I don't think I've committed any of the fallacies you've cited here. True, I didn't explain myself fully for the sake of brevity.

But, to clarify:

Aside from the acts of a few lunatics, we can nearly always understand the attitudes of any particular terrorist. E.g. al Qaeda sought revenge for the presence of US forces on sacred Saudi soil. A justification? Maybe to them. Not to us, however.

Same for Hamas, 7 Oct. While I would certainly never demonstrate or advocate for them in anyway, I do realize—& I think this must be obvious to nearly any observer—that Israel's response has put Hamas in the drivers seat. Saudi Arabia has backed away from signing a formal accord with Israel, while other regional powers have withdrawn their ambassadors. Israel grows isolated. Exactly what Hamas wants.

And that frightens me.

A better approach, entirely theoretical I admit, might be to move forward on the Abraham Accords with SA, while creating another "Wrath of God" type operation targeting Hamas's leadership, many of whom don't even live in Gaza.

I think Israel's response, in part, is dictated by the government's pique at being caught with their pants down, & that is never a good basis on which to formulate strategy.

Israel is colonial-settler enterprise, no question. Vladimir Jabotinsky argued that Jews would reach any voluntary agreement with Arabs, "not now & not in the future" he wrote in The Iron Wall. David Ben-Gurion sought to remove as many Arabs as possible from both the Israeli portion of the UN partition & those areas captured during the war of independence.

Your analogy of neighborhoods doesn't follow because that demographic change was voluntary. Granted many Arab villages were abandoned because Arab propaganda in the wake of Deir Yassin, attempting to rally others to the cause, backfired. Still, fleeing for one's lives, right or wrong, is very different from concern over property values.

When I claim everybody's right here I mean the Arabs weren't to blame for not accepting partition; why agree to lose even one Inch of land they believed to be their homeland? Similarly, the Jews weren't to blame for colonizing Palestine & declaring an Israeli state after WWII. Not only, or especially because of the Holocaust, but mainly because of how the Allied Powers abandoned them after the war. Seeing all that had happened, the catastrophe inflicted on the Jewish people ... & they don't lift a finger to help.

That doesn't mean I think Hamas was justified, or the Intifadas, or the invasion by Egypt, Syria, Iraq & the Arab Liberation Army (I'm leaving out Transjordan's Arab Legion because it never invaded Israel proper) after independence, or the many riots, uprisings, massacres perpetrated by porto-palestinians during the Mandatory years.

But, over the years many of my co-religionists insist that the above was motivated by Muslim antisemitism, as is the Palestinian characterization of Israel's independence as the "Nakba". When they're not. Israel might have, in '67, taken the opportunity to promote a stable, secure & prosperous Palestinian state in Gaza & the West Bank, with fair compensation for lands lost. The tragedy is they didn't.

And here we are.

Finally, I don't see how I've been guilty of any gaslighting here. Because I fully acknowledge that Jews were subject to pogromist violence in Palestine, as well as the rest of Europe I realize that not only is Israel's existence essential to the survival of the Jewish people as a whole, but unless it maintains a Jewish majority there's really no point in its continued existence. Hence Palestinian return is, & must continue to be, a non-starter.

In conclusion, put as simply as possible: while Nazi exterminationist Jew-hatred was so irrational in its origins that historians continue to debate, Arab opposition to the Jewish presence in Palestine-Israel at least has an understandable cause. But just because something is understandable doesn't mean it's justified. A man robs a bank because he wants money. What's not to understand? Does that mean we approve of armed robbery?

To be perfectly honest, I find Normal Finklestein's "Long live Palestine!" schtick every bit as irritating as I'm certain you do.