Thousands of years ago, most people (he says "everyone," but since there were cities here and there, let's say he meant most) in Palestine were nomadic, and they included both Jews and non-Jews.
After WWI, Palestinian land was "ceded to" (colonized by) Britain.
Britain (having decided it was to their economic/strategic advantage) issued a declaration recognizing that Palestine used to be a home to more Jews and invented the concept of a Jewish "right of return," and began encouraging Jewish immigration there. (At this point, Jews still constituted a relatively tiny proportion of the population there.)
Many non-Jewish Palestinians (many of whom were by this time Muslim) didn't appreciate this development; but Jews started immigrating there anyway. Some non-Jewish people were also immigrants, but the Jewish population increased faster than the Muslim population.
Muslim and Jewish militant and terrorist groups arose, and clashes occurred.
The Brits decided there needed to be a 2-state solution. The U.N. backed this idea. Jews liked the plan, since until then they'd had no state there for thousands of years (if ever?); but Muslims didn't, since until Britain and its allies had started encouraging Jewish immigration there, Muslims had vastly outnumbered Jewish people and did not like the idea of being excluded from large portions of lands where they until recently had or in some cases still predominated.
After that, all kinds of warfare ensued in fits and starts involving much of the Muslim world vs. the Jewish people and their colonial allies, and both sides committed lots of atrocities; but generally, the Jewish side kept winning. But many or most Muslims never actually surrendered; they just got herded into what are essentially giant, outdoor concentration camps. Many aspects of these herdings were illegal under international law, as recognized in numerous UN resolutions condemning Israel's actions.
Again, the history is complex and bloody, and I realize I'm skipping over a lot of it; but I still come back to, why should the israelis have greater rights to Palestinian lands than the indigenous Muslims do? And I don't mean to exclude the possibility that Israelis do have greater rights; but I feel that in this situation as in so many others, there's a lot of smoke blown, and the reasons we're given are mostly ad-hoc rationalizations for selfish interests rather than rational principles consistently applied; and what we end up with in practice is "might makes right."
And I'd like to see us do better.
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