Sure, all religious groups in the area have had ties and claims to Jerusalem for Millenia, but the actual nation of Israel was founded in 1948.

If you found a nation on a contested holy site and try to push all the other religious groups out, you will have a huge amount of radical and violent resistance, i’m not really going to support you either.

If the situation was reversed, and the middle east was dominated by jews instead or muslims, and Israel was instead a (somewhat) recently-founded muslim nation surrounded by jewish ones, I wouldn’t feel too bad for the muslim nation that decided to set up shop there and make it your holy capital or something.

Its awful, and the whole religious side of things makes this a never-ending war with no real “moral victor”, but its just hard for me to pretend I don’t see the ridiculousness in all of this. A radical militant group kills/kidnaps 2000 isrealis and the response is to kill 15,000+ palestinians with not just tacit approval but full-blown military support from the largest world powers. We are not even talking about “an eye for an eye making the whole world blind”, we’re talking about trading an eye for a whole human body.

Should Israel have responded? Absolutely. I’m not going to say it should have even been a peaceful response. But what’s happening now is a clear over-correction, a clear attempt to both weaken the Palestinian state as a whole and the Palestinian people themselves. It will breed more violence, and you will inadvertently create groups more radical than hamas, who will point to this and say “they did not go far enough”. The Palestinian people need to reject hamas on their own, and this isn’t going to cause that.