Benny Morris portrays the incessant clashes between Arabs and settlers before WWII -- particularly in the 1920-1940 period -- as deeply driven by religious appeals on the Arab side. Hamas looks back consciously to some of the pre-WWII Muslim zealots, naming its brigades after one of them.
Palestinian nationalism took some time in developing, though expressions of it could be found early in the century, but religion was readily at hand. The society out of which it arose was without much of a working class in the modern sense. You had relatively wealthy landowners, agricultural labor, and petit- bourgeoisie -- the usual sources for that sort of thing. In a sense it seems like modern fundamentalism is a harkening back to the politics arising out of neo-feudal relations of the inter-war period. It makes sense to see this as well, as you say, as a reaction to the ebb of the secular/socialist currents.
Zionism originally created its opposite, Palestinian nationalism, where previously there had been no such consciousness. Arabs thought in terms of the entire British and French territories, which comprehended Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, if they thought beyond their village or clan at all. "Palestine" was the limited area where the Jews went, limited because there weren't too many jews. Now the Jewish settlers, animated by biblical references, create the fundamentalist opposition. Sharon didn't screw around with Muslim holy places for nothing.
To digress a big more, I've been reading that prior to WWII, it was the Arabs who agitated for one-man/one-vote democracy in the British mandate. The Jews favored something like today's Senate -- equal representation by ethnic group, but under British mandate. They were not sufficiently numerous to benefit from "democracy." Israel is really a conditional democracy. It opposes a right of return for Palestinians out of fears (realistic, to be sure) jews would lose their electoral majority and be legally disenfranchised, notwithstanding the fact that Arabs have as legitimate a right to return as anyone else.
Morris reports that the pre-WWII history is replete with revenge killings of totally innocent civilians on both sides. Typically the Israeli murders were retaliatory and fewer in number, though obviously where the feud begins becomes indeterminate, outside of the obvious point that it began when Jews started emigrating. This is plausible to me because the Jews had no reason to run around killing people indiscriminantly. They were too busy buying land, driving off Arab tenant farmers, and building up their settlements. Deir Yassin came much later.
The recent developments are a pretty close copy of the inter-war Arab revolts and counter-insurgency by the Jews and the Brits. Arabs would raid settlements, killing when they could. Jews would stage counter-raids. Obviously technology makes the weapons more destructive now. Blowing up Arab houses that were inconvenient for counter-insurgency, or as collective punishment, was originally a British innovation.
I assume Dennis R is not quite serious with his Sharon chant. The genocide charge could prove to be a real disservice to the movement. It sounds stupid because it is not credible, and it is substantively misleading. The Zionist game is not to kill people -- it's to drive them away, inch by inch, molehill by molehill.
The Israelis are smart enough to understand when killing causes people to flee, and when it makes them hunker down even more (as now). If they ever consolidate and fully absorb the West Bank, I would fully expect them to nibble away at Lebanon and Syria. It's what they have done for the past hundred years. It's what I would do if I felt I had to either grow or die.
mbs