Oh, indeed it is evil. And they do indeed share the same kinds of self-righteous xenophobia that make atrocity easy to forgive or perhaps sought out.

You don't reason with those people. You control them. If you can, in time, find some way to reach them--great. But don't wait! You control them if you can.

But I can "make sense of it" about as well as I can of any human behavior that differs from my own (e.g. religious behavior). Maybe I'm bad at making sense of "ordinary" behavior, or maybe I have an especially robust imagination. One dose of righteous entitlement ("this is meant to be our land"), one dose of tribal antagonism and existential defense ("they hate us and want us dead"), one dose of religious encouragement ("we're on God's side"), one dose of minimization ("and anyway they could go somewhere else where they belong--they have the whole Middle East, we have one tiny strip of land").

The hardest part for me to emotionally rather than intellectually understand is the withdrawal of concern about fellow humans. But it's common, even in the U.S.. Men are trash. Murderers and rapists are streaming across the border. Punch a "Nazi". She asked for it.

Lesser evil is not that rare. And there are few hard boundaries between lesser evil and greater. It's not a slippery slope, but there are no fences to prevent wandering down the slope save for those we instill with culture.

It's a hard ask for creatures like us to extend empathy beyond the circle of friends that we know (and easy to retract it from the enemy we know). One can tell various just-so stories about how this made sense evolutionarily. Regardless, in order to scale our society up, we have to solve this one. There are some halfway decent approaches, especially when people are comfortable. The approaches break. We can empathize with people when they're on the wrong side of the break, but it's still wrong. Still evil. Still needs to stop.

If you can understand the desire for "right of return" despite almost nobody having actually lived where they want to 'return' to, you ought to be able to understand it in both Israeli settlers and Palestinians. If you can excuse Palestinians cheering when Hamas fighters dragged dead Israelis through the streets, you have all the cognitive tools you need to also excuse Israeli citizens turning a blind eye to settlers occupying parts of the West Bank. If you can excuse the Palestinian violence in response to Jewish terror in the 1930s, you can excuse Jewish violence in response to Islamic terror in the 1920s. If you can relate to Palestinian insistence that for religious reasons Jerusalem must be theirs, you can relate to Jewish insistence that for religious reasons Jerusalem must be theirs. If you can't do both (or refuse to do either), I submit that your sense of empathy needs work.

I can understand both, to a degree. But I can still know it's wrong. Still call out evil. Still call out lack of compassion for others as human beings.

The question for me is: how do we get out?

Buried in this question is part of the deepest contradiction in liberal thought.

Suppose some Haitians move to Springfield, Ohio. Fine, people should have freedom of movement. Suppose a lot of them move to Springfield, Ohio. Well, fine--who are we to say who can go and who can't? Suppose they radically change the character of the town, vote in entirely new leadership, leaving the original Ohio residents in a different subculture than they had been in their entire life and planned their entire future around?

Huh. That seems like it might be impactful. Is that still okay?

Suppose the old residents of Springfield, OH attack the Haitians. The Haitians are colonizers: taking land and power away from the residents. Suppose the Haitians fight back--they're entitled to be there, and they don't owe their attackers anything. Suppose Ohio tries to solve matters by dividing the place into two counties in different Congressional districts, but the old residents refuse and attack the Hatians en masse, but are driven back.

Is this sounding familiar? What should we do here?

The fundamental contradiction is that we believe both in the right of people to embrace their own culture and political organization, but also in their right to live where they please as long as they're peaceful and productive by default.

If you can square that circle, then you can start making progress on the Middle East.