Obviously I don’t like terrorism as a method, but at a certain point, it becomes the only option.

No, it’s never the option, and always has blowback that harms the very people in whose interests it was rationalized in the first place.

Go ahead and point to when guerilla attacks on civilians achieved the original aims and didn’t result in retaliatory violence.

Also, to be clear, those camps in all those situations were wrong. Are you defending them?

Did you read my comment before going off on a rant?

The point of discussion was that people being harmed by other people inevitably results in generational retributive violence. And that’s simply not correct.

Nowhere am I saying that the initial violence is a good thing. I’m just pointing out that this sort of rationalization is BS. That’s not how it actually works. (Normal people realize that bad people of an identity group doing bad things doesn’t reflect all people of that identity group, so even if there’s a desire for justice against the specific people that did bad things, that doesn’t translate into a desire to do bad things to any member of that identity group for non-psychopaths.)

Most civilian victims of violence want nothing more than to avoid future violence. They don’t want to commit their lives to more violence.

The exception is religious violence, where there’s a long history of commitment to violence (retributive or not) out of a sense of justice inherent to it and an ‘otherness’ and superiority over anyone that isn’t part of the same religious group.

This is primarily not a religious conflict, it’s territorial and racial.

Oh really now? So how many of the Hamas terrorists attacking civilians in their homes and burning children alive were atheists do you reckon? 50%?

And how many Zionists who refuse to consider any kind of compromise regarding Palestine’s existence are atheist? My guess is not much more than the relative number of atheist Zionists in 66 CE who thought it would be a great idea to rebel against Rome because God was going to be on their side in the resulting conflict.

This is primarily a longstanding religious conflict.

Racial!?! WTF are you talking about? The DNA of Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians is effectively identical. They are the same people. The difference is primarily religious, and extends a bit beyond that to cultural differences. Sure, Ashkenazi and Sephardic only share half the DNA. So that portion of the population are simply partial relatives of the Palestinians, as opposed to effectively the same people ‘racially’ - the equivalent of a half Palestinian.

If at a snap of one’s fingers both sides suddenly became 100% atheist, there’d be nothing more to be fighting about. Just like the many, many peoples throughout history who have had atrocities committed against them by neighbors and yet generations after live in complete peace with one another.

This is almost exclusively a religious conflict, with Jews and Muslims at each other’s necks and with Christians only giving a crap because they think Jerusalem must be inhabited by the Jews for their zombie to float down from the sky. The underlying reasons are much more insane than the more palatable reasons that get talked about publicly by the parties involved, but those insane underlying reasons are the real ones, and the ultimate driving force behind why there will never be peace in the region as long as any of those three motivations have a seat at the negotiating table.