In my case, that's simply not true. My grandfather who I never knew fought in WWI and was gassed on the Somme. He was a carpenter who struggled to work after the war, and my mother (long since gone) vividly remembered the National Assistance Board coming round to the house, looking in every cupboard to find things to sell before the family would receive any meagre help.
He never joined the British Legion, never attended Armistice Day celebrations, and never once spoke about the war.
My father God rest his soul worked at Woolwich Arsenal as a teenager in the late 1930s. He tried to join up in 1939, but his eyesight let him down. He eventually got the service he sought in 1940. He joined the Royal Signals and served in South Africa, Libya, Egypt, Italy, and ultimately ended up in a ruined Germany.
He had hundreds of books in the house and taught me virtually everything I know. We sat down together as a family to watch The World at War, and he was a fountain of information. He firmly believed in a Jewish homeland and held a contempt surpassing every bone in his mild body for the evil they wrought. He reserved a burning hatred for Hitler, and often said he hoped there was a hell so Hitler could burn there for eternity.
That said, he was a socialist who, like most of his compatriots, voted for the Labour government of 1945 over Churchill’s Tories. He fully supported the birth of Israel. He also believed the Arabs had been badly treated, and he met quite a few while on active service during the war some were employed as support staff.
He left me with an inquisitive mind, a love for history, and a desire to seek the truth.
Israel is a relatively new country, born in a more progressive, post-colonial Western world. Its birth pains are more raw and visible than those of more settled nations. But it was never simply “a land for a people without a land” around 700,000 people were already living there, and they had no desire to leave. In that original injustice, and in the settlements that followed, lie the roots of today’s conflict.
Something has to give but it won’t come from the leaders of Hamas or Netanyahu and his extremist supporters. They are not the solution; they are the problem.
Palestinians know their rich and varied history they are not the simplistic cyphers of terrorism and evil that some would like to portray. For anyone seeking a concise and powerful account of the Arab Revolt - which surprised me when I read it recently , I recommend the work of Ghassan Kanafani, the great Palestinian writer assassinated by the Israelis in 1972. His account was meant to be the first chapter of a full history of the Palestinian struggle tragically unfinished at his death. His famous interview with an Australian TV company is celebrated to this day - he was a leader of the PFLP a marxist organsiation that used early terrorist methods to try and advance their aims.
But we have to get to the point where killing is never justified by everybody or in the end the logic that might is right lies at the end of that bloody road. But he powerfully makes the point well over 50 years ago as to why they fight.
The victors often get to write history, but some voices deserve never to be forgotten. Palestinians are not what some would wish them to be they are a people with memory, culture, resistance, and a rightful claim to dignity.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/the-neck-and-the-sword