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This is true to a point. It is also true that Israel was once far larger than it is today. The Israelis captured huge swathes of land through force of arms in defensive wars, and has mostly returned that land peaceably. The Israelis left the Gazans to their own devices in 2005. The common narrative that Israel is constantly expanding is ahistorical.
I see this logic - not that I agree with it, but I see it. What I don't see is how your logic is not fully generalizable to the Israelis. They have also been wronged by Palestinian actions. How can it be in your paradigm that Palestinians have the right to invade Israel and kill every Jew they see, but then the Israelis do not have the right to bring indiscriminate death down upon the Palestinians in retaliation? (for the record, I do not believe either of them have the right to do this, nor do I believe that Israel's response has been indiscriminate.)
While I don't think the analogy is particularly fair, I will point out that there is only one moral paradigm in which the shooter in your story is unambiguously justified, and that is blood feud. That is inherently a might-makes-right morality. The shooter will soon find out the hard way that that the Mafia have no more scruples than he when it comes to killing children.
I don't accept "defensive" (would you label Russia's Ukraine war thus as well? After all, Ukraine was constantly attacking Russia's acquisitions in the Donbass), and if you keep seizing x units of land and then returning x/2 of them as a "gesture of goodwill" when settling with a thoroughly defeated adversary, this doesn't register as things being a wash regarding your expansionism.
As I argued in a parallel response to @RobertLiguori, I perceive an asymmetry between initating unjustified violence and retaliating to it. If the Palestinian actions that wronged the Israelis were morally just, then any given act of retaliation for them is at least significantly less just than if the prior action were not. On top of all of this, even just looking at casualty figures, the Israeli retaliation for any Palestinian action is wildly out of proportion - generally, any conflict seems to look like "Palestinians killed n Israelis; thereupon Israel killed 100n Palestinians, with another 5n Israeli soldier casualties".
Why are blood feuds might-makes-right, except for the trivial sense that if you don't even have the might to take a potshot at the enemy team's weakest spot then you are really left with no recourse? Either way, blood feuds seem to have been the default mode of justice for functioning human societies for the overwhelming part of human history. I understand that they are questionable from the perspective of someone living in a functioning modern state and we have found approaches to justice that work better, but all of these presume that there actually is a functioning state that is willing and able to mete out non-blood-feud justice. The whole conundrum of the Palestinians is that there isn't - nobody could judge the Israelis for driving them out of their homes, levelling their cities or killing them in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Any candidate sovereign that could force the parties into court by force of arms is making a show of looking away and whistling. In this setting, blood feuds empirically seem like the best social technology that humanity has discovered.
Why is ‘justice’ the framework through which to view tribal land ownership? Throughout history many different tribes have occupied this land, have migrated in and out, have been destroyed or vanquished or assimilated.
"Justice"/moral right is what I mostly see being invoked to convince populations of third-party countries including ones I live and pay taxes in to support Israel, transfering things of value and exposing themselves to risk. This is why I see the need to argue against it. If I am asked to sacrifice for a cause for the sake of justice, I would like to know if the cause is actually just.
Military aid to Israel is not actually about justice, though. Politicians prefer to pretend that their acts of rational realpolitik are justified, but they make their decisions based (mostly) on strategy.
The west in general and the USA in particular have several key interests in the region, like the Suez Canal. Israeli intelligence and military power are useful leverage on those interests. Back when he was a senator, Joe Biden famously said Israeli aid is the best investment the USA makes and that if Israel did not exist, America would have to create it to preserve its interests.
So what is actually the realpolitik argument there? How can Israel keep the Suez canal open in a way that the US other powers in the region couldn't? The assertion that there is actually some convoluted realpolitik reason for whatever the US middle east policy of the day is - as opposed to blindly doing whatever the lobbyists of the day demand because their similarly short-sighted investors will make their stock value go up if it happens - looks a lot like a series of all-caps hail-mary "trust the plan"s. In the meantime, approximately every major problem that the Americans face in the Middle East themselves is their own creation. If the politicians of the cold war were given a crystal ball that told them of the future of Iran and Afghanistan, with all their implications for American interests, as a consequence of the interventions that they were advocating for then, I'm sure some of them would have managed to concoct a speech about how the Islamic Republic and the Taliban are also necessary to preserve American interests.
Israel keeps one of America’s #1 enemies, Iran, in check. Israel provides an overwatch that prevents Hezbollah, a very anti-American power, from dominating Lebanon. The Israeli military has in the past carried out strikes on anti-American regional powers that America was no doubt very pleased with, eg against Syria.
Does this necessarily mean that Israel is worth the price tag? No, but there’s genuine geopolitics reasons to play nice with them.
Would Hezbollah even be anti-American without the American support for Israel? The situation may be different from Iran whose present political system emerged as a direct reaction against past American chicanery, but on the other hand even Vietnam, which got treated a lot worse than Iran, is basically friendly to the US nowadays, and the Taliban are also acting all conciliatory since their comeback. I'm sure that if the US wanted to be friends with Iran in a post-Israel world, they could do so quite easily by just promising to keep Saudi Arabia on a leash and pushing them to agree on mutually acceptable spheres of influence. The barriers would actually be on the US side, since it seems like the deep state can nurse very old grudges over matters such as BP and the embassy hostage taking.
Yes. Hezbollah is specifically an anti-colonialist movement opposed to western influence, and their original archenemy was actually France, another key US ally. They’re also in theory revolutionary socialists(but Muslim) who are buddies with Russia as a legacy of the Cold War. Oh, and they were founded as an Iranian proxy.
There isn’t a world in which the US and Hezbollah were ever friends.
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