Is The Palestinian Land Claim Valid?
What if you encountered evidence it wasn't? Would it change your mind even one iota?
Palestinian Nationalist advocates base their claim on Israel's land claim being invalid. That Israel is stolen Palestinian land and that Israel illegally occupies Gaza and the West Bank. Furthermore, they claim that the Palestinians are victims of genocide.
As we already examined, this genocide claim is false.
Furthermore, if we investigate the demographic origins of modern Palestinians, we discern that many immigrated to the area at the same time as Jews. As we see here in Atlas of World Population History, Jews were a continuous presence in Palestine/Israel and have that the population of the area was essentially stable from the year 400 to 1700. Jews were 3.33% of the population in 1800 (about 10k), and 14% of the population by 1900 (about 70k). Here it is from my friend, Atlas of World Population History (1978, Colin McEvedy & Richard Jones, Penguin Books):
There were even enough Jews in the Middle Ages for the Crusaders to have notably killed a bunch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_the_Crusades.
Still, let us ignore the contemporaneous migration there by Palestinians and Jews during the Ottoman period and ignore the indigenous Jewish population that lived there continuously and only focus on descendants of Palestinians who lived there continuously, going all the way back to Ottoman rule and before. For those Palestinians, there are three representative bodies: Fatah (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah), Hamas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas), and the PLO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organization).
Fatah was founded by Yasser Arafat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat) and is an expressly Palestinian Arab Islamist movement. Its ideology excludes Christians and Jews. It is Islamist and the government of the West Bank. Fun fact, Fatah also means 'Conquest' in Arabic. https://translate.google.com/?sl=ar&tl=en&text=%D9%81%D8%AA%D8%AD%20&op=translate
Hamas calls for the death of all Jews in Israel and according to its own charter seeks to have all Jews there 'pushed into the sea.' (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp) It explicitly calls for the genocide of Jews. It is explicitly Islamist, as stated in Article 1 of its charter. It is also the government of Gaza.
The PLO is the official representative of the Palestinian people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organization). They are expressly anti-Zionist, which means they are against Jewish nationalism. They cannot extend the same rights to indigenous Jews that they demand for themselves. They were forced to change their charter in 1993 in order to pretend to have Good Faith in negotiating peace accords with Israel, yet their membership is dominated by groups that uniformly agree that Israel has no right to exist.
All Palestinian representative organizations agree that Christians and Jews do not have a claim to the land, even if they've always lived there. Palestinian national aspirations are religious in nature. They are exceptionalist and exclude the indigenous Jews and Christians whose presence has been there continuously since antiquity.
Does that make them invalid? Is theocracy a sufficient basis for nationalism? Because all three groups representing the Palestinian political cause use religious discrimination as the basis for who has rights to a nationalism. They a priori exclude Christians and Jews. They refuse to extend the same rights to indigenous Jews that they demand for themselves.
This does not even address the issue that Palestinian landlords sold land to Zionists whose property was expropriated (seized) by the British in an act of Eminent Domain in order to try and create a two state solution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine). Nor does this address the issue of Palestinian representative bodies rejecting a two state solution in 1948, instead siding with Arab attackers who failed to beat Israel in its war of independence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War), and who succeeded in their genocide and expulsion of over 800,000 Jews in Arab countries. (https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/the-expulsion-of-jews-from-arab-countries-and-iran—an-untold-history).
The Palestinians aggressively lie to stake their claim on Israel. They are Islamic Supremacists out to disenfranchise national ambitions of non-Muslims. Palestinian governments and representatives have never been interested in peace with Israel. They are expressly anti-Jewish in their national conception. They never self-identified as a declared ethnicity ever during any Ottoman census. They believe that Palestine is a national entity, rather than the conquered remnants of Egypt (Gaza) and Jordan (West Bank). They concoct an ethnicity that has no anthropological distinctions from the Egyptians or Jordanians, besides a claim to the land of Palestine/Israel. They claim to be an ethnicity to neutralize the nationalism of Jews. Israel had recognized up until the attacks the Palestinian national identity, but the same has not been reciprocated. Palestinians are Islamic supremacists using the language of international law which they disdain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Christians The 1922 census showed 73k Christian Palestinians, 84k Jews, for 157k people disenfranchised from Palestinian political bodies, or 1/8 of the total population. That grows to 1/3 disenfranchised Jews (700k) and Christians and does not include the Jewish migrants from Muslim countries that committed genocide against local Jews (justified by the creation of Israel) who then moved to Israel.
The entire Palestinian cause is an Islamic movement to neutralize Jewish nationalism and the Palestinians themselves are a fictitious people.
European "Jews" are not Arab Jews, but European settlers.
"Jews" is a fraught and misleading term, I am afraid.
Respecting the UN declarations back to 1947 would bring a form of peace, but it would not be possible to respect them through peaceful means at this point.
There are many specific familial historic claims to specific houses and pieces of property.
The apartheid state is unjust and criminal, and was carved out of the British mandate through terrorist tactics from the Irgun as the empire faded after WW-2. It was also a "Zionist project" with old and deep roots in London.
External intrigues and weapons of mass-migration were at play.