Other versions of this claim include:
Jews were there first and this is land promised to land to the Jews.
Israel is an example of an indigenous people finally returning to their native country after exile.
Palestinians are Arab occupiers of that region. Calling Jews colonizers is just progressive “wokism”.
There was no land theft because Palestinian land holders sold their land to Jews in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century
Responses:
1) The Jews only constituted 5-10% of the population of historic Palestine for 2,000 years.
2) Allowing return to a country after 2,000 years of absence, whether based in biblical claims or not, would wreak havoc in the modern period. By this logic, Italy would have claims on vast swaths of Mediterranean and European countries based on the expanse of the Roman Empire two millennia ago. To take the analogy further, if Vikings pointed to a mythological text to claim that they inhabited North America prior to the Native Americans, descendants of Vikings would not therefore have a legitimacy to take over the United States and establish a new state.
3) If we accept Jewish claims to establish ethnic majority in the historic land of Palestine, what of the Jews that live as minorities in Europe and North America? Does this mean that Europeans also have the right to ethnically cleanse Jews or other minority groups from their midst, or to treat them like second-class citizens?
4) We should remember that even the Bible does not name the Jews as the indigenous inhabitants of the land of Canaan (Palestine). Instead, the story in Genesis 12 describes God promising the land that was then inhabited by Canaanites to Abraham. Generations later, it is Joshua who leads the Israelites in kicking out the indigenous Canaanites in the Book of Joshua. Clearly, then even from a Biblical standpoint, the Israelites were NOT the first inhabitants of the land, and were preceded by the Canaanites. Abraham himself was from the city of Ur in modern day Iraq
5) Indigeneity aside, it’s patently unjust to remove people from their homes, whether they have occupied that home for one generation or one hundred, and it’s a fantasy to imagine that people who are being removed from their homes will not fight back. Resistance is a normal response to any attempt at ethnic cleansing, regardless of which parties are involved.
6) Even if some or even many Jews settled in Palestine through the legitimate purchase of land, this in itself doesn’t grant them the right to exterminate the historical population in order to establish a Jewish-majority state.
