"apartheid"? Palestinians are solely responsible for their economic situation by promoting terrorism and trying to literally erase their neighbors from the face of the earth.

Read about Hamas "freedom fighters", they control Gaza now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...

I don't see how anything you said changes the fact that Israel is an apartheid state:

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...

Also, you completely ignored the part about Lebanon also being a democracy. We need to stop spreading this old bit of misinformation that Israel is the only democracy.

any country, including Israel, has a right to defend itself.

when these "poor victims" bombard Israeli cities with rockets, or murder civilians in suicide attacks in the name of islamic jihad, you can't just let someone into your home who is carrying a knife and has blood on their hands.

As for Lebanon they support Hezbollah, an islamic militant group which was created by Ayatollah Khomeini and sees eradication of Israel as their holy Jihad. They are largely controlled by Syria which is dreaming of "throwing the Jews into the sea", and is as far from democracy as you can possible get.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah

The number of Israeli civilians killed in those rocket attacks over the last 20 years is dwarfed by the number of kindergartens and medical facilities bombed by Israel in 2014 alone.

It's safe to say that both Israel and Palestine are terrorist states. Israel is just more successful at it.

Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on earth.

Israel is trying very hard to avoid civilian casualties but they are fighting against cowards who hide they weapons (and their militant leaders) in hospitals, schools, kindergardens and mosques.

I hate to link to WaPo but this is an exception

https://archive.is/oHdEc

Yep. Exactly like I said. They're both terrorist states. Israel is just better at it.

Lebanon is not a free democracy and I’m not sure what that has to do with this discussion anyway

There is a raft of talking points used to explain why Israel are right to behave so poorly. Many, if not most of these talking points are specious. A common one is that Israel is the only democracy in the middle east, which is absolutely not true.

What does "Lebanon is not a free democracy" even mean? You can say the same about Israel. They have many laws and restrictions that are based around religion, and religious groups are very powerful. They enact apartheid, which is about as opposite of democracy as possible. Even if Lebanon has a troubled democracy, it's definitely better than what is happening in Israel. This trope needs to be retired.

Every claim you’ve made here is false and again has nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Typical response to this topic: just claim it's false and don't provide any argument or data as to why.

Lebanon is a democracy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Lebanon

Israel is a theocratic apartheid state:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-adopts-divisive-la...

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...

Bringing HRW as a source immediately invalidates your argument, they have zero legitimacy when it comes to any topic involving Jews.

There's nothing wrong with HRW. And even if there was, it doesn't invalidate NBC and Wikipedia.

It does though, Wikipedia and NBC both use them as legit sources despite them spending 90% of their time on Israel and 0% of their time on real atrocities. If you have someone who can’t even honestly tell you what’s going on in NK but calls himself a global human rights advocate you know something is wrong.

If you are suggesting that the media is biased for the Palestinians over Israel then you aren't discussing in good faith and there's no point to this conversation.