Introduction

The Judeo-Islamic conflict has engulfed an entire generation of Jews and Arabs in a cycle of violence, as the Jewish state struggles with a league of mostly Arab nations that are defending the cause of Islam in historical Palestine.

While the earlier stages of the Judeo-Islamic conflict were terrorized by complete Muslim refusal to accept the existence of any Jewish state in the Middle East, the current generation of leading politicians in Muslim countries has shown willingness to end the conflict and restore law and order in the Middle East. The landmark document of this new era is the peace initiative of the Arab League, in which Arab countries promise to end all hostilities if Israel respects the Green Line borders of the Jewish state.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beirut_Summit)

Israel has dismissed this peace proposal, mostly because during the past 40 years it has invested huge amounts of money into illegal Jewish settlements outside of the pre-1967 borders of the country (in the hope that when the international community notices the huge value of these Jewish investments, it will inspire international sympathy for the Jewish plans to annex those Arab territories, as a spoil of war). Ariel Sharon summarized this belief and political strategy in the words: “Everything that we take now will stay ours [because the international community will be impressed by the high economical value of our investments]... everything that we don’t grab will go to them [Palestinians].”
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Sharon)

The successful psychological outcome of this 40-year-old policy is that today the majority of honest and law-abiding Israeli citizens view the illegal Jewish settlements on Arab lands as self-evident and legal property of Jews, unable to even imagine that any crime would have taken place. Also many western democracies, such as the United States, are more impressed by the enormous economical value of Jewish investments than the uncomfortable fact that they are illegal according to international law (which does not authorize unilateral annexation of territories conquered in war), and the governments who authorized the investments were consciously breaking the law, knowing what they were doing and why.

The Israeli side of the conflict wants to portray itself as a democracy that respects law and order, labelling Palestinian Arabs as lawless terrorists. Israel has shown very little respect to the laws of land ownership, however, and lands legally belonging to Arabs (beyond the pre-1967 borders) are generally treated as Jewish property.

In retaliation for the Israeli confiscations of Arab lands, Palestinians have resorted to violent struggle, and this in turn has incurred violent vengeances by the Israeli army.

Israel has recently been increasingly successful in convincing to the western world that the original and only source of problems in the Middle East is Islamic extremism and Arab violence against innocent and peaceful Jews. It must be noted, however, that it is typical behaviour for humans everywhere in the world to resort to violence when something is taken by force from an entire ethnic group.