Whose land is this?

Professor Edward Said mentioned in this video when he was asked whether Zionists have any historical claim to the lands of Israel.:

Of course, but I would not say that the Jewish claim or the Zionist claim is the only claim or the main claim. I say that it is a claim among many others. Certainly, the Arabs have a much greater claim because they've had a longer history of inhabitants of actual residents in Palestine than the Jews did. There has been some quite interesting work done by biblical archaeologists in which you will see that the period of actual Israelites', as it was called in the Old Testament, dominance in Palestine amounts to about 200 to 250 years but there were Jebusites, there were Canaanites, there were Philistines, there were many other people in Palestine at the time and before and after. To isolate one of them and say that's the real owner of the land. that is fundamentalism because the only way you could back it up and say well God gave it to us yes but I mean Christians think that God gave it to them and Muslims think that God gave it to them I mean that's not a rational argument.

The very important point is that I don't think any claim, [whether they say by God] or by the emperor; nobody has a claim that overrides all the others and entitles that person with that so-called claim to drive people out. This is a very very important point, I mean Jews have a claimant I've never denied that of course, they do but is it a claim that can tell a Palestinian: Well you've got to leave this house because I got it 2000 years ago and it's true I come from Poland or from Brooklyn but I have a bigger right to this house than to you you, so get out. Sorry, I disagree with that without kind of logic.

George Galloway mentioned in this video:

The solution should be within one state it will have to be, because the two-state solution, which I supported as an Arafatist, I look foolish now, having supported the Oslo Agreement, I look like an idiot. Arafat looks like an idiot. Because we believed that there would be a two-state solution, and almost 40 years after the agreement, there's not one centimetre of Palestine free, and Gaza is in complete ruins. The West Bank is on fire. Settlers are running amok. The attempt to ethnically cleanse the West Bank and East Jerusalem is running concurrently with the slaughter in Gaza. So where are you going to put two-state solutions? There's 800,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank. They all settled there long before October the 7th.

In 1948 the Balfour Declaration was received and co-signed by the Zionist organizations. I was literally in the building. It's a big Manchester story. Balfour himself was an MP in Manchester. The document was signed in Manchester. The reality is, when we promised, on behalf of one people, to give to a second people the land that belonged to a third people, we set off, as Churchill put it, down a descending staircase, soaked in blood. That's why when some people say, why are you so exercised by this? Because my country caused it, and my country is still involved in it. That's why I'm so exercised by it.

Husam Zomlot said in this video:

Let me explain this! Many people around the world believe that the two-state solution is a Palestinian demand. No, it's not. The two-state solution is a Palestinian concession because by the late 80s, the PLO was proposing one Democratic egalitarian state for all of its citizens be it Muslim be it Christian be it Jewish that was our political platform. But the world (i.e. the West-led world), primarily, the US proposed something else. They said no, we have to divide the land (i.e. The two-state Solution). By the late 80s, Yasser Arafat and the founders of the movement decided to Ally themselves with International resolutions and therefore we accepted the two-state solution, not as our demand, but as our compromise. Now here is the deal! We cannot accept less than the than the 1967 borders.

Israel keeps negotiating with us, not about how to achieve the 67 borders, no no, they want to arrive somewhere between Jerusalem and Jericho. So they want to bite more of the 22% of historic Palestine that is the 1967 borders and they don't understand that any Palestinian leader, will never be able to accept less than what was offered by the UN Security Council and they can never give more. This is the line.

Short: Palestine is among the earliest sites of human habitation in the world and Palestinian people descended directly from the ancestral inhabitants of the land. The Zionist claim over the land is rooted in the Hebrew bible, and is under questioning by scholars who suggest that myths like the Abraham story (which claims Abraham descended from Palestine) were written after the fact in an attempt to give Jews in captivity in Babylon land rights. The Moses Exodus story (where God promised the Israelites Palestine) is another myth used to justify the establishment of Israel. That, and for many other reasons, relying on ancient texts with questionable historical accuracy to justify the harm being done to Palestinians is dangerous. Until 1947, Jews and Palestinians coexisted in harmony, but the majority of today's global Jewish population, including those in Israel, have European roots. Zionism, as a European settler-colonial movement, denies Palestinian existence, and falsely emphasises Jewish ties to the land. At the end of the day, regardless of the evidence for or against the claims of Jewish presence 2000 years ago, it does not justify the current theft of land and harm inflicted on Palestinians.

Long: Palestine is among the earliest sites of human habitation in the world. Palestinian people descended directly from the ancestral inhabitants of the land. The reason Jewish Zionists feel they have a claim to the land is based on what is written in the Hebrew bible. However, scholars now suggest that the Abraham myth - which claims Abraham was born in Palestine - was composed centuries later in late 600 BCE by landowners while in captivity in Babylon, who were attempting to trace their rights to the land through their father Abraham. These captives upon their return from Babylon, then based their claim to what is now Palestine on another myth – the Moses Exodus story, which claims God gifted the Israelites the ‘promised land’ (Palestine). It is also worth questioning why a book written centuries ago and believed only by those who follow the religion, and is historically proven at the very least questionable in its factual accounts - is being used as a justification to exterminate Palestinians and occupy the land.

In actuality, Jews and Palestians lived in harmony in Palestine until 1947. Jews are also largely a diaspora, with several Jews and Israeli Jews in particular, having no genetic or Middle Eastern heritage tying them to the region. In fact, European/Ashkenazi Jews make up 80% of the world's Jewish population. Meaning the majority of Jews globally - and in Israel - have European roots and are not Indigenous to Palestine. Genetic testing is also conveniently banned in Israel, likely in an attempt to cover up this fact.

To justify the appropriation of land, and the expulsion and elimination of its people, Zionism as a European settler-colonial movement has tried to deny the existence of the Palestinians altogether and falsely inflate Jews ancestral ties to the land. Before the British Mandate on Palestine and the Balfour declaration, Jews in Palestine made up only 4% of the population. Jewish claims that they inhabited Palestine 2000 years ago are irrelevant in the current context, and definitely do not justify the theft of land and the killing and expulsion of the Palestinians.

Sources:

@key48return

@raadbarhoush

welcometopalestine.com

This answer is taken from the document Palestine: in Conversation Document.

In this video, Vox website mentions the following along with sources:

• Around the time that Israelis celebrate Independence Day, Palestinians commemorate “The Nakba,” or “The Catastrophe.” The Nakba was a series of events, centered around 1948, that expelled hundreds of thousands Palestinians from their homeland and killed thousands. The Nakba isn’t the beginning of the story, but it’s a key part of Palestinian history — and the root of Israel’s creation.
• Prior to the Nakba, Palestine had a thriving population — largely made up of Arabs — that had lived and worked the land for centuries. But with the founding of Zionism, years of British meddling, and a British pledge to help create a Jewish state in Palestine — things began to change drastically. By 1947, with increasing tensions between Jewish settlers and Palestinian Arabs — the British left Palestine, and the UN stepped in with a plan to partition the land into two states. What followed was known as Plan Dalet: operations by Israeli paramilitary groups that violently uprooted Palestinians. An estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed, more than 500 villages were decimated, and roughly 750,000 Palestinians displaced.
• Most who were expelled from their homes couldn’t return to historic Palestine. And today, millions of their descendants live in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank and surrounding countries. The history of the Nakba has been deliberately concealed and often ignored in western narratives around the creation of Israel. In this episode of Missing Chapter, we break down how the Nakba happened — and how it defined the future of Palestine.