Nice post bandy.
Hamas only has the "power" it does in Gaza because of Israel. Israel is a rogue nation, by all modern definitions a terrorist state, founded in a manner that, just for reference, Daesh tried to emulate. The current ruling political party is directly descended from the radical paramilitary groups that were classified by "the West" as terrorist organizations, and who wrote in support of Stalin, and who offered military aid to Hitler in the Middle East. They invented the current country with uncompromising brutality, openly promoting ethnic cleansing, based on a ludicrously distant historical reality understood mostly through myth and nostalgia. They crassly exploit Judaism to justify their dominion. They are butchers, murders, psychopaths, killers, torturers, and misogynists. They brainwash their own youth with programs explicitly designed to foment hatred and bloodlust while they live in a relative lap of luxury. The fear comes from losing that, from becoming like Palestinians, and they must kill Palestinians to preserve their privilege, which, of course, is their God-given right.
All a Palestinian needs to convince them to take up arms is to live as a Palestinian. Israel has long sponsored an intense program of fear they instill in their own populace in order to keep them in line. Israeli "liberals" who oppose the occupation, and yet live their lives in cafes in Tel Aviv and shop at luxury clothing stores in West Jerusalem, promote the false narrative that Israel is a democratic state that "tolerates" dissident voices. All the while they construct a horrifying "security" apparatus that is really designed for human herding. They've created an entire slave population that is kept in pens, literally, forced through narrow cement corridors, made to strip naked in pits regardless of age or gender, sometimes tortured, sometimes let pass, sometimes a gun put to their head, sometimes receiving little more than a glance from their masters. When they finally make it home, after a day of grueling labour and 3-6 hours of humiliation and terror on the commute, they are greeted in the afternoon with tear gas being shot into their homes, at their children, into their playgrounds and football cages, down their main drags where they eat and socialize.
What often gets lost in all of this is that most Palestinians actually work in 48, they work in the settlements, they are the builders of their own occupation. Yes, they can be conservative, but they also have a centrist party that governs the West Bank, and a still-present secular leftist party. Most Palestinians are too tired to fight, too exhausted to move. Your options basically, are to either join up with the Islamists or Fatah, work your ass off as a labourer and watch the people you love get slowly picked off around you, be born into a position of tribal importance, or collaborate with the occupation. If you're a farmer, forget it. Israelis will spray your crops with herbicide and kill them, they'll burn down your stables, your barns, your house. They'll requisition your crops and leave you with nothing.
Israel has no redeeming quality. Its very foundations are rotten with hate, blood, and a thirst for power. Israelis are people, and people cannot help but be human. I actually understand most of the decision-making, on a human level, and I get that it's already too late now, just like it was too late in the USA. Smaller territory, lots of examples to work from, it happened really quickly. That doesn't make it OK. It's not the Israeli people, as individuals or as humans, its Israel, a nation that defines its people so strictly, and whose people readily accept that definition for the sake of their own comforts, privileges, sense of security, etc.
Just a last note, the racisms and ethnic biases in 48 and the settlements are not just against Palestinians, but very much against all minority groups in Israel. The current regime is not even conservative enough for some. I was in West Jerusalem when there were Haredi riots, burning and smashing shops and cars over a euthanasia case. I was in East Jerusalem when settlers came into the old city and looted and destroyed a church in the Christian quarter, writing anti-Christian slurs in red paint and destroying artifacts that were hundreds if not thousands of years old. And I was only there a few weeks. Ethiopian Jews are treated as second-class citizens, they aren't given citizenship like folks of Ashkenazi descent, for instance. They are given work permits and the work the same jobs as Palestinians. They also work the especially shit jobs at the checkpoints. So you have one oppressed group made to oppress another.
I could obviously go on, but anyone who feels like "there are good people on both sides" and takes some kind of supposed "balanced" view of the tyranny of Israel is not really paying attention. It is by its definition imbalanced, and that the global community continues to tolerate it is one of humanity's many great shames.
