[stormdennis]

You need to brush up on your facts as well as your timelines and stop parroting Zionist slogans. Jews formed a very small proportion of the Palestine in the 19th century. It was also never a "British" territory as such. Britain simply had the League Of Nations mandate to prepare it for independence, elections etc. The locals were supposed to have a say in which Great Power was given the mandate and they most certainly didn't want it to be Britain, being aware of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Britain, in cahoots with France, brushed all that aside at the time to get the mandate and have the aims of the Balfour Declaration incorporated into the mandate. Britain's goal was to have a Jewish client state in a sea of Arabs to guard the Suez Canal, the passage to its Indian Empire. For that reason no elections were ever held as Balfour stated that Britain wasn't going to even pretend to consult the native population, let alone give them a real say, while Churchill was happy to see an inferior civilisation replaced by a superior one. During the mandate period the proportion of Jews rose from a few percent to almost a third, against the wishes of the indigenous population. This finally resulted in a uprising by the Arabs in the 1936 to 1939 period which was brutally suppressed by Britain and its Jewish armed militias leaving the Arabs rudderless. After the war the Jews, being aware of the weakness of the Arabs couldn't wait for the British to depart, to the extent of waging a terrorist war against their former patrons to hurry them up. Finally the Arabs (Palestinians) having no diaspora to lobby for them in the West were done up like a kipper at the UN.

[Protostome]

I contest the use of the word "native" in that regard.

People have immigrated constantly throughout history from place to place. Many palestinians bare the names of their 19th-18th century origins. Last names such as "Al-Masri" (The Egyptian), "Halabi" (Of the city of Haleb in Syria) are very common, to name a few.

The tragedy here, is the continued refusal of the palestinian leadership during the 1940s to accept any partition of the land, which led to a catastrophic result on their part. Had they accepted the 1947 partition plan, Israel and Palestine could have been a free, peaceful countries.

[stormdennis]

Aah, the Palestinians never existed argument, the successor to the long discredited land without people for a people with land one and just as derisory. The actual tragedy here is that Western Powers facilitated settler colonisation to create a Jewish State which by definition required the expulsion of the people already living there. Further, the Zionists never had any intention of sticking to the share of Palestine "gifted" to them by the the UN. They had prepared detailed plans for the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine. The only reason they didn't take the West Bank in 1948 was that there, they were up against the British-trained Arab Legion.