One argument that I often hear is that Jews, who  began their Diaspora in 135 AD as a consequence of the suppression of the bar Kochba Revolt by the Romans in Judaea (Israel), were entitled to return to Israel at their election, since the land was theirs.  This claim is bolstered also by the promise of Abraham, in Genesis 15: 18-21:

“To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river the Euphrates. The land of the Kenites, Kenizites, Kadmonites; the Hittites, Perizzites, Refaim; the Emorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.”

It is doubtful whether Abraham was a real person at all, so the idea of a promised land is a romantic notion verging on being a mere fairy tale.

Undoubtedly it was a great tragedy for second-century Jews to be forced from Judaea, but that has little or or no bearing on anyone alive today.  Being half American Indian, I feel that American Indians were sorely mistreated by invading Europeans too, but that has nothing to do with my present situation, which finds me as just another American citizen.  Now the genocide of the Indians took place as recently as the nineteenth century, but it is still water under the bridge.  I don’t have an enforceable claim upon any lands in North Carolina, where the Cherokee Indians lived before their forcible removal to Oklahoma.  How is it then that I am expected to agree that Jews have a legitimate claim on Israel, when their tenancy ended eighteen centuries before their return?  Do Celts have a claim on Spain?  They were there before the Spanish.  The Greeks owned the city of Istanbul (then called Byzantium or Constantinople) for over 2000 years.  Are they then entitled to return despite the fact that Turks have held the city since 1453?

I think that a national claim on land ought to be considered expired after some period of time, like 100 or 200 years.  The Chinese claim on Taiwan, which was seized from them by the Japanese in 1895 and nominally restored to them from 1945-1949 is, in my opinion, just at the borderline between a valid current claim and a defunct one.  If that judgment is correct, then the Jewish claim on Israel is as dead as a doornail.

The Palestinian response to the Jewish claim is to claim that the Palestinians are the descendants of the Biblical Philistines.  I am skeptical of this claim first of all, but even if it is true, it also lacks any meaningful application today.

However, the Palestinians or Arabs, whatever name you wish to apply to them, did reside in Palestine (Israel) from the seventh century right up to present time, and that to me is a valid claim.  Many of these people have been displaced from their homes and placed in ‘Bantustans’ by the name of Gaza and the West Bank.  They have every right to be indignant and to resort to any means at their disposal to oppose the occupation. 

Palestinians never formed a definite nation, with boundaries, laws and diplomatic relations, but that shouldn’t matter either.  They lived in Palestine under the Ottoman Empire from 1517 to 1917, as did Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and other regions of the Middle East.  Palestine was clearly their land at the beginning of the twentieth century.  And the Jewish occupation of the land should be considered an invasion rather than a return.

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