Ridiculous, moronic and totally ignorant statement albeit typical of some, fortunately a minority, on here who love to spout cliches about this situation.
Israel is a democratic state, founded democratically by a vote at the UN. It's amusing how those who decry Israel for not accepting UN resolutions, refuse to accept the most crucial one in the history of the region and also fail to recognise that the actions of the Arab bloc had consequences. As actions do.
Had the Arab side accepted partition, things may have turned out differently. But they didn't, and that led to them (a) attacking Israel en masse, (b) losing quite a bit of the territory assigned to them in the Partition Plan and (c) creating a lot of refugees among the Palestinian people in the former Mandate. No war, no refugees.
After 1948, Gaza was under military occupation, but by Egypt, not Israel, and the West Bank was annexed, not by Israeli settlers but by Jordan. But the people screaming about Israel "occupying" Gaza and creeping annexation of the West Bank didn't seem to get too incensed about that. And if the 1948 war had turned out differentl, with a total Arab victory, then the territory would have been claimed by Syria, as part of its fantasy 'Greater Syria', which included most of that part of the world and even parts of the Arabian Peninsula.
Nasser rattled his sabres in 1967 and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and forcing the removal of the UN peacekeeping force in Sinai, despite Israel making it clear that these would be a causus belli. Yet he still went ahead and did that, leading to the Six Day War. That left Israel in control of Gaza and the West Bank, leading to the current situation. Actions, yet again, having consequences.
Then there was the rise of Palestinian terrorism, leading to the Munich Olympic massacre in 1972 and other notorious events. Followed by the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel was attacked without provocation.
That's not to excuse the actions of the more recent Israeli governments, fuelled by the rise of the right-wing settler movement and the governments that have enabled and encouraged that. And of course those actions have had consequences as well.
And the notion that Hamas are somehow noble freedom fighters is completely simplistic and utterly wrong. Hamas clearly don't care one bit for their fellow Palestinian. In fact, as we're seeing now, they see hem as collateral damage in a wider ideological struggle financed and fuelled by the religious fanatics in Iran (who aren't even Arabs). The more innocents who die, the more they run their hands in glee and capitalise on it via their propagenda.
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