Explanation of Finnish attitudes towards Israeli and Palestinians

Today I was reading about Israel´s air strike to Syria, which resulted in a death of five Al Assad´s soldiers. The reason for their death - according to Israel - was the Iranian presence in Syria. 

This brought to my mind the attitudes of Finns to Israel. The people close to the political left - and liberal values - are almost invariably negative to the Jewish state, whereas many people with sympathy to the political right - and conservative values - support them. 

(The exception are deeply Christian Finns, who consider Israeli as the people specifically selected by the God. However, I am not writing about them in this blog post as the number of strictly religious people is not high in Finland.)

This distribution among Finns is weird because the society of Israel is politically - and especially in its values - much more liberal than any of its neighbors. And what independent Palestine would more than probably be. 

My explanation to this dissonance comes from the common affection towards the weaker side of a conflict. In Finland that may have been strengthened by the fact, that throughout our history we have been dominated by our bigger neighbors: we were the poor Eastern part of Sweden since medieval times until 1809, when Russia conquered our land up to the Torne river, which still today is the border between Finland and Sweden - often also called as the most peaceful border in the globe.  

Finally in 1917 we became independent as a result of a temporary weakness of Russia due to Lenin´s revolution. But even after that we were attacked by the Red Army in 1939 and although Soviet Union  was not able to join Finland in itself, Russian leaders strictly affected our foreign policy for decades. Therefore, all people of Finland have got a long history of being the weak one.

According to this, almost all Finns had much more understanding towards Israel that to its Arabic neighbors up to 1970´s. The situation was commonly considered as being similar to the biblical story of heroic David against evil Goliath. 

However, after the Yom Kippur war in 1973 it became clear that Israel was not the weaker one, but a strong military power supported by the United States. And at the same time, the position of David was slowly transferred to Palestinians - a development, where Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza played a major role.  

After that, the better and better flow of information throughout the globe has slowly changed the attitudes, and we have ended up into a nation with a weird distribution of supporters of Jews and Palestinians of the holy Land. Value liberal people economically on the left are mostly favoring ultraconservative Arabs, and conservative people supporting market economy are usually sympathizing Israeli. 

Previous thoughts on the same topic:
A notable difference between Social Democrats in Sweden and Finland
Ellet ole meidän puolellamme, olet meitä vastaan (text in Finnish, but translatable by Google translator)