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This highlights a general disagreement I see. Pro-Palestine arguments are often based on high principles of human rights, international law, democracy, etc. Pro-Israel arguments are often based on pragmatism, political reality and a flavor to might-makes-right. The second kind of argument just clicks better with me, I guess this might be some moral foundation kind of thing. I can see the morally pure argument for fighting the Dane until he gives up all he has unlawfully taken. But the Dane seem to be well settled and well defended, and if your side would have won the wars of yesteryear, then you would be the ruler of Denmark today and you would be equally unwilling to give back to the Danes all that you'd taken from them, so at some point it's just time to accept reality and move on. (It's easy to claim the moral high ground and lofty principles when you are in a position without power.)
Or maybe I'm just unconsciously seeking out the arguments I like from the side I unconsciously want to like and the arguments I dislike from the side I don't want to like.
You're missing one possibility: you like the argument that might is right, because the natural reaction of the powerless is to suck up to the mighty.
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The "high principled" pro-Palestine arguments do better to outline flaws in those principles than they do to support the Palestinian case. The "democracy" argument comes down to two wolves complaining that the sheep isn't on the menu (granted it's a very tough and stringy sheep with big horns). The "human rights" argument has to turn a blind eye to the point that a lot of the claimed "human rights violations" exist because when relaxed, the Palestinians use the opportunities granted to kill more Israelis.
Utterly meaningless aside that has shown up in several of your posts. If I punch you in the face and declare that I'm going to take your home from you by force of arms and then evict you with the help of a bunch of my well armed friends, do I then get to talk about how morally correct I was to do so because you keep trying to punch me in the face and take back your house? Your argument here only works because you remove those incidents from their historical context, and one can use the exact same technique to make all kinds of incorrect arguments (like my one above).
This amounts to an argument that it's right for the Palestinians to ethnically cleanse the Israelis. Which is an argument you can make, but it fails to sound as highly principled as the usual "human rights" arguments.
"Divorcing individual events from their historical context allows you to make nonsensical claims about morality" is incredibly far removed from "It's ok to genocide the jews" and I'm honestly surprised that you read that out of my post. You're putting an incredibly inflammatory comment in my mouth, and I can't see any reason for it.
Your analogy "If I punch you in the face and declare that I'm going to take your home from you by force of arms and then evict you with the help of a bunch of my well armed friends, do I then get to talk about how morally correct I was to do so because you keep trying to punch me in the face and take back your house?" directly implies that yes, it is OK for the Palestinians to "take back" Israel. I did not say "genocide", I said "ethnically cleanse". If this were to happen and somehow you were to keep the Jews from fighting back, most of them would probably leave rather than be genocided.
No, it does not. It implies that choosing an arbitrary cut-off point for your moral condemnation is bad and can be used to justify any kind of dishonest conclusion, in the same way that it is an abuse of statistics to start comparing islamic and right-wing terrorism from the date of September 12, 2001. What I am saying is that your argument is useless when it comes to gaining additional clarity on the situation, and if you want to accurately apportion blame and determine who is in the right you need to look at these events in a larger historical context. Maybe the people with the best claim to that land are the French descendants of the Knights Templar - probably not, but my point is that your argument prevents this from happening and obscures the truth of the matter while making one side look better than the other.
This is an absurd level of hairsplitting and even just looking at wikipedia (lol) the picture provided for the ethnic cleansing article is of an event described as a genocide. Is this really the quality of argument that you want to make?
The distinction I am making is "expel" versus "kill". This is not hairsplitting. That "ethnic cleansing" sometimes euphemistically refers to genocide and the UN definition of "genocide" (but not the more common definition) includes some things which aren't killing is the hairsplitting.
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I settle on the same basic positions without having any particular affinity for Israel or the claim that it should be a Jewish homeland. I generally oppose modern invasions, but regard references to who should own something based on a generations old war to be worth not much more than an eyeroll. OK, sure, it's not fair that the United States drove Indians off of land that they occupied - now what? I don't care, it's American property and I have zero interest in land acknowledgement.
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