Really?
1)They were the indigenous residents of Palestine for millenium (when Jews, who shunned soveriegnty over the land, numbered barely 3%). That it was not an autonomous state is irrelevant, you have heard of induividual property rights haven't you?
2) They were "promised" autonomy by Col MacMahon in 1916 in return for fighting Ottoman power and it was Palestinian beduin that fought with Lawrence to close the Ottoman trade routes to the Red Sea. They also fought the Ottomans in the 1850s as a Palestinian nationalist movement (failed).
3) The Sykes Picot Agreement whereby French & British carved up spheres of influence intent was autonomy for indigenous Arabs (which would include Jewish Arabs.).
4) The Balfour Declaration (silly document predating the mandate akin to giving away what it did not own) and subsequent Mandate both insisted "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine"
5) No one considered that Zionists intended sovereignty, all western support for Zionism was based on the notion that Judaism shunned sovereignty over "Israel" pending the arrival of their Messiah (as if)
The Palestinians' claim is older, stronger and more deserving.
There was no international law that allowed winners of war rights over land and certainly none that could gave Zionists sovereinty.
The trouble with all that Balfour Declaration and Mandate happy horseshit is that it promised a Jewish National Homeland carved from a piece of Old Palestine, but then crippled that promise with the
IMPOSSIBLE condition that this would
ONLY be done
IF the rights of indigenous Arabs were not compromised.
That constituted a built-in, premeditated
DEATH BLOW to any aspirations for a Jewish National Homeland carved from a piece of Old Palestine.
In truth, a Jewish National Homeland could
NOT be created
WITHOUT compromising some of those rights.
The people who devised those crippling conditions knew that they were actually paying lip-service to the idea of a Jewish National Homeland while simultaneously and hypocritically ensuring that conditions were set down to actually make that impossible in the Real World.
So, faced with a desperate need to create a Jewish National Homeland, and faced with the impossible qualifying conditions hypocritically and intentionally embedded in Balfour and the Mandate and the UN Partition Plan, the Jews, understandably, became disgusted, threw up their hands, collectively said "Phukk it", then proceeded to hack through the Gordian Knot and made good things happen for themselves, despite the hypocritical and otherwise insurmountable barriers to Statehood which the world had put in their path.
They did this by cherry-picking what they wanted from Balfour and the Mandate and the UN Partition Plan, and setting aside the rest.
After being bullied and lied-to by Ottomans, Arabs and the British for decades, and then having 6,000,000 of their own slaughtered in the 1940s by Euro-trash, the Jews had had enough, told the British and the Arabs to go phukk themselves, and completed the process of creating a Jewish National Homeland for themselves, carved out of Old Palestine according to the old promises of Balfour and the Mandate and the related 1947 UN Partitino, and to the Devil with the hindmost; consequences be damned.
Gutsy move; one helluva Comeback for a People who had nearly been slaughtered to Extinction in that part of the world. Good on them.
Frankly, the UN should have moved in, after the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War, and relocated the losing Palestinian population, much as it allowed the population transfers of Ethnic Germans from old East Prussia and the Sudetenland, or the transfers of population between Pakistan and India, as those two countries split-apart old British Imperial India, and Hindus and Muslims went their separate ways.
But, the UN failed to do this, and therefore, unwittingly, set the stage for 60+ years of pointless strife; a struggle which Rump Palestine cannot possibly hope to win.
There is no point in continuing the killing, from the Palestinian perspective, when there is no possibility of a Palestinian victory.
That is simply insane, but, then again, few people beyond the borders of Rump Palestine are willing to accord them Brightest-Crayon-in-the-Box status.
