HomerianSymphony

They were young people who were gathered for a music concert.

Israel has compulsory military service for young people, so many of them were enlisted in the military. That doesn't change the fact that they were young.

the powers that be (UK and US primarily) already have control of the area (still Mandatory Palestine), and a desire to maintain control of the area, they decide to give most of that land to the Jews and call it Israel.

Israel wasn't created by the UK or the US (or the UN). Israelis declared the state of Israel themselves after seizing territory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

The UN did have a plan to create an Israel in 1947, but that didn't happen, because neither the Jews, the Arabs, nor the UK were on board.

but Israel doesn't get to say they want to control the entire region?

What do you mean Israel doesn't "get" to say that?

Israel does say that, and Israel does control the entire region, and almost every Western power allows them to.

I think a Two-State Solution would be a good idea (and I have opinions on exactly where the border should go), but it will have to be imposed on Israel by the international community.

Israel has never been sincere about a Two-State solution, and their "offers" to Palestine have been inadequate and unworkable, and the Palestinians have been right to reject them because there's no point in accepting a deal that won't lead to peace. Only a fair and workable deal can lead to peace.

Israel has demonstrated that they are an illegitimate state, because legitimate states do not bomb the stateless people living within their borders. At this point we should be treating Israel like Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. The Israeli military should be placed under foreign control, and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza returned to the Palestinians.

So far, the only thing stopping this from happening has been the United States' support for Israel.

Israel needs to realize that the United States is rapidly declining in power, and if Israel doesn't voluntarily cede the Palestinian territories, Israel might not exist at all in the near future.

Just to be clear, Hamas does not want to eradicate the Jews. That is a myth propagated by Israel.

Hamas wants to eliminate Israel, by which they mean they want Israel replaced by an Arab-majority state in which both Jews and Arabs live. (Hamas want the return of 4 million Palestinian refugees to Israel/Palestine, which would make it an Arab-majority state.)

Furthermore, they have indicated they are open to negotiating a Two-State solution.

I don't think it makes any sense to portray Hamas as unreasonable for wanting Arabs to control the whole land (from the river to the sea) when Israel want the same thing for Jews.

I wasn't implying that.

Israel struck first in the Six Days War.

Over a shipping route.

If Hamas were Sunni muslims instead of Shia

Hamas are Sunni.

Hezbollah are Shia.

There's something else I want to mention.

In 1947, the UN attempted to sort out Britain's mess by creating a "partition plan" in which the land would be split between a state of Israel and a state of Palestine.

Though adopted as a UN resolution, it was never implemented, and the aforementioned civil war broke out instead.

I just mention this because I find a lot of people are under the misimpression that Israel was created by the UN in 1947 as some kind of compensation for the Holocaust, and that's not what happened.

Another correction: The attack that killed 1200 Israelis, 33% of which were legitimate military targets and 66% of which were civilians.

I never said they were civilians.

In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn't want to deal with

That's not what happened.

Firstly, the Balfour Declaration was in 1917, during World War I. By 1948, the Jews were already living there, and fighting for the land.

Secondly, Britain never partitioned the land, and never announced any intention to partition the land. (Things might have been very different if they had.) I think you're getting confused with the UN's partition plan, which was never implemented.

There are no "good guys" in a conflict between religious people.

Religion does play a role in the conflict, particularly over the question of where the border between an Israeli and Palestian state should go (so that holy sites end up on the appropriate side), but I don't think it's very useful to understand this as a religious conflict.

The Jews who moved to Israel in the early 20th century weren't pilgrims. They were refugees fleeing political persecution. The founder of Zionism wasn't even religious.

And Israel didn't happen because religious Jews enthusiastically got behind the idea of Zionism. Israel happened because Britain got behind the idea of Zionism.

Because the Crusdaes of the 11th to 13th centuries still loom large in Western culture (Richard the Lionheart and all that), I think Westerners have a tendency to think that the situation in Israel/Palestine is a continuation of those conflicts. But it's really not. It's a 20th century creation.