It very definitely was not. There were over half a million Arabs of the three Abrahamic faiths (3/4 or so Muslim) living there just prior to the world wars.
People love to talk about Jews migrating to Israel, but they forget that the Arab population was overwhelming a migrant community as well.
Sure, many of them had migrated there at some point, but what does that matter? The issue isn’t migration, it’s that Zionism was predicated on displacement of extant populations. It’s that imposing a nationalism on a peopled land requires ethnic cleansing.
It very definitely was not. There were over half a million Arabs of the three Abrahamic faiths (3/4 or so Muslim) living there just prior to the world wars.
Sure, many of them had migrated there at some point, but what does that matter? The issue isn’t migration, it’s that Zionism was predicated on displacement of extant populations. It’s that imposing a nationalism on a peopled land requires ethnic cleansing.
Many of the Palestinian Arabs immigrated at the same as the Jews.
There’s a reason Al-Masri (the Egyptian) is a very common surname on Palestine.