Jews were only a few percent of the population before Europeans started moving in at the end of the 19th Century. The people we now call Palestinians were the native inhabitants of the whole region of Palestine. They've given up 78% of it.

Yes, there was a certain period when Jews were a small minority; so what?

If we're using "Palestinian" to mean someone from Palestine, why wouldn't we count a family from the First Aliyah as Palestinian? The Second Aliyah? Holocaust refugees?

Some who now identify as Palestinian also immigrated during the economically prosperous Mandatory Palestine period. Would you say they're not real Palestinians, because they joined too recently? How about Arafat, who doesn't have a "pure" unbroken Levantine lineage (being born in Cairo)?

Should American families who have only been here for one century have fewer rights, perhaps less voting power, than families who have been here for multiple centuries?

That "certain period" was over a thousand years. For at least hundreds of years until the about 1900, the region of Palestine was inhabited by the people we now call the Palestinians, not by the ancestors of the Israelis.

> Some who now identify as Palestinian also immigrated during the economically prosperous Mandatory Palestine period.

Relatively few. Not enough to have much of an impact on the overall Arab population of Palestine. This is radically different than the Zionist colonization of Palestine, which was a mass influx of people with the explicit intention of taking over control of the territory.

> Should American families who have only been here for one century have fewer rights

I think you would accept that the following two situations would be very different:

1. People immigrate to the US, settle down, send their kids to school, and eventually become American citizens.

2. A large group of people enter the US with the explicitly stated goal of founding their own country - a country in which they want there to be as few Americans as possible. They have their own militias and operate completely outside the control of any government that the people of the United States control. Just to make this scenario more realistic, we can say that the US is currently under the rule of a foreign empire, so that Americans have no say in their own government. The foreign settlers start taking over large parts of the country. Finally, the UN says that the US should be split in two, giving half of it to the foreign settlers. The foreign settlers agree, but Americans think it's unfair and don't agree. War erupts. The foreign settlers, based on superior political organization and funding from abroad, quickly establish massive military dominance over the Americans, and go on to conquer 78% of the United States, expelling 80% of the American population from the territory they control.

Not exactly the same thing.

> Relatively few. Not enough to have much of an impact on the overall Arab population of Palestine.

The numbers are largely unknown for border crossings. But the point is that it's a gross oversimplification to say that Palestinians are native to Palestine (even those born outside?) while Jews are not. The intentional naming collision encourages this oversimplification.

And if we move past the rather old-fashioned idea that more recent immigrants don't count, the more relevant figure is that there was a (slight) Jewish majority within the partition plan borders.

> mass influx of people with the explicit intention of taking over control of the territory

Many of them simply had no choice, having been driven out of other MENA states.

> with the explicitly stated goal of founding their own country

I don't think that it's wrong to legally immigrate, regardless of any statehood aspirations, or that such immigrants are less deserving of any rights than other residents.

> The numbers are largely unknown for border crossings.

Actually, we do have a very good idea. The demographics of Palestine were studied at the time (e.g., by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry), and are well understood. Arab population growth in Palestine was almost entirely due to simple births minus deaths, and was similar to population growth in other Arab countries of the time.

> But the point is that it's a gross oversimplification to say that Palestinians are native to Palestine (even those born outside?) while Jews are not.

Which Jews? There were Jews who were native to Palestine. They made up a few percent of the population of the region. But the overwhelming majority of the people who founded Israel were recent immigrants. The first Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, was from Płońsk, Poland. The first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann was from Belarus. Golda Meir was from Odessa and grew up in Milwaukee. You can go down the list. They're almost all like that. Heck, the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was from Budapest, and barely ever set foot in Palestine (only once, I think).

> The intentional naming collision encourages this oversimplification.

The reason for the naming collision is simple: the Palestinians are the people who lived in Palestine before the Zionists came in, took over most of it and established Israel.

> Many of them simply had no choice, having been driven out of other MENA states.

No, that happened in the years after the founding of Israel, as a consequence of it. It turns out that kicking out hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes and loudly proclaiming that you're doing so in the name of the Jewish people is a really effective way of stoking antisemitism in Arab countries.

