Here are my two cents worth, bearing in mind that I have never stood on the Golan with an Israeli commander etc. etc. and that I'm not a doctor, lawyer, lion tamer, Grand Poobah of the Water Buffaloes or whatever sort of thoroughbred you'd really rather be hearing from right now.
Not me. I'm just an ordinary schmuck. But what the hell: en garde anyway.
For someone who refers heavily to supposed personal experience in the region (I'll give you the benefit of a doubt since my scepticism seems to get your back up and I scare easily: out of courtesy I'll make Vali a doctor too, though I still have my doubts), your a priori determination to find symmetries between the two sides in this conflict leads you into some tortuous reasoning.
Your decision, in the best academic tradition, that both sides must be equally to blame, forces you to adopt a shopping-list approach in which any fault on one side must be counterbalanced by an equal and symmetrical fault on the other side, with the desired final result being that we discover that neither side can be more aggrieved than the other. As a result, the conclusions you reach are only marginally better than what is regularly dished up by the American media by way of 'explanation' for what is going on.
This approach, I think, leads you - forces you - to ignore some basics that are simply going to have to be grasped by anyone who genuinely wants to find a solution. Instead you turn away from the problem entirely on the grounds that both sides are up to their necks in blood and should best be left to sort it out themselves. It's just too much of a moral muddle, you tell us, for outsiders like ourselves to be able to properly sort it out.
The reason I find this approach lacking is the blatant and overwhelming asymmetry that exists on the ground today, as we speak, between the warring parties, and that likewise colors the history of the conflict. The root cause, the Original Sin, the primum mobile as it were (good one, eh??) is and always has been the Occupation. And the Occupation simply cannot be reduced to an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand proposition. One of the sides occupied and occupies the territory of the other side. (Vali dismisses the notion that there was anything like 'Palestinian territory' - and hence Palestinian rights of residence - before Israel was established, but this is a trifling objection, and moreover powerfully self-contradictory in someone who supports the Israeli cause.)
I'm sorry but no matter through what lens you view the events in Mandate Palestine prior to and during the establishment of the State of Israel, a facile symmetry between the actions and moral or political claims of the two sides, and the results at the end of the day, is massively distorting. One population entered the territory of another and threw it out forcibly.
As for the seemingly unkillable canard that the Palestinians left voluntarily or because the armies of neighboring Arab states ordered them to, a post-war internal report from the Haganah (a quasi-official Jewish militia) stated that of 391,000 Palestinians who had fled by June, 1948, some 73 percent had done so in response to Jewish military operations.
To quote Israel's first president, David Ben-Gurion, in a conversation with Zionist Nahum Goldmann:
<!-Quote-!>Quote:We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country." (Reported in Goldmann's book, "The Jewish Paradox.")<!-/Quote-!>
Since that event the asymmetry has been maintained and intensified, with Israel wielding absolute military superiority over the Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries (in no small part due to steadfast US military support - the reasons for which Vali likewise confuses), and exercising near-total control over what the Palestinians can and cannot do, where they can and cannot live, when they can and cannot get jobs, food, medical aid and so on. As for the "fragmented nature of their internal politics," your deliberately vague formulation suggests that this fragmentation is somehow entirely their fault, and has nothing to do with the constant attacks by Israel on any authority the Palestinians choose - or have thrust upon them - as part of whatever 'peace deal' is deemed acceptable to Israel and the US at any given time.
Sorry, but it just ain't 50-50, Farmer Bob. Stop pretending otherwise: Israel is dominant, the Palestinians thoroughly dominated. The reporting we get in the West is similarly unbalanced. Although on this score the Palestinians can get some measure of fair play, with salutary antidotes to Western pro-Israel bias at least available, though not as readily, through Al-Jazeera and other organs.
Of course both sides have engaged in terrorist acts, and while the murder of innocent civilians is a crime by any standards, here too straitjacketing reality into a false symmetry is profoundly distorting. As Noam Chomsky might put it, the difference is between wholesale and retail terror. Israeli terror is exercised on a mass scale and Palestinian terror is exercised on a much smaller, more intimate scale. Granted it doesn't matter much to a victim whether their family is killed by a gunship or a Qassam. But the numbers tell the story, as now in Gaza: 500 Palestinians, 5 Israelis. The thoroughgoing moralist will say it's crass to bandy numbers about such a matter, but I believe they are an important clue about the power available on either side.
Look at the distortion required by the Washington Post on December 30 to impose a Farmer-Bob-style symmetry in reporting events in Gaza. On the front page are two pictures. One shows an Israeli woman, described as distraught over Hamas rocket attacks. The other shows a Palestinian mother who has lost a child to the Israeli assault, alongside another child who has been wounded. At the time Gazan casualties were pegged at 350, Israeli casualties at four. I'm sure living under the threat of Qassams is no picnic, and I'd probably piss myself repeatedly, but come on - you call this tit-for-tat??
I could go on (as I'm sure you wish I would) about Israeli destruction of anything resembling a Palestinian civil society, which isn't remotely matched by anything the Palestinians or Arabs could do or have done to Israel.
The relentless hunt for symmetry is simply an excuse to throw up one's hands at the whole affair and say "who can say who's guilty or innocent any more? They all have blood on their hands. They'll have to sort it out themselves."
To me that attitude of moral relativism is not simply an abdication of the duty to find whatever we can about what is happening in the world: it is also a willing acceptance of a state of ignorance about what is going on, and as such is also an act of complicity in the crimes that must be ignored or diminished in order to produce the bogus "symmetry" that such views are based on.