If it's acceptable for them, who am I to judge?
Election after election they vote for the party (Likud) that does consider Hamas a viable partner, transfers them hundreds of millions USD in cash and refuses to support any alternative government in Gaza.
Your comment revealed the complete breakdown of these necessary elements.
As someone who has enormous sympathy for the suffering of the Jewish people, and Israel as a response to that, I do hope that there are very few of you in Israel.
Otherwise, Israel will disintegrate, and you will discover that when you demonstrate smug selfish indifference to rockets hitting your fellow citizens, those same rockets will eventually hit you too.
You do understand, that Israel was established by people, who didn't suffer in Holocaust, but still demanded retribution from Arabs, who weren't responsible for Holocaust, right?
A lot of Holocaust survivors were afraid to admit it until 90-ties for the reason they were considered sub-humans by fellow Israelis.
> sense of common identity
Please, be kind and explain to me, what common identity can be between me, secular son of Ashkenazi Jew, and minister Deri, Moroccan Arab of Jewish religion, who considers my father as good as dead since he married my non-jewish mother?
The US is home to 350,000,000 people. If you gather the craziest of these in one small place, you'll have enough force to storm a (poorly defended) Capitol.
The US always had various fringe, a-social and anti-social groups. Still, Americans do largely share a sense of identity, especially against a common external threat. To judge by some of the comments here, perhaps to a greater extent than Israeli society currently does.
Transnistria, Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine. Not really peaceful.
> Try doing that as an Israeli civilian in a bomb shelter, hearing Hezbollah/Hamas rockets explode in your city.
As an Israeli civilian I say: if you hear rockets explode you chose a wrong city to live at.
You have to understand that Gaza is kind of concentration camp and significant portion of Gaza population are arabs forcefully displaced from villages in Gaza-Ashdod-BeerSheba triangle. Do you expect them to just agree with "facts on the ground" and do nothing?