The Arabs who call themselves "Palestinian" today only came about sometime in the 20th century in response to increased Jewish aliyah.
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@Ivurm
actually, no. Palestine never existed as a state. its existence was planned by the UN in the partition plan, bat the local Arab leadership rejected the plan as whole. the locals at the time refer to themselves only as Arabs and their goal at the ensuing conflict was united state with Jordan, Syria or Egypt (or some partition of the area between those states). in the years 1948-67 the west bank was occupied by Jordan, while Gaza strip was occupied by Egypt. there wasn't local movement that call for independence or tried to fight the occupation: at most the locals tried to improve the conditions at the refugee camps or gain citizenship in the Arab states.
the OP is mostly right. demographic research show great increase of the Arab population (much more than what you could attribute to natural growth) alongside the Jewish Immigration. texts from that period suggest that the development of the area and the foreign investments provide business opportunities and workplaces for people from all the area. mobility was higher at that time, since the ottoman empire controlled all the area (and later the British rule did little to limit Arab immigration).
however, I do believe nations have the right to define themselves, and therefore the Palestinians nation is a fact and history has no bearing on their claim for a state. sadly, I think the ideal of 2 state solution is dead and the blame doesn't lie completely on one side.
The entire Levant, Holy Land, whatever you want to call it, has been a racial and ethnic melting pot since long before the Romans arrived.
This needs to be unpacked a little.
1) Arabs who called themselves Palestinian today have lived in the region for many centuries.
2) This does not mean that all the Arabs there are autochthonous: many Arabs who call themselves Palestinian came as immigrants from Egypt and Iraq during the 1930s and 1940s. One of the ironies of the Arab-Israeli dispute is that it is, to a considerable extent, a dispute between people whose grandparents came from Egypt because they were persecuted and people whose grandparents came from Egypt because they were looking for work.
3) Before 1948, the term "Palestinian" almost always referred to Jews living in the Mandate, not Arabs.
4) Arabs living in the region, until the late 1950s and 1960s, usually referred to themselves as Syrians, seeing themselves as part of the Ottoman vilayet of Damascus which covered what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
5) It is not particularly important how a national identity arose. However tenuous it might appear to be - for example, the Egyptians of the Balkans who claim descent from ancient Egypt - once that national identity is widely established, it becomes legitimate. National identities can be established very quickly and, once they exist, they are no less real than national identities that have lasted for centuries.
They would've identified themselves as Syrian, because Syria at one point was considered to cover today's Syria as well as Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine/Israel, and parts of Turkey and Iraq. A Syria covering that area would've been far ideal to the situation we got in the Middle East thanks to colonialism. The ancestors of the Palestinians lived on that land centuries (if not longer) than the vast majority of Israeli Jews have.
Israel was not widely populated before migration efforts, and the Palestinian identity only appeared in the mid-1900s. Is that any reason, tho, to deny them a state?
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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