In the Great War, the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany and lost. As a consequence, the Ottoman Empire was broken up in a series of "excessively punitive" treaties by the Allies, one of which prompted a revolution that resulted in the formation of Turkey and another few chunks of the British Empire being returned to indigenous rule. One of these chunks that had to be dealt with is an area that has been called Philistine, the Kingdon of Judah, Syria, Ieudea, lower Tiberias, Palestine Prima/Secunda/Tertia, Filastin, Damascus-Syria, Acre-Beirut-Nablus, the Jerusalem sanjak, and/or Palestine.
The League of Nations eventually managed to mandate some loosely organized area of another loosely organized area, Transjordan. This did not guarantee any sort of territorial stability, and the history of the ownership region remains in dispute. But one important part of this Mandate is relevant:
The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.
However, through the history of this mandate the French, the British, and neighboring Arab states all forced the Jews living there to relocate many times to appease the French and British's pet schemes for balancing the region between their respective empires. To repeat: The forced relocation of Jews was rampant in the region of Palestine throughout the first half of the 20th century.
And the Jews in Palestine were many and numerous. Cities with Hebrew names like Netanya, Tel Aviv, Bat Yam, Rehovot, Ashdod, Nir Yizhyq, Elat, En Yahav, En-gedi, Shermesh, etc., and the vast swaths of irrigated farmland in the region did not arise in a vacuum. Hundreds of thousands of Jews lived in the area - indeed, the efforts of many of these Jews are almost solely responsible for making the region livable in the 20th century.
When the United Nations was formed, most of the "relevant players" in the Middle East eagerly signed on. Britain, France, the United Arab Republic (today Syria and Egypt), Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia joined, agreed to abide by its rules, work together on its laws and mandates, and build a global community together. At the time, Britain "officially" owned Palestine in the eyes of the world, but Britain agreed to cede the region to the United Nations so that the world could agree on a solution to what was then known as "the Jewish question."
That should immediately end any question of Israel's "legitimacy as a state." Each of these nations contractually obligated their governments to work with and agree to the laws of the United Nations.
On May 14th, 1948, David Ben-Gurion accepted the independence of the state of Israel as the result of a majority vote in the United Nations and announced this to his people. On May 15th, 1948, Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, declared war.
This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.
---Azzam Pasha, <24 hours after the establishment of Israel
And since that day - since a democratic decision over a patch of land handed over to the United Nations by its legal owners with the intent of benefiting those who lived there, cultivated it, and did the work necessary to make the land livable was violated in an act of pure, genocidal ethnocentrism and greed by the Arab League in the explicit interest of wiping millions of people and the nation of Israel off the face of the earth - Israel has been the bad guy.
Just before this decision was made, Palestine had attempted to help Hitler implement the Final Solution in the Middle East. Just after Israel's formation (less than a day, in fact) several Arab governments announced the goal of genocide of the Israeli people - one of those early declarations was made by the man who would later found the "freedom-fighting" organization known as the PLO. On that same day, those same nations expelled 750,000 Jews from their borders and urged Arab Israelis (who were not expelled from their land by the formation of Israel) to flee so as to "not get in the way of the seven invading armies." In 1967, much of the Middle East launched another failed genocidal war against Israel, and another in 1973; in 2001, Osama bin Laden declared an "international struggle" against Israel. In each case, Israel ceded land, restored original borders, and refused to push campaigns further in the name of peace.
Over those same years, roughly 1,000 terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians occurred within Israel. In 2000, peace was almost achieved in Geneva - until the sick joke of an organization Fatah (now called, in another sick joke, "moderate" by the media today) simply walked out of the peace negotiations. The deal in question would have given Palestine 97% of the land it wanted, $30 billion in aid, and a security guarantee. Fatah didn't even offer a counter-deal - it just declared an Intifadah and went home, where it was in turn ousted by the Palestinian electorate for not doing enough in the name of the genocide of the people of Israel. Enter Hamas.
Well, not really "enter" - Hamas has been around in many forms and in many nations for awhile - but when the organization came to power, its first goal was to make it clear to its constituents that genocide was a number one priority. Thus, it should be unsurprising that the Hamas Constitution contains a legally binding mandate to drive for the extermination of Israel. As soon as possible, Hamas began firing homemade rockets towards Israeli civilian centers.
