Now, I didn't get to answer the second part:
The people who identify themselves today are indigenous to Arabia - NOT Israel/Palestine. There may have been generations of families living in Palestine for centuries who are Arab Muslim (I believe their population around the time of the formation of British Palestine was close to 200,000), but they are still living in Israel today - they are Arab-Israelis. There are over 1 million of them. They have the same freedoms as Jewish Israelis do - they can even serve in Israel's Kenesset.
Palestine only existed as a name difference between Israel and Palestine. It was still Israel, just under a different name. The people of Iran are Persians, not Iranian. The people of Iraq are Arabs, not Iraqis.
According to what I've read, the indigenous Jewish population of Palestine in 1917 was about 2% of the population.
Most of those small percentage of the population of Jews at that time had been living in Palestine for centuries...possibly in some cases their families had been living there since the LAST time it had been called Isreal.
They lived in peace with the dominate Arab population for centuries.
As did most of the Kibbutzen which FIRST came to Palestine. Most of t6hose people were SOCIALISTS more than religionists.
Those early Jewish "pioneers" bought the land legally from the Palestinians (or in many cases from the Ottonmans who often had the title). And then they were sensitive to the needs of the (often ) tenant farmers who'd been working that land for generations, too. They worked in peqace with those Palestinians, folks. They were not imperialists, and the were a great model of what should have been done in that land, in my opinion.
The problems of Jews v Arabs really started after the Balfour Declaration because (quite naturally, I think) the Arabs were not happy to hear that Britian and the Europeans Zionist community were deciding the fate of their Palestinian society without at least consulting the indigenous people (the Arab Palestinians).
And so once the mandate was in place the Arabs protests against this policy started.
Between 1918 and 1948, the British policy about Jews from Europe immigrating fibrilated. Sometimes the Brits allowed immigrants in, and then the Arabs rioted, sometime they Brits did not, and then the Palestinian Jews rioted. (anyone ever read "
Ship of Fools" ?)
There was never any time, post the Balfour declaration, when the Arab community in Palestine was NOT protesting to the Brits and the League of Nation about this arrogant policy of European colonialization of their land.
All this racist blather about those people NOT being a Palestinian community that thought of itself as unique and Palestinian is NOT supported by the history of that place.