> I don't think that it's wrong to legally immigrate, regardless of any statehood aspirations, or that such immigrants are less deserving of any rights than other residents.

If you read the scenario I sketched out above and think it's the same as everyday immigration and is okay, I don't know what to tell you. It's like calling the European settlers who drove out Native Americans "immigrants."

> Arab population growth in Palestine was almost entirely due to simple births minus deaths

Do you have a source for this? I don't think that matches the British census data, unless we postulate that the birth rate somehow skyrocketed.

> There were Jews who were native to Palestine. They made up a few percent of the population of the region

What do you mean by "native"? What's special about the particular time period you're referencing? The Palestinian identity didn't exist then.

> the Palestinians are the people who lived in Palestine before the Zionists came in

There were always Jews in Palestine. Even if we're zooming in on a period where their numbers were small (and I'm not sure why), we shouldn't be saying things that erase these Jews from history.

> as a consequence of it

I think most of us would agree that there's no justification for ethnic cleansing. (I don't condone the cases of that done by Jewish militias in some towns either.)

> and think it's the same as everyday immigration

Not what I said at all. The point is that, in both this analogy and the actual topic of immigration to the Levant, it shouldn't matter how many centuries a family has lived in a region.

> Do you have a source for this? I don't think that matches the British census data, unless we postulate that the birth rate somehow skyrocketed.

It's in the official report of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry, which did actually use demographic data gathered by the British. It's not that births skyrocketed. It's mainly that infant mortality went down. This exact same phenomenon has played out throughout most of the world at some point in the last 200 years, and it typically leads to a population boom (until families adjust and start having fewer children).

> What do you mean by "native"? What's special about the particular time period you're referencing? The Palestinian identity didn't exist then.

We don't have to get into a big theoretical discussion of what "native" means. When the Zionist movement began, there were already people living in Palestine. Most of them had deep roots there, going back many hundreds of years (or more). The Zionist movement was a European movement that aimed to colonize Palestine - to settle it and establish a state for European Jews. This is basically very similar to what happened in North America with European colonists and Native Americans. There are particularities to each case, but the basic dynamic between the existing ("native") population and the group that's coming in to displace them is the same.

The fact that Palestinians didn't have a firm national identity in 1900 isn't a justification for taking their land and expelling them.

> There were always Jews in Palestine.

This is a red herring. The fact that there was a tiny group of Jews living in Palestine does not have much of anything to do with our discussion. We're talking about Zionism, a movement among European Jews to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

> I don't condone the cases of that done by Jewish militias in some towns either.

Without the ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist militias (and the IDF, after it was officially founded), there would be no Israel. The entire basis for Israel's existence is the creation of a large Jewish majority in a substantial portion of Palestine. That happened through the mass ethnic cleansing campaign in 1947-48.

> Not what I said at all. The point is that, in both this analogy and the actual topic of immigration to the Levant ...

We're not discussing "immigration to the Levant." We're talking about an organized effort to take over a foreign territory, against the will of the people who live there.

> This is basically very similar to what happened in North America with European colonists and Native Americans

This is a complicated analogy. There was no sovereign, so noone to decide on an immigration policy and no arbiter of legality.

Some settler groups purchased land and had good relations with natives. We don't tend to deem those problematic merely because people relocated and didn't look like the other people living there at the time. Many settlements were of course problematic for other reasons.

A closer analogy would be black families legally relocating to safer white neighborhoods, "against the will of the people who live there". If a neighborhood flipped from majority-white to majority-black, and black politicians gained power, would you say the white community gave up something that was rightfully theirs?

> Without the ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist militias (and the IDF, after it was officially founded), there would be no Israel. The entire basis for Israel's existence is the creation of a large Jewish majority in a substantial portion of Palestine. That happened through the mass ethnic cleansing campaign in 1947-48.

This isn't accurate at all. There was already a Jewish majority in the proposed Jewish state by the time of the partition plan. Hundreds of thousands of additional Holocaust survivors were expected. Ethnic cleansing of Jews from surrounding Arab states also greatly contributed to what became a much stronger Jewish majority.

> against the will of the people who live there

I don't believe a demographic majority has some inherent right to deny access to minorities who wish to legally immigrate.

The fact that you think Zionist colonization of Palestine was analogous to black families moving into white neighborhoods is just crazy. I don't think anyone who has ever read about this history could sincerely think that those two scenarios are even remotely comparable.

You're making a big deal of the existence of a "sovereign" - in this case, an imperial overlord that ruled without any democratic accountability, and which implemented policies that were almost universally hated by the local population they ruled over. But because the British Empire supported Jewish settlement of Palestine, you view that as just fine - regardless of what the people who actually lived there thought.

> I don't believe a demographic majority has some inherent right to deny access to minorities who wish to legally immigrate.

That "legality" was established by an undemocratic regime that ruled directly against the will of the overwhelming majority of the population. You're setting up a morality here in which the European imperial powers had a moral right to dictate to their captive colonial populations who would be allowed to live where, and to force them to accept the political / demographic takeover of their lands by a foreign people. And what's more, you think it would be immoral for the colonial population to resist what would effectively be an invasion by a foreign people. Why? Because the imperial overlord said the invasion was legal.

But if you're being morally consistent, you'll have to now say that the Israelis have no moral right to prevent the millions of Palestinians who live scattered across the world from immigrating to Israel. I'm sure you'll quibble that Israeli law doesn't allow that immigration, but that's not a moral objection. If the Palestinians had been allowed to run their own affairs in the 1920s-40s, instead of being ruled over by a foreign power, they would have passed laws preventing Jewish immigration, just as Israel now prevents Palestinian immigration. If you're morally consistent, you'll accept that Israel should allow itself to become a majority-Palestinian country.

> The fact that you think Zionist colonization of Palestine was analogous to black families moving into white neighborhoods is just crazy. I don't think anyone who has ever read about this history could sincerely think that those two scenarios are even remotely comparable.

An analogy is not an equivalence; one can make meaningful analogies involving aliens or unicorns. You have not provided any actual argument for why the analogy might be flawed.

> you'll have to now say that the Israelis have no moral right to prevent the millions of Palestinians who live scattered across the world from immigrating to Israel

Open borders are probably morally optimal, at least theorists like Joseph Carens would say so. You seem to be holding Israel to a standard of moral sainthood, or expecting me to. No state decides immigration (or any other) policies based on what is morally optimal.

> That "legality" was established by an undemocratic regime

We can just as well pretend that there was no sovereign power, only anarchy. When there's no legal argument for blocking immigration, we're left with only moral arguments, and I don't think a demographic majority has any inherent moral right to deny the freedom of movement of select minorities.

> You have not provided any actual argument for why the analogy might be flawed.

You really want me to explain to you why black families moving into a white-only neighborhood is a ridiculous analogy for Zionist settlers moving in to Palestine with the goal of transforming it into a Jewish state?

I'm surprised that this has to be explained, but here goes.

In your analogy, blacks are an oppressed minority inside the United States who are merely exercising their freedom to live in whatever neighborhood they want. They are not foreign invaders coming in to take over the country, expel the native population and establish an ethnically exclusive state for themselves.

In Palestine, the goal of the Zionists were essentially invaders. They had the goal of transforming it from an Arab country into a country for European Jews, where Jews would have unquestioned supremacy and control over the state. In Palestine, the Zionists were not some oppressed minority. They were much wealthier than the Arabs. They had enormous financial backing from the outside in order to buy up land from absentee landlords, expel the tenant farmers, and establish Jewish settlements. They were backed by the imperial overlord, the British Empire. The Arabs had no power of self-governance. They were ruled over by a foreign power, the British Empire, which imposed a policy on them that meant that a foreign people - European Jews - would take over the country. When the Arabs rose up, they were brutally suppressed by the British army, with the help of Zionist militias.

This is what you're comparing to a few black families moving into a white neighborhood. It's beyond absurd.