Maps

A funny dialog about maps of the middle east. 

These maps show claimed "control" over the area, not necessarily who lives there.

Zionists seem to have the weird idea that because they have ancestors back in Israel, including ancestors that during some intervals controlled the region, they should control it exclusively now.

Virtually everyone alive has ancestors in that area during one epoch or another.  This is probably more true of 1917 Palestinians ("Arabs" in the borders of Mandate Palestine) than any other group you could specify, including European Jews.

When Jews were said to have left Israel after defeats in 70 CE and 130 CE, it was NOT everyone who left.  It was soldiers and elites...NOT farmers.  (I need to read "The Invention of the Jewish People" to get a better idea of this, reviews say the book claims there is NO historical record of mass numbers of people leaving "Israel" during these times at all!  So that would mean, most likely, the Palestinians of 1917 may well have been the descendents of the people who lived there in Biblical times and before as well.  I would only qualify with a phrase like "mostly" and "most descent."  We are all descended from everyone who has descendants from 2000 years ago and more, but some are more descended from some in that era than others.  This becomes comprehensible when you realize that the increments of proportionate descent over 100 generations is a very small quantity, 1e-30 or so.  In other words, to describe someone's descent in the most compact possible form it would take over 30 decimal digits.)

Anyway you evaluate it, the dispossession of Palestinians and the theft of their self determination over the entire region of 48 Palestine is a crime against humanity that will not go away until the Palestinians have full rights in their homeland of 48 Palestine, or within the meager and unfair-to-them 67 borders two state compromise with no reductions.  No amount of posturing over who controlled what in the past, or who is descended from whom, will change that.

Laws which systematically discriminate against Palestinians in community planning and leasing are a continuation and extension of that crime against humanity.