In pondering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in discussions I have had, I have found that very few people actually have a basic understanding of the conflict nor could they provide a definitions of the conflict even in rough approximating terms.
Thus one sometimes hears that it is all about Arab/Palestinian ‘terrorism’ and suicide bombings and the ultimate goal of the terrorists-Palestinians is to ‘push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive” and that their motives are those of anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews. Those who hold this view see the conflict as one of the survival of the Jewish state amid a sea of irrational hatred.
That is the view of the Zionists, and the view propagated by Israel, and the one they would like for the world to accept.
One also hears that the conflict is a religious one between Jews and Arabs and that it has been continuous for ‘thousands of years’.