You are confused, I said nothing about the Arabs invading. Palestine was sparsely populated in the 19th century, and there is considerable evidence that the bulk of Palestinian Arabs emigrated into the country, legally or illegally, towards the turn of the (20th) century and thereafter, especially under the British Mandatory Authority. Thus, the comparison with indigenous peoples is not quite accurate. Furthermore, there never was a Palestinian Arab state, nor was it a natural point of devolution after the Mandate. Indeed, for a long time it was considered that Syria had the natural claim on the territory, among Arab powers. Of course, Jordan took the bulk of Palestine and made it into a kingdom, and thereby became a contender for the sovereign over the whole territory.
Resistance to Jewish immigration was largely cast as an aspect of Pan- Arabism, which insisted that any land that had once been ruled by Arabs, defined primarily linguistically, should continue as an Arab territory, one way or another. In other words, the Jews didn't belong not primarily because they were displacing native inhabitants, but because they were polluting Arab land. Anti- Zionism rapidly became anti- Semitism, and Hitler was widely admired among the Arabs.
The Jews of Palestine accepted the UN partition plan, which would have gerrymandered Jewish and Arab districts into two separate states, although without defensible borders. Under the Partition, the Arabs, who had already taken Jordan, would have gotten the bulk of the remainder of Palestine. Nevertheless, the Palestinian Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, encouraged by the Arab Powers to think that the Jewish community would soon be annihilated, which, of course, they tried to do after independence was declared. This circumstance of trying to finish Hitler's job, as it were, has made it impossible to consider a binational or multinational state, especially when followed by other attempts at annihilation, or by the Palestinian embrace of indiscriminate terror. Once they started attacking schoolbuses, decades ago, that was pretty much it........... |
