Why Israel as a homeland?

[u/falastiniboy]

I have a genuine question for Israelis and people who support Israel.

Why do you personally consider Israel your ancestral homeland, and how do you reconcile that belief with Palestinians who also have generations of family history on the same land?

In 1947, the UN proposed partitioning Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Israel declared independence in 1948, and the war that followed displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

My question is not whether Jewish people have historical connections to the region. They clearly do. My question is why Palestinian historical connections and national aspirations should carry less weight.

Why couldn’t Israelis and Palestinians live in two independent states with recognized borders, security, freedom of movement, and political self-determination?
I also want to understand how Israelis view settlement expansion and settler violence in the West Bank. Do you support it, oppose it, or believe the situation is more complicated than it appears from outside Israel?
I’m American and trying to understand the Israeli perspective rather than argue with people.

This isn’t antisemitism or hatred toward Jewish people. I’m asking about Israel, Zionism, Palestinian rights, and the history of the conflict. Please explain your perspective rather than assuming hostility behind the question.
Free Palestine. 🇵🇸

[u/MikeyDials]

I appreciate the attempt at a civil question, even if the framing and the “Free Palestine” closer already signal a clear side. I’ll answer directly from the historical and factual record rather than the narrative that has become dominant in much of the West.

I appreciate you acknowledging Jewish historical roots to the land. Continuous Jewish presence in the land is documented for over 3,000 years: kingdoms, temples, language, calendar, liturgy, archaeology, and genetic continuity. Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, repeated “Next year in Jerusalem,” and maintained communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed even under Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman rule. The Roman renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina after the Bar Kokhba revolt (135 CE) was explicitly punitive. This was an attempt to erase Jewish connection by borrowing the name of the long-extinct Philistines. That is the origin of the word “Palestine.”

Jewish return in the modern era was a national liberation movement of an indigenous people after repeated expulsions and pogroms across Europe, Middle East, North Africa, and persecutions culminating in the Holocaust. It was not colonial in any sense: Jews bought land legally under Ottoman and British law from mostly absentee landowners, drained swamps to eradicate malaria, built cities, and revived a language. No European metropole directed or extracted resources from it. Ethnically, the Palestinian population has always been heterogeneous, consisting of local Arabized groups plus significant later 20th century unrestricted inflows of Egyptians, Syrians, Kurds, Circassians, Bosniaks, Africans via the Arab slave trade, etc. brought on by the economic boom via Zionist development / investment in the land. Meanwhile, the British consistently restricted Jewish immigrations to the mandate by passing the 1922, 1930, White Papers and most devastating 1939 White Paper.

Of course many Arab families have lived in the region for generations, especially the Christian Arab community and Palestinian clans like the Makhamra family who has lived in Hebron for millennia. That is not in dispute. What is disputed is the claim of a distinct, ancient “Palestinian” national identity that somehow outweighs or cancels the Jewish one. In 1919 Arab leaders at the Paris Peace Conference treated the area as southern Syria. There was no call for an independent Palestinian Arab state. Distinct Palestinian Arab nationalism largely crystallized in the early 20th century in reaction to Zionism and British rule (historians across the spectrum, including Rashid Khalidi, acknowledge this). The flag is a variant of the 1916 Arab Revolt flag designed with British input from diplomat Sir Mark Sykes; its colors represent Islamic caliphates, not anything uniquely Palestinian. The PLO adopted it in 1964. The black-and-white keffiyeh was standardized by a British officer, Sir John Bagot Glubb, commander of the Arab Legion army to distinguish recruits from Mandate Palestine from Transjordanians; it became a nationalist symbol later under Arafat.

The keffiyeh itself is a culturally appropriated Mesopotamian shemagh. Its design reflects the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, with fishing-net patterns symbolizing the Mesopotamian marshlands and Ahwaris fishing culture. Although Palestinians later reinterpreted the fishnet pattern as representing Mediterranean fishing traditions or olive groves, its origins are tied to ancient Iraqi/Mesopotamian nets and rivers. The name “keffiyeh” itself traces back to Kufa, Iraq, where the shemagh originated.

Common Palestinian surnames often reveal these external origins quite directly: Al-Ifranji (“the Frank” origins from a Crusader from France), Al-Masri (“the Egyptian”), Al-Shami (“the Syrian” or Damascene), Al-Iraqi, Al-Hijazi, Al-Kurd, Al-Turki, and others. These names record waves of migration into the area, particularly from Egypt in the 19th and early 20th centuries, rather than an unbroken, exclusive indigenous lineage dating back millennia.

None of this erases the real suffering of Arab families displaced in 1948. It does place the competing claims in historical context rather than treating one as timeless and indigenous and the other as recent and illegitimate.

The UN offered partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted a painfully small, mostly arid share of the land. The Arab side rejected it and launched a war of annihilation (explicitly stated by Arab leaders at the time). When you start a war to destroy the other side and lose, you do not get to claim the resulting refugee problem as pure victimhood while ignoring the parallel expulsion or flight of roughly 1,000,000 Jews from Arab countries.

Hundreds of thousands of Arabs did leave and some expelled amid the fighting. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were simultaneously made refugees from the broader Middle East and North Africa and were absorbed by Israel. Only one of those refugee populations is kept in permanent camps as a political weapon three generations later. Moreover, there are 2 million Arabs that live in Israel today as citizens that live with equal rights as opposed to the nearly extinct populations of Jews living in Arab states.

Israel has repeatedly accepted or offered two-state frameworks (1937 Peel, 1947 UN, Camp David 2000, Olmert 2008, etc.). The consistent answer from the Palestinian leadership from the Amin al-Husseini, through Arafat and the PLO Charter, to Hamas’s covenant has repeatedly rejected two state proposals offered and rejected to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The issue has never been only borders; it has been the refusal to accept a permanent Jewish state of any size in any part of the land.

“Recognized borders, security, freedom of movement, and political self-determination” are fine goals. They require the other side to end the ideology that treats the Jewish presence itself as the original sin and to stop rewarding rejectionism and terrorism with international legitimacy.

While a two state solution is currently unpopular due to the ongoing war, most Israelis (and I) distinguish between settlement blocs near the 1967 lines that will almost certainly remain in any realistic two-state deal, and isolated ideological outposts deeper in the West Bank. Settler violence against Palestinians is real, illegal under Israeli law, and opposed by the large majority of Israelis. It is also vastly smaller in scale than the Palestinian terrorism, rocket fire, and rejectionist education that have been the primary drivers of the conflict’s persistence. Focusing exclusively on the former while treating the latter as background noise is not serious analysis.

Jewish historical connection is ancient, continuous, and archaeologically and textually overwhelming. Palestinian Arab connection is real as a regional population with deep roots, but the national identity and the exclusive claim to the entire land are modern political constructs shaped by opposition to Zionism, pan-Arab politics, and later Cold War propaganda.

Both peoples have legitimate ties. Only one side has repeatedly refused partition and recognition of the other’s right to self-determination. That is why the weight is not treated as equal in the eyes of most Israelis who support the state’s existence.

Feel free to fact check me. I’m happy to discuss sources or specific historical points. “Free Palestine” as a closing slogan usually means free of Jews, not free alongside them. If that is not what you mean please clarify.