Reply #67: Yes, I do.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

:- "The Palestinians" are *not* trying to kill him. Some Palestinian militant factions are trying to kill him.

:- Many of the Palestinians are, at least nominally, in favour of attacks meant to kill him and civilians like him.

:- The number of Palestinians who, if you introduced him to them, and said "there is going to be a rocket attack, would you rather he died in it or not" is far smaller than the number in favour of rocket attacks intended to kill people like him.

:- There are, I think, two main reasons Palestinians support attacks on Israelis.

:- One is that they hope that if they can make the Israelis suffer enough then it will force the Israelis to stop making them suffer.

:- I do not think this will work.

:- The other is that an awful lot of them have already suffered an awful lot at the hands of the Israelis - an order of magnitude more than most Israelis have suffered at the hands of the Palestinians. As such, many of them are - completely justifiably - very, very angry at the Israelis, and - unjustifiably, in my view - want to make the Israelis suffer in revenge.

:- I suspect that they tend to blame Israel, rather than specific Israelis, for their suffering, and as such they regard any Israeli as a target for revenge.

:- This doesn't seem to make peaceful interaction on a personal level between Israelis and Palestinians impossible - once you categorise someone as "Simon the grocer" rather than "an Israeli" it becomes easier to realise that he's not the person you want revenge on, even if you still nominally support attacks on Israelis.

:- On the other hand, Israel is a democracy, and I think that every Israeli who has ever voted for any other than the most pro-peace, pro-concessions candidates in elections, or served in the IDF, is in some measure complicit in the crimes of the Israeli state, although this does not in any way justify attacks against them.

:- The only way to make your son understand why the Palestinians feel the way they do about Israelis is to make him - and yourself - understand what Israel has done to the Palestinians , or - if you can't face changing your views to that extent - what the Palestinians feel Israel has done to them.

:- As to why the Palestinians can't come to a peace agreement among themselves - the Palestinians don't have a functioning state - that's partly their own fault, and partly Israel's. In a situation like that, the people who obtain power are those who want power and are willing to take it by force, and such people are naturally going to fight one another for power.