Gaza strip? Same deal as the West bank...
Who has claim? Everybody and nobody.
Don't forget that what is now Israel used to be called Palestine and used to be under British control.
There have always been Jews in Palestine though, but it wasn't until WW2 that they really started working on creating their own state. Relations between the Jews and Arab peoples in the area have always suffered from frictions, even before the state of Israel was created in 1948.
For obvious reasons the British needed extra manpower during WW2, and so started drafting soldiers from all over their empire, including Palestine. This led to the creation of an independant Jewish brigade. However, the British were hesitant to put this brigade on active duty. The reason is that they did not want to train several thousand Jewish men to use weapons, give them combat experience and then once the war was over, send them back into Palestine, where they could cause all kinds of sh*t for the British rulers, which they were likely to do, since the desire to have their own state became stronger every time it became more and more clear what had happened to the Jewish people of Europe.
In the end, the pressure on the Brits became too strong, and the brigade went into action in Italy, fighting the Germans during the closing months of the war.
After the war, many of the veterans of the Jewish brigade formed the core of what became the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) and they were armed with weapons they had managed to steal and smuggle to Palestine during the war. So because they had a core of experienced and well armed troops, the Israelis were able to defeat the less experienced Arab forces that invaded Israel on the day the country gave birth to itself.
The US, due to the powerful Jewish lobby, was the first country to recognize the state of Israel.
Given what happened to the Jewish people during WW2, it only makes sense that most of the world was hesitant to deny them the right of self government. (Even though the British and others have tried to prevend Jewish Europeans moving to Palestine after the war, fearing that it would lead to more friction in an already troubled land. They even went to so far as to keep Jewish people incarcerated in former concentration camps.) After all, Europe and the US were suffering from a collective guild trip from not realizing sooner what was happening in the camps and in some cases even actively helping deporting Jews to the camps.
Looking at how Israel was created, it makes so much sense that they are as aggressive as they are today. The present day generations have not lived through the holocaust themselves, but something like that leaves an imprint on a nation's mentality, particularly if, like the Jews, you have already been prosecuted for thousands of years, all over the world. It makes sense that Israel does not take sh*t from anybody, particularly from those that would rather see the country dead.
However, that does not mean that they should be given a card blanche. Of all people they should be aware of what it means to be dehumanized, so why they dehumanize the Palestinians in the way they do is beyond me. Although, arguably you could say that they have the right to be as stupid and racist as any other country. Still, it is not hard to understand where all this comes from. They had to fight the Palestinians (and the British) to be able to create the state of Israel, so I guess they still consider them to be the defeated foe.
What is much more puzzling is the fact that the rest of the world just sits by and shrugs its shoulders. Do we still feel guilty? Is that why we let Israel get away with bloody murder? I don't know. But the fact is that Israel continuously ignores several UN resolutions, while when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it only took one resolution and the world acted. Could it be that we don't care, because there is nothing to be had from the Palestinians? Could it be because they are amongst the poorest of the poor and what's left of their land has little yield? Had they sat on lakes of oil, we may well have done something about it, who knows.
I can understand why Israel has now gone into Lebanon. I don't condone it, but I can understand it. But what Israel does to the people in the occupied territories...
Holland, like so many countries in Europe, has been occupied by the Germans during WW2 for 5 days short of 5 years. The avarage Dutch person suffered less during that time, than the avarage Palestinian does today. Food for thought.