It is a lie that only three Israeli civilians have been killed by the Qassam rockets. 59 civilians and counting have been killed since 2006 - women, children, the elderly, soldiers, Israelis, Italians, Americans, a French teenager, an Ecuadorian, and others have been literally ripped to shreds by Qassam and Russian-made/Iranian-provided Katyusha rockets. Thousands of rockets have been fired, with the deliberate intent to massacre the innocent.
There are only so many windows of ones' childrens' rooms blown out by rocket impacts one can handle. There are only so many innocent people reduced to piles of flesh by suicide bombs full of nails and bolts that won't provoke a massive response. The lives of everyone entrusted to you can be deliberately endangered by genocidal, theocratic maniacs for only so long before your patience runs out.
Any claims of Israeli "overreaction" are pure fraud. You have probably heard the brainless dupes of Muslim terrorism argue that Israel should engage in a "proportional" response to Hamas; that is, they should only be allowed to engage their mortal enemy with the same flimsy hand-me-downs that Hamas has been attempting to exterminate Israel with for the better part of this millennium. Their sense of scale is completely off. The last thing on earth these credulous, gullible supporters of genocide would want would be for Israel to engage in the kinds of "proportional response" they think they want to see. Israel's neighbors have called for nothing less than the systematic extermination of its entire population (including, in some cases, the Arabs in Israel who comprised about one-fourth of its population). If Israel were to engage in an "appropriately proportional response" to the acts and intents of the Arab world, there would be a swath of scorched earth from Cairo to Tehran, from Beirut to Medina.
If you are so stupid as to cheer on the innocent mass murderers-in-waiting in Palestine as they valiantly defend their right to slaughter Israeli children, at least be thankful that Israel has routinely chosen not to be proportionally responsive to the scale of murder that you zealously pine for. Thank whomever you so choose that the Israeli military is morally superior to you in at least this respect.
If you support the majority-elected government of Hamas, you are a fool. If you think Israel shouldn't "overreact" to a half-century of provocation and attempted genocide, you have never had the life of a friend or loved one endangered - or are at least too sociopathic in nature to be taken seriously for being unable to empathize with such a situation. If you think it is somehow "Israel's fault" that every Palestinian government has either walked out on or outright violated any and every terms of peace in their history; that the rest of the Middle East won't pick up the tab for their fellow Arabs in Palestine but rather leave that to Israel and the U.N.; that the government of Palestine has proudly announced its use of human shields in every conflict thus far; you are a willing foot soldier in an army on the wrong side of morality, and clearly so to everyone who does not have a cult-like faith in everything opposed to civilization to defend.
Every Western supporter of Hamas must explain what is so ethical about using human beings as body armor and using civilian areas as firing points. You must explain why democratically-made decisions are inferior to authoritarian ones, why genocidal intent should be rewarded in the court of world opinion, and what exactly is so great about this particular version of fascistic theocracy (except the fact that you shall never have to live under it or experience the world it wants to bring to you). You must explain why the slaughter of civilians should be rewarded, why the violation of peace treaties and the deliberate refusal to engage in peace talks should be rewarded, and why murder should carry the great incentives you want to give to Hamas and every future Palestinian government - for you are not just wishing death upon millions now, but are wishing death upon countless more in the future by supporting the precedent of government-mandated genocide by Palestinians, for Palestinians (and, in the case of the human shields, of them).
Once you realize why you can't explain any of these things to those around you who are smarter than you, sit down and try to think about why you can not successfully convince yourself of these (as you must in order support the side you have been convinced to choose).
9/11 truthers take support for Hamas as a matter of faith: they must, they must, or they are "Zionists," as everyone who is smarter than them and knows more about the situation than they is a "Zionist." This, again, is pure fraud. None of us here at CRNU are "Zionists" in the true sense of that word. None of us think Israel is perfect - Israel is not perfect. None of us think that imminent action on behalf of saving Palestinian lives is unnecessary (especially considering those lives are currently in the hands of a government that would place them squarely into the laser sights). Everyone agrees that there is a better way. Neither Hamas, Fatah, nor Palestinian rejectionism as a political strategy represent that way.