Which side is right in the Israel Palestine conflict ?
The answer to your question may depend a little on the moral framework through which you see the world but I will attempt to answer it from my perspective.
The crux of the issue centres around the central ideology which led to the establishment of the state of Israel: “Zionism” and continues to guide its actions.
Zionism as we know it today is a movement that emerged the 19th century with the aim to establish a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. The political project spelled out by Herzel & his contemporaries marks out the need for a strong Jewish demographic majority as a cornerstone of this project. It calls for the establishment of an ethno-religious state for Jews in a land where the majority of the native population was not Jewish. The Palestinians obviously resisted and continue to resist the establishment of a state that excludes them from a national project and does not give them equal civil or political rights (and indeed actively continues to see their very existence as a threat to the state).
Everything that has happened since is an attempt at ethnically cleansing and colonising the land of Palestine to maintain this demographic majority and “artificially” alter the demographics and identity of the land. In any other context we would reject and condemn any state that confers rights and “supremacy” on the basis of ethnicity or religion.
It was on this basis that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination"
(Full resolution text)
The resolution remained in place until Israel made revoking it a condition of its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference.
While the history of antisemitism in Europe and other racist ethno-nationalist movement helps us understand how Zionism as a movement arose, it does not justify it or support the existence and practices of a state and an ideology which still clings to these beliefs.
It’s why Palestinian calls for either independence or a truly democratic state from the river to the sea & right of return for Palestinian refugees is seen as an existential threat to the “State of Israel” as it flies in the face of its founding ideology. Any movement which sees equality or the demographics of the “other” as a threat to its existence is fundamentally astray.
The international community as a whole has worked to reject racist or discriminatory policies and regimes in any other context yet the Israeli apartheid regime both historically and to this very day continues to uphold these beliefs.
Today it is locked in an internal struggle between political zionists fear of enfranchising Palestinians and giving them equality as it risks the Jewish demographics of Israel and the zealot settler-right which refuses to allow Palestinians to form an independent state.
Success Israeli governments for the last 15 years have held onto that belief the status quo is sustainable for ever, something which the last week has shown us all too harrowingly is blatantly false.