The IDF uses F-16's, Apaches, etc. to attack legitimate military targets. That's not terrorism. They do a respectable job of minimizing civilian casualties. There were 13,000 Palestinian civilians in Jenin -- the IDF kept 12,977 of those civilians safe. That's not so bad, is it? We'd all prefer that they'd kept ALL of them safe, but international law recognizes that all you can do is try your damnedest. The terrorists resident in Jenin were a legitimate military target, by any objective standards you care to name. Israel had a legitimate right to go in there.

That's just one example; the others are all in the same vein: Israel uses those military weapons against military targets. Their goal is to kill combatants. Active members of Islamic Jihad, Izzedine al Qassam, the PFLP, etc., are (at best) combatants. They're actively, directly, and voluntarily engaged in hostilities. They kill people. It's okay to shoot back at them. Of course, they're not "combatants" in the honorable sense in which IDF soldiers are combatants, because the Islamic "militants" focus primarily on killing civilians -- their intent is to kill people who are not combatants. That's a war crime. That's terrorism.

The Palestinian "militants" attempt to maximize civilian casualties. They perpetrate massacres as a matter of deliberate policy. This has been the policy of the PLO since its foundation in 1964 (not to mention Arab massacres of Jews in 1920, 1929, and so on).

Speaking of economic security, there was plenty of that in the PA for years. The terrorism continued throughout the years of the Oslo Accords: Something like 350 Israelis were killed by Palestinian terrorism between 1993 and the outbreak of violence in late 2000. That's quite a few, and the PA economy was going great guns back then (in fact, Palestinian terrorism has generally correlated positively with concessions made by Israel; they initiated the current violence after Israel's unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon, and immediately after Barak offered unprecedented concessions at Camp David in 2000. It seems counterintuitive, but think about it: The more territory Arafat & Co. control, the more extensive their bomb factories and training facilities can be, the more openly they can operate and recruit, etc.). Well, anyhow: Try to imagine how France would react if Germans were killing 50 Frenchmen every year, or how England would react if, say, Catholics in Northern Ireland were... oh, wait... They'd call it "terrorism" and react appropriately, wouldn't they? I mean, let's be serious here!

The IDF is not in the business of terrorism. The Islamic "militants" over there are in precisely that business. You suggest that there is some kind of moral equivalence between the two, but you are mistaken. If Arafat had the kind of resources the IDF has, tens of thousands of Israeli civilians would have been killed since 2000. If Israel wanted to kill Palestinian citizens, they have the means to kill them in droves -- but they have not chosen to do so.

And don't tell me that Lebanese Maronite Christians are helpless automatons, incapable of controlling their own trigger-fingers.

The Palestinian people surely do deserve self-determination, hell yeah -- and so did the people of Japan in 1945. But they didn't get it until they chilled out a bit and learned to live in peace with their neighbors. The "militants" in the PA claim loudly and often that they won't stop killing people if Israel withdraws from Gaza and the West Bank. Instead, they will stop killing Jews when they can't find any more Jews to kill. Make no mistake, their ideology is explicitly racist and rejects any and all political solutions. These people very closely resemble the Ku Klux Klan in the USA (but much more enthusiastic, of course). You can be on the losing side and still be a swine. You can spout national liberation rhetoric and still be a swine.