Jewish people believed they were promised land of their own, and the Palestinians believed that they would be given a defined homeland as well. However, the governments making these decisions were outside the Middle East and were acting in their own interests, not the interests of the people living in the areas affected. When the United Nations recognized Israel as a political entity after World War II, it did so in response to the outrage of Germany's Holocaust. While this was understandable to Western countries, Palestinians felt that they had been cheated out of their homeland and that instead it had been given to Israel.

The differences between fundamentalist and more moderate Islam comes down to the nature of Islamic belief. Islam does not make any real distinction between religion and government. In the Koran, religion and government are completely intertwined. So to fundamentalist Moslems, a non-fundamentalist Islamic country in...
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