Robert Spencer argues that the idea that Israel is occupying Palestinian lands is a myth. He
writes:
[Those who call for an end to the "occupation"] all likely assume that there was a previous Palestinian state that the Israelis occupied and destroyed, but in reality, there has never been a Palestinian state of any kind, ever, at any point in history. There has been a region known as “Palestine” since 134AD, when the Romans applied that name to the land that had previously been known as Judea, that is, land of the Jews.
But “Palestine” was akin to “Staten Island” — it was only the name of a region, never of a people or a nation.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire had sovereignty over the territory that is now Israel and the supposedly occupied land as well. The Ottoman Empire was, however, known by this time as “The Sick Man of Europe.” In the early 1920s, just before the empire fell altogether, it conceded control of Palestine and the land that came to be known as Transjordan, and now as Jordan, to the League of Nations.
On July 24, 1922, the League granted administrative control over these territories to Britain with specific instructions to create a “national home for the Jewish people.”
Spencer doesn't say this but it was during this period that many Jews were settling Palestine and taming the desert. Thousands of Arabs thus migrated to Palestine to find work. They came from countries all over North Africa, the Middle East and Turkey. It's their descendants who make up the bulk of today's Palestinian Arabs. Relatively few Palestinians have been in the land for more than a few generations.
When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, it immediately had to fight a war for its survival against the surrounding Arab nations that had vowed to destroy it. Then there was finally an occupation — in fact, two: Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria (which it renamed the West Bank).
Israel won back those territories in the Six-Day War of 1967, but that was actually ending an occupation, not starting one: the only international law governing sovereignty over those territories stipulated that they were to be part of a national home for the Jewish people.
Prior to the 1948 war the Arab nations advised the Palestinian Arabs to leave the country so that they wouldn't be caught in the cross-fire. They were promised that after the war when the Arab nations had destroyed the new nation of Israel these "refugees" could return and plunder the property of the Jews. Israel, however, won the war and the "refugees" were stuck in refugee camps.
So from whom was the land stolen? Not from the Ottomans, who had ceded it to the League of Nations. Not from the league, which had granted administrative powers over it to the British. Not from the British, who only had it in order to help create a Jewish state there. And not from the Palestinians, who didn’t even exist until the 1960s, when the KGB and Yasir Arafat bestowed Palestinian nationality upon a group of Levantine Arabs as a rhetorical weapon to use against Israel.....
A Palestinian state, if it is ever created, would be the first-ever such entity in the history of the world.
