Netanyahu has supported Hamas long before 2005 as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The elections were pushed by Bush at a time when PA were seen as corrupt. When they lost Bush tried to get them to coup and Hamas took over and kicked them out as a reaction to that.

>In July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin"

Should tell is everything we need to know about the people in power now.

Maybe the Palestinians were not happy with the deal, them losing their land. Not to forget previous atrocities perpetrated by Jewish terrorists and the nakba.

> Under a 2007 agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt controls the crossing but imports through the Rafah crossing require Israeli approval.

Doubly untrue today; Israel took complete control of it on May 6.

Factually this was never Palestinian land. This was Ottoman land, then British land, then Israel. Many Palestinians are not native (e.g. El-Masri, "The Egyptian", is a common family name in Gaza, because they are Egyptians) and the Jewish people have as much of a claim on the land as they do. Parts of the land were also under Egyptian and Jordanian control for some time (ask them why they didn't establish a Palestinian State over these lands while they had them by the way). Jewish refugees immigrated to the region before 1948 because they had nowhere else to go. Many Israeli Jews have been expelled from Arab countries under violence and their assets stolen. The Arab behavior toward Jews in the region is purely racist, there's no other way to look at it.

Also factually what pushed the Israeli right wing to demonstrate was Hamas' suicide bombing attacks. I was there and I know this first hand. You're not going to rewrite history by referring to some random fact.

Israel blockaded Gaza. Blockades are legal. Gaza still had a border with Egypt which Egypt chose to blockade as well. Gaza was effectively a polity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polity) and was at war with Israel. What should amaze you is that Israel supplied Gaza with electricity (Gaza also had their own power station) and with water (Gaza has wells and a desalination plant) and allowed good in all while being enemy territory under the control of Hamas. Hamas stole the aid flowing into Gaza to buy weapons and build tunnels.

> The Nakba was an outcome of Arabs deciding to attack Israel in 1948, they wanted to wipe it off the map, and they lost. They rejected the partition plan.

The "partition plan" was a plan to give part of Palestine to Israel. It's pretty natural that one side refused and the other accepted- the action is the same but the outcome is the opposite for the two parties. Trying to spin it like "they both got the same generous offer" is propaganda.

But even more important is that the partition plan assigned to a "Jewish state" a territory whose population was 45% Palestinian. This means that either

a) they thought it was possible to create a Jewish democratic state with a 45% of the population non-Jewish, or

b) the plan was to enforce apartheid from the beginning, or

c) the plan was ethnic cleansing from the beginning.

And- lo and behold- ethnic cleansing is exactly what happened one minute after the creation of Israel. How convenient that it was the Palestinian's fault.

But this "Nakba" stuff appears invariably to be coded appeals to a "one-state solution". Israel is a nuclear-armed state with one of the world's best trained military and a strong economy that, contrary to activist opinion, stands on its own two feet. There is only one outcome in a "one-state solution" and it's not the one you (or I) want.

It's worth pushing back on existential arguments against Israel as it's currently construed. "Mass murder of Israeli civilians is unprovoked because Nakba" is one of those. The correct response is "no, things are much more complicated than that."

Gaza is considered an occupied territory by all international bodies with the power and authority to make such a determination, for excellent reasons that you can look up. End of the story. What you do (and Israel does, for propaganda purposes) is to confuse the civilian settlement with the military occupation, or to pretend that since soldiers are not inside Gaza but just all around its borders, Gaza is free. Which is like saying that a prison camp is free if the guards are all outside the fence.