The narrative of Israel as a colonizer is fought with historical inaccuracy. This is perhaps the most well documented piece of land in the world and it is clear who was the first to raise a Kingdom on its lands.
I can go see 2000+ year old ruins in Israel that belonged to ancient Israel. That are still relevant to my religion and culture and people. Old Jerusalem is a time capsule to Biblical times. I can walk through the same gates and doorways used by my millenia old ancestors.
Nobody in the entire history of the World ever met a self identifying Palestinian until the 20th century. I'm serious. That identity is a 20th century invention.
The country is littered with stone Mikveh's, ritual baths that are built to collect and fill with natural rainwater. We used them 2000 years ago and we use them the same way today. A few are still functional and you can use them.
I can go to Mt. Masada and see the ruins of the stupid opulent fortress-palace built by the Roman appointed King Herod of Israel, where 690 Jewish rebels would later find themselves holed up against an invading Roman empire out to vanquish the Jews and sell them to slavery. You can see the camps the Romans built around the beseiged mountain, the ramp they built to bring a battering ram up the mountain and breach the fortresses wall. You can see the store of giant fucking round boulders they were rolling down onto the Romans approaching up the ramp. Rather than fall to such a fate of slavery, when it was clear the Romans would breach the next day, the Jewish rebels opted to fall at the hands of eachothers swords, or so goes the tale.
The Romans exiled the Jewish people from these lands.
Now half the world's Jewish population lives there and for three quarters a century we've had our autonomous homeland back.
"Syria Palaestina" was a slave name given after the third Jewish revolt against the romans, named after the Philistines, an old Biblical military enemy of the Israelite peoples, and the Philistines resided in, ironically, the Gaza area. (Ancient Israel actually never included Gaza as far as I'm aware).
Per the Wikipedia article above:
The use of the name "Palestine" became common in Early Modern English,[23] was used in English and Arabic during the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. The term was used widely as a self-identification by Palestinians from the start of the 20th century onwards.[24]
And so while under various occupations the land has gone by various variations of "Syria Palaestina", the name "Palestine" and the self identification of Muslims and other groups in the area as "Palestinians" in a national way was not seen at all until the turn of the 20th Century. Shortly thereafter, the British would take the land from the Ottomans as the British Mandate of Palestine.
Before then? Nobody ever met a "Palestinian". To suggest otherwise is historical revisionism. The Levant region has been inhabited by many peoples as the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe during Roman colonization and through the rest of Jewish exile. But no other people has had thousands of years of contiguous unbroken history in the region and still exists as that same people and we see our culture and religious rituals baