It wasn't Palestine's land before Israel's creation. Prior to the UK and France creating arbitrary borders across the region in the early 20th century, the middle east was one giant borderless region. There were no Syrians, no Iraqis, no Palestinians etc... They were just Arabs.
While it's true that there were some Arabs living in the region of Palestine prior to Israel's creation, they were mostly a nomadic people without any serious attachment to the land. Palestine was not a country at the time. There was no government, no currency, no flag, no national anthem or anything else that's required to classify something as a country. In other words, there was no sense of unity there. There were just a couple hundred thousand random people living throughout without any real attachment to the land. There were also a number of Jews there as well (Jerusalem, for example, has had a Jewish majority since long before Zionism was ever even conceived).
Once the Zionist movement started and Jews started moving in, they settled on uninhabited parts of the region and parts that did have Arab landowners were legally purchased. David Ben Gurion (who later became Israel's first PM) even went on record telling the Zionists to only make purchases from wealthy land owners. The Zionists then cultivated the land and turned the swamps into fertile land by drying them up with eucalyptus trees. Once the land became nice and fertile, more Arabs started moving in as well to take advantage of it.
Eventually, this all led to the 1948 war in which the Jews finally declared a country on the land that they owned and the Arabs declared war, trying to exterminate the Jews to take every square inch of land for themselves. The Arabs lost the war, lost land in the process, and the rest, as they say, is history.
While it's true that there were some Arabs living in the region of Palestine prior to Israel's creation, they were mostly a nomadic people without any serious attachment to the land. Palestine was not a country at the time. There was no government, no currency, no flag, no national anthem or anything else that's required to classify something as a country. In other words, there was no sense of unity there. There were just a couple hundred thousand random people living throughout without any real attachment to the land. There were also a number of Jews there as well (Jerusalem, for example, has had a Jewish majority since long before Zionism was ever even conceived).
Once the Zionist movement started and Jews started moving in, they settled on uninhabited parts of the region and parts that did have Arab landowners were legally purchased. David Ben Gurion (who later became Israel's first PM) even went on record telling the Zionists to only make purchases from wealthy land owners. The Zionists then cultivated the land and turned the swamps into fertile land by drying them up with eucalyptus trees. Once the land became nice and fertile, more Arabs started moving in as well to take advantage of it.
Eventually, this all led to the 1948 war in which the Jews finally declared a country on the land that they owned and the Arabs declared war, trying to exterminate the Jews to take every square inch of land for themselves. The Arabs lost the war, lost land in the process, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Last edited by Fancy_Pollux (2006-11-23 07:26:04)