Israel and the right to exist

At the heart of the seemingly interminable crisis in the Levant is the legitimacy of a Jewish state in Palestine. We in the West are confounded by Arab resistance to this idea, yet if we put ourselves in their shoes, it quickly becomes obvious why they resist:

An essentially European state has been imposed on the Arab World. A Jewish state has been imposed on the Muslim world. And a colonialist, settler state has been imposed on a region long bedeviled by imperialism, a state created in part by ethnically cleansing 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Recognizing all this, it becomes difficult to understand how Arabs could be anything but deeply hostile toward what they must see as an alien body in their midst.

The fact that Hamas and Hezbollah hold this view should be accepted as natural and should not deter including them in the negotiations for a stable settlement. After all, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apparently believes all Palestine rightly belongs to the Jews. He is willing to cede land to the Palestinians only because if all Palestine were included in Israel the ethnic integrity of his country would be seriously compromised by the addition of two million Arabs, thus defeating the whole point of a Jewish state. His attitude hardly differs from Hamas's, yet this does not bother us in the least.

We suffer, it seems, from an inability, or perhaps a refusal, to empathize with the Arab street. This is proving dangerous as NGOs like Hamas and Hezbollah become increasingly popular with ordinary Arabs while their dictatorial governments, the people we choose to deal with, become increasingly distanced from their populations. We don't have to accept the proposition that a colonial, Jewish state in the Arab, Muslim world is illegitimate, but we must accept that, whether we like it or not, Arabs have good reason for believing so. Until the West, and that includes Israel of course, come to terms with this, we will never get at the root of the problem.