Jews in the Land of Israel are: indigenous - aboriginal - native - home-grown - YJ Draiman

Jews in the Land of Israel are: indigenous - aboriginal - native - home-grown

The legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise of returning Jews to Eretz Yisrael is based on Jewish descent from the ancient Israelites. The Jewish people has inherited their right to the land, religiously, legally, and historically, the Jewish people are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel. Jews have always looked and prayed toward Zion (Jerusalem), never relinquished their relationship to the land, and have always maintained a presence since ancient times, despite expulsions. Jews were treated as foreigners and persecuted wherever they were during their long Exile.

Zionism was an authentic response to the persecution of Jews over millennia around the world. Jews did not come as colonizers, but rather as pioneers and redeemers of the land, and did not intend to disrupt the lives of the current inhabitants of the Land of Israel. All land for Jewish settlement was legally bought and paid for, often at inflated prices. The Arabs in Palestine-Israel are occupiers of Jewish territory just like the previous occupiers since the Jewish Second Temple Destruction by the Romans in 70 AD who named Israel - Palestine and Jerusalem -  Aelia Capitolina.

The Arabs also expelled over a million Jewish families and confiscated all their assets

The Arabs of Palestine were not a national group and never had been. They were largely undifferentiated from the inhabitants of much of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. They had no authentic tie to the Land of Israel. Many only came for economic opportunity after the Zionist movement began to make the land fruitful and the economy thrive. In all the years of Arab and Muslim control from the 7th century, Palestine was never a separate state and Jerusalem was never a capital.

Zionist diplomacy legitimately sought a Great Power patron since Herzl, and found one in Great Britain. True, Britain had its own imperial agenda, but this does not detract from the righteousness of the Zionist cause. The Balfour Declaration was ratified by the San Remo treaty of 1920, confirmed by the 1920 Treaty of Sevres and Lausanne and adopted by the League of Nations, constituting a statement of international law approving a Jewish homeland in all of Palestine.

The riots of 1920, 1929 and 1936 were instigated by unscrupulous Arab leaders for their own nefarious purposes, particularly the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al Husseini. The “Palestinian” population had increased rapidly through hundreds of thousands in illegal immigration of Arabs who were attracted by Zionist economic successes, and the Arab population’s living standards rose rapidly during this period. The British frequently stood aside when Arabs murdered Jews.

The British, who had been initially supportive of the Zionist enterprise through the Balfour Declaration and the early mandate, began to backtrack early, as reflected in the splitting off of Transjordan in 1922, the Passfield White Paper of 1930, and many other incidents. They definitively repudiated the Balfour Declaration with the White Paper of 1939, and were unabashedly pro-Arab after that point.

The English change of heart vis-a-vis their obligation to the Jewish people under the law and trustee for the Mandate of Palestine-Israel. The British agenda was to placate the Arabs as much as possible in order to control the oil resources in the Middle East. As a matter of historical facts, The British went overboard violating international treaties and the Mandate and its terms, by severely restricting Jewish immigration into Palestine-Israel from 1939-1948, thus causing the deaths of millions of Jews trying to escape Nazi extermination camps. Furthermore, the British sent out British agents to blow-up Holocaust Jewish refugee ships bound for Palestine-Israel, known as "Operation Embarrass".

The Zionist movement accepted the UN partition resolution of 1947 in good faith, albeit reluctantly, as it had the 1937 Peel Commission Report recommending partition. War was forced on the Yishuv (Jewish national community) by the Arabs. Solely in self-defense, the Haganah (later the Israeli Army) took over more land than had been allotted in the Partition Resolution and was justified in holding it, as it would have inevitably become a base for attacks on Israel.

The Yishuv was numerically vastly inferior to the combined Arab population, and it bordered on a miracle that Israeli survived the war (“the few against the many”). All Jews realized they would be massacred if they lost, and fought with absolute determination to prevent another Holocaust. Arab atrocities proved they had no other choice.

The Arab-Palestinians were not expelled. They fled, in most cases, because they were ordered and cajoled by their leaders and the Arab states, in order to make room for conquering Arab armies. In many cases Jewish officials pleaded with the refugees to stay. The Israeli decision to prevent refugees from returning was justified, as otherwise Israel would be destroyed by a hostile Arab internal majority. Ultimately, the responsibility and blame rests with the Arab leadership for rejecting the partition resolution.

The refugee issue was artificially kept alive by the Arab states, who deliberately used the refugees as pawns against Israel (while the million Jewish refugees persecuted and expelled from Arab countries, who had all their assets confiscated, were resettled) . The real reason for the continuation of the conflict was the refusal of the Arab states to recognize Israeli’s existence. Israel has repeatedly offered peace, but not at the price of the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, which has been the Arab goal since 1948.