I wasn't condoning violence on either side, and every Palestinian that I have personally talked to agrees that the leading government has a lot of problems. But it is undeniable that Israel is an occupying power in a post-colonial era.

Concerning the Nakba, which saw more than 15,000 Palestinians killed, 531 Arab villages destroyed and 750,000 Palestinians forcibly displaced, would you expect an indigenous population to just watch as Zionists claimed the homes and the land they had inhabited for centuries?

There is evidence to support that Israel organized the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon; in the second Intifada (an uprising due to overwhelming oppression and denial of basic human rights) the death toll of Palestinians was more than three times that suffered by Israelis. Israel has and continues to use excessive force, strategically dismantle infrastructure, sever connections between Palestinian villages and harm civilians in the process.

Critiquing Israel is not anti-semitism. But to insist that the Israeli population be justified in inflicting horrors that follow a similar trajectory to what the Jewish people suffered is horrifying. No one denies that the Jewish population has endured an unspeakable tragedy, but that doesn't mean that their actions are infallible. The Zionist movement, as it emerged and persists under right-wing politics, was and is overwhelmingly explicit in its intentions to erase the Palestinian population from their homeland.

This article documents some of the earliest correspondence between Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl (the founder of modern Zionism) and Yusuf Diya, the former mayor of Jerusalem at the time. Diya acknowledges the shared history of the two 'cousins' but insists that the land be left alone, while Herzl disregards that an indigenous Palestinian population ever existed in the land he hoped to claim: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/01/hundred-years-war-palestine-book-rashid-khalidi/