The issue is not and never has been whether both sides want to “live on the lands they are fighting over.” Nor is it really about Gaza as a piece of land. The core issue here is that Hamas rejects Israel’s right to exist.
As long as this radical islamist group insist that Israel cease existing, no Israel government (drones, nukes, and F16s aside) can find a path to peace …. nor can those of us who feel the pain of Palestinians living this way do anything good by sympathizing with Gaza because it does not have the weaponry to make even more war.
As for liberal peace movements like the Boycott project or the American Presbyterian Church, calling Israel names like “fascist,” “racist,” or “colonialist” is at best stupid and at worst antisemitic. … they really need to read some history. Racism is the belief that another group of humans are genetically inferior to your own. There are some Israeli racists, but it is the Arab side that spews Nazi era propaganda and teaches it in school. Fascism was invented in Italy as a form of government that celebrates nationalism and combines the state and the corporations. Whatever you think of Netanyahu he is hardly Benito Mussolini!
The issue of Israel as part of colonialism is also far more complex than the Peaceniks understand. Ancient history aside, modern Israel has its roots in the Ottoman Empire … a caliphate where the overarching rule of Sultan and Caliph from Istanbul did not recognize states. (Ask the Turks and Armenians how they felt about this!) The ideal of the Zionists was to establish a homeland within that Empire. Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan were all parts of the Syrian province. Israel was to be a home on land, Palestine that was not then claimed by any people as their home land. Not only was there NO effort at colonizing the people, the founders envisaged living side by side in the land of Palestine.
This idealism was reshaped when the west defeated the Turks and created states like Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. NONE of these had any more historic basis than Israel. Until WWII, Israel’s war to exist was an anticolonial effort directed more at Britain than at any (then non existent) Arab state.
So. where is the moral right today? Can one rail against the Zionists for not having the fore vision to predict WWI and WWII? Were they foolish for not expecting Hitler? It would be inane NOT to see Israel as real and equally inane not to see the Jewish state as an outpost of European culture implanted in the midst of the arab world. BUT, history is what it is. The Palestinian people (a far more recent “people” than the Israelis!) are real too.
Both peoples need peace.