OK, very very very condensed summation:
Israel has been Jewish for several thousand years. During the Roman occupation of Judea, Jews were oppressed and
the Romans renamed the region Palestine (after the Philistines who also lives there) in order to subvert Jewish authority there. Due to various political upheaval, many Jews left to other countries, but plenty remained. The Muslim/Arab world gained political control of the Middle East and the country known as Palestine was mostly barren desert and third-world conditions.
Around the late 1800's, Zionism spread throughout European Jewry and many fled anti-Jewish communities in Russia and other nations to go home to Israel. They built farms and kibbutzim and communities, and brought technology and other improvements. For the first half of the 20th century, Zionists lobbied hard to remove the British from power (Palestine was then British property) and yeah, there was terrorism from both Jews and Muslims who wanted them out. Around the end of the 1940's, the British finally gave Palestine over to the UN to divide. It was split into a Jewish state (Israel) and an Arab state (Transjordan, now called Jordan).
It was commonly accepted that the Arabs would not condone the existence of a Jewish nation in the middle east, and everyone expected civil war to break out in Israel on Independence Day. Arabs were encouraged to leave to get away from the fighting, with the promise that they would reap the benefits and gain more land (the Jewish land) when the war was over. It was supposed to be pretty short. War did indeed break out on Independence Day, but to everyone's surprise the Jews won. Since then the Arab world has made a concerted sworn effort to "drive the Jews into the sea" and eliminate the Jewish state.
Every war that Israel has fought has been defensive. Israel has no agenda to eliminate Arabs or take over Jordan. But the fact remains that there is ALREADY an Arab-Palestinian state, and it would be suicidal for Israel to stop fighting back from those who are sworn to destroy her.
BTW,
no one was a "Palestinian" before the 1960's. Yasser Arafat coined the term as a political ploy to gain sympathy from the West, and it worked. It's a bogus term so don't believe the hype.
Hope that helps!
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