Look, I'm an Israeli, but I've lived outside of Israel for a big part of my life. In that time, some of my good friends were Arabs, and I even got to talk to a few Palestinians. As such, I think that my view can be considered less biased than the average person in the region, but more informed than the average person outside of it.
The simple answer is that both sides are right and both sides are wrong. Most Palestinians do want peace, just like most Israelis. The problem is not the general populations, but those few extremists on each side (but mainly on the Palestinian side). The problem magnifies itself when these extremists become the government (not fully by democratic means). In fact, Hamas did not run on a platform of "killing jews" as most people might think, but on a platform based on social care and welfare, which explains why they fared so well in the elections. What I'm trying to say here, is that most Israeli's and most Palestinians support peace, and the problem is the extremists, which do their best and succeed at stopping the peace proceess! Also in Israel, the slightly more hawkish government that was just elected was not elected as such for their views as much as for the leaders Out of the three candidates for the Prime Minister, one was a former PM which had the Intifada start in his days leading the government, and the other was seen by much of the Israeli public as too fragile and unexperienced (maybe because she was a woman without any real military experience, which in a nation such as Israel is somewhat of a must). This is what lead to Netanyahu, an experienced former prime minister whose main messups seemed to have been forgotten(my personal view... I slightly dislike him), to be re-elected. On the contrary to the popular belief that the right-wing parties got a majority, the left wing actually had that. The problem was internal politics, and Shas, a major religious party which is somewhat left wing in it's policies, had a falling out with the other main candidate, Tzipi Livni (the woman), due to trivial and unrelated matters. Livni's party, Kadima, actually got more votes than Netanyahu's, but Shas, as the tie-breaker, opted to go with Netanyahu. This mini-essay on Israeli politics is just to explain that the in both sides, the extremists are a minority, but due to politics or campaigning platforms unrelated to the issues at hand, find themselves currently in the government.
Now a slightly more biased view: As someone who currently does live in Israel, and in the areas affected by the rockets, I can tell you that in any other nation, this would not be tolerated. Many point to the fact that the death toll in Israel is lower, but that is not because of the rockets being less deadly or anything like that: It is because of the Israeli government's extensive programs to help take care of it's citizens. Every home here has to have a bunker like room, which we have to evacuate to on the sound of the alarm, leaving everything as is. In my area we have 30 seconds, some areas have 10 seconds. We often have briefings and practice alarms on all kinds of situations to make sure that we are ready for everything, and to minimize casualties. In fact, there is a whole corps-like unit in the army who's goal is to research these things and give orders on "what to do if". These rocket attacks are not something occasional: it has been going on for over 8 years, with thousands of rockets raining upon Israel. In fact, when Israel gave the Gaza strip to the Palestinians for full control, the response was not stopping the rockets but an increase in their quantity!
I don't blame the Palestinian people, I know many as I said before, and they are great people, and some of the friendliest I know. But their government is the problem: A government which teaches propaganda in their schools (search for Hamas children's TV on youtube), which fights urban warfare with the purpose of using civilians as human shields, a government which plays PR games more than it does take care of it's people. The problem is that the Palestinians don't know better, they have never had better, so they have nothing to compare it to. THIS is one of the major mistakes of the Israeli government.
Israel is not a perfect angel, no. Far from it, we have extremists too, just like them; we've made our share of mistakes, and when the nation was still young, we made a couple of mistakes that haunt us to this day, but between that and saying that we have no right to exist, between that and what happens today, there is a huge gap, and we have tried to right the wrongs we did back then, Egypt and Jordan seem to think we've managed.
I'm sorry for this rant, It's a lot of things I think when seeing international reaction to things here in Israel, and I tried to be as unbiased as I could (I personally think I'm more neutral than most) but I know that a bit of bias dripped into it...
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About Mint- On Wednesday I'm going to help someone install Linux. I chose Mint as the distro that would probably fit him most... I think I'm gonna be burning a DVD of openSuSE instead...
