I saw a description of violence

Context
I'm reading Our Choice of Gods by Richard Parrish. It's a novel about the roots and consequences of conflict in Palestine, starting with Jewish lives destroyed by the Holocaust, which leads to the Israelis' callousness toward the Palestinians in the Holy Land, which in turn causes the Palestinians to embrace terrorism, and so on and so on. I picked up the book because, although the causes of violence are obvious to me, I was interested to see what would make someone turn the other way and actually embrace peace.

Commentary
When I was in college I came to the conclusion that, popular opinion to the side, men were actually much more romantic than women. "Romantic" in this case meaning they were much more likely to believe in things like love at first sight and eternal soul mates than the women I knew, who talked more about "not losing your head" and "making the relationship work."

"Wow, you've really gone far afield there, Lynn." Bear with me; I'm coming back. Similarly to the way conventional wisdom says women are romantic, it also says pacifists are hopelessly unrealistic in their view of a world where everyone gives each other warm fuzzies all the time. Actually, that's not what I believe as a pacifist, but more importantly, I think the proponents of violence are far more impractical than I am, in that they believe they can harness that wildfire to a particular set of goals.

Consider Palestine. This is an area of the world where two groups of people (well, actually about 500 groups of people, but let's try to keep it simple) hold the following belief: there is some act of violence we can commit that will cause the other group to leave this place and never come back. Over time, some members of both groups have given this belief up, but there is a seemingly endless supply of instigators who pop up and say, "No, no, this time I have a plan that will win us a decisive victory," the evidence of the past 60 years (or the past several thousand, but again, I'm trying to simplify) notwithstanding. How is that more realistic than pacifism, which often says at its base, "I don't respond well to force. Therefore I'm going to assume you don't either."?

What did you see today?