@SpukiKitty
A few things to address, if I may.
@SpukiKitty
Someone should give many among the Palestinians the memo because blowing up innocent civilians in random places (like night clubs, cafes, schools, etc.) will not endear the world to your otherwise-understandable grievances you may have with the Israeli govt.
As far as I'm aware, (suicide) bombing is rather rare nowadays. The Palestinians have mostly given up on that... though not on violence and terrorism. They just do it differently.
On the personal level, knife attacks and car ramming is the norm these days.
On the greater, organized level, Hamas (and sometimes others, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) of course use rocket attacks (as well as attempts to tunnel into Israel in order to conduct raids) from Gaza. Not a very effective method physical damage-wise, but at least it's flashy.
@SpukiKitty
The fact is is that the media refuses to focus on Israel's atrocities but will gladly focus on stupidity cranked out by Hamas...
Err, which media? Maybe most of the American media is like that, but it's a bit of a different story in Europe. Especially if you look at left-leaning media - then the situation is often pretty much the exact opposite of what you describe. Furthermore, pro-Palestinian sentiment is consistently on the rise, which is a fact that activistically-minded Palestinians (and Israelis) have very much noted.
@SpukiKitty
...shows that the Palestinians need to switch to protest and civil disobedience. If you take the higher ground and get brutalized by "The Man", everyone else is more likely to be sympathetic and pressure will be put on authorities to do something about the Israelis.
This is exactly what has happened and is happening, though not necessarily as an alternative to violence - it can also be used simultaneously with it as another 'front' of the struggle. Indeed, the Palestinian struggle has for a long while now featured both methods; the two Intifadas are pretty good examples - with the first one (1987-93) having a greater relative focus on protest and civil disobedience, and the second one (2000-05) more on violence (that one had a lot of bombings). The point is that neither Intifada was exclusively peaceful protest or violence & terrorism - they had both aspects to some extent.
In recent years, the two chief Palestinian movements have had a difference in the sort of methods they favor.
Hamas, of course, tends to focus on violence, though they also encourage protests (usually against Israel). They do negotiate on occasion, e.g. for ceasefires, but that typically only comes after getting battered by Israel in one of their many clashes.
Fatah (the chief party of the PLO and the de facto rulers of the Palestinian Authority, at least in the West Bank) is a less straightforward case. Historically they very heavily used terrorism, but nowadays they've more or less abandoned it for other avenues. Rhetorically, they are still pretty much dead set against Israel, to the point of still often praising attackers and terrorists and even offering pensions to their families should they die.
However, Fatah simultaneously has a deep and long-standing security arrangement with Israel. They cooperate intensely, despite all the heated rhetorical exchanges and Fatah's repeated threats to abandon the arrangement. Threats which Fatah would never deliver on, because the Israeli authorities are literally their lifeline.
See, Fatah is unpopular among the Palestinian population of the West Bank where they're in power, and Hamas have a very strong activist presence there. Fatah's hold on power depends on the Israeli help in arresting and reining in of Hamas's people.
Israel also finds the arrangement useful, because the help of Fatah is invaluable for maintaining more security and a tighter control over the West Bank.
The problem is that this 'deal with the devil' and the lack of resistance to Israeli control (and its settlement enterprise in the West Bank and East Jerusalem) that necessarily follows from it plays no small part in further weakening Fatah and the PLO.
It's a vicious cycle. The weaker Fatah is, the more they have to rely on Israel. The more they cooperate with Israel, the more your average Palestinian despises them for it (in addition to their other faults, like massive corruption). The weaker Fatah becomes, the more Israel's army and security services need to fill the void to keep a lid on Hamas - and the more it further angers (often justifiedly) regular Palestinian people. The more Fatah and Israel cooperate and the more presence Israel has there, the greater support for Hamas becomes. And the stronger Hamas becomes, the more the focus will be on Palestinian violent resistance, thus generating further violent responses from the other side. Since Hamas's strategy is popular (as they're the ones visibly doing something concrete to combat Israel), Fatah sees a need to adopt more violent rhetoric (and eventually actual violence) in order to stay relevant and to politically survive, thus further alienating Israelis, yet still not being able to one-up Hamas which has no such limits to how much they can escalate. And on and on it goes...
Then add the issue of the Israeli settlers on top of that, which makes all of that a helluva lot worse and guarantees that there's no way out. There's just too many of them now.
It's an endless dark spiral into a bottomless pit.
That said, the Palestinian Authority (controlled by the PLO, especially its Fatah element) is not just passively watching. It does have its own avenues of political combat: especially in the form of diplomatic pressure on Israel, which they have heavily focused on in recent years. Basically it means the effort to internationalize the Palestinian plight, by addressing world governments and the organizations they form (such as the UN), as well as supporting grassroots boycott efforts like those of the BDS movement. They are trying to go around the Israeli government, hoping to gain enough support worldwide to force Israel to negotiate on favorable ground.
Israel, meanwhile, fights those efforts and maintains that they are not being done with good intentions.
There is the further factor of pro-Palestinian activist organizations that try to influence public opinion, both in the West and in some other nations (like South Africa). To my knowledge, they generally don't openly cheer for one side in the Hamas-Fatah divide, and indeed, placing them clearly in one camp is not simple. These organizations do tend to claim to be pro-peace, but more than a few of their members are quite open about having radical views that may seem more in line with those of Hamas. The organizations themselves do not support violence (after all, they can't or they would be subjected to anti-terrorism laws); however, there's no shortage of folks who do have at least some sympathy for violent resistance, as they tend to view Israel (and, unfortunately, often its common citizens too) as monstrous.
Note: don't get me wrong, many of these people are genuinely just folks who want a peaceful and just solution. What I meant to say is that they're unfortunately accompanied by those with less noble goals in mind.
Their pro-Israel counterparts do exist, but tend to be more closely aligned with the Israeli government from what I've seen. They are also officially pro-peace, but what their actual views (and actions) are of course differs from case to case. Some of them can go so far as to ultimately support the radical Israeli right (especially easy in America right now...).
I think it's fair to say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is actually a three-way conflict (between the Israeli government, the PLO and Hamas) where none of the sides finds it advantageous to compromise and seriously negotiate now. With all their due differences (and they do exist, very much so!), it seems to me all of them are biding their time until a more advantageous moment arrives... or until things get so bad that they themselves are forced to the table, whichever comes first.
In fact, that moment might actually come soon for Hamas, because the Gaza Strip is now in such a bad state that it's becoming increasingly unlivable - due to both unrepaired devastation from previous wars, the years of economic effects from the Israeli and Egyptian blockade, but perhaps most of all due to overuse of the local aquifer which is turning the water too salty and unfit for human consumption. It's not a dead given, but there are a lot of speculations that Hamas is getting backed into a corner and its usual belligerence won't be able to get them out of this one, no matter how much world sympathy the genuine plight of the people of Gaza gets. Typically, the world blames Israel for that (rightly or wrongly), but Hamas also has to deal with its own increasingly disgruntled populace in Gaza.
@SpukiKitty
Of course; The more terroristic Palestinians probably see the "Israeli" thing as an excuse to use violence to advance their crazy Wahhabi religion (Like Al Quaeda, DAESH, The Taliban, etc. who just want to conquer Earth and impose their grim, grey killjoy cult of boredom, repression and despair).
This is how Hamas functions to an extent. While not as radical as those organizations you mentioned, Hamas rule in Gaza does have major theocratic features (along with some ultranationalist-style ones). Hamas does indeed repress any real dissent in Gaza, often justifying it with - of course - them being the one true resistance movement, so opposing them is portrayed as aiding the Zionist enemy! ;)
@SpukiKitty
Both Israelis & Palestinians are being dumbasses.
A lot of them, yeah :P
Damn, I just can't seem to write a response on the topic without it being a full-blown essay, can I? :S :D
