wo thousand years.
According to this view, all of Palestine "really" thus belonged to the Palestinian Arabs, and was annexed in a basically unjust manner and settled in recent times by Zionist Jews. But because these Jews have no other home, and as a sort of compensation for the Nazi Holocaust, the Israeli Jews are accepted in this view as having a sort of squatter's right to the territory within the pre 1967 boundaries of Israel, but only with the previso that they ought to compromise by withdrawing from the remainder, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan, which would then become a State of Palestine.
We will argue that this view of the history of Jews in Palestine is so grossly simplified and distorted as to be meaningless: that Jews have always lived (save for brief interruptions) in every part of Palestine, and thus surely have a moral right to live there now. Thus does not bear directly on the political status and fate of Israeli settlements outside Israel's pre 1967 boundaries. A practical argument may be made that some of that territory should be relinquished to "Palestine," if such an action would help promote a lasting Arab Israeli peace. But this is a practical and political consideration, not a moral one.
That Jews lived in Palestine, or Eretz Yisrael, in ancient time is as beyond dispute as that Greeks lived in ancient Greece. Arabs, Muslim or Christian, can hardly deny the ancient Biblical Jewish experience, which is an integral part of their own religious heritage. Biblical tradition is supported, as it happens, by independent archeological and historical evidence. Egyptian records report the existence of tribes which they called Habiru living in Canaan at least as early as 1200 BC (Burney, 1977: 113). Habiru is agreed by scholars to be the same word as "Hebrew." It is not necessarily clear that all Habiru were proto Israelites who shared fully in the Biblical experience and tradition, ...