of American and Canadian Mennonites. Picture one of those private-gated communities you see in suburban America surrounded by several thousand soldiers with guns, tanks, sandbags, US supplied helicopters and other assorted weaponry.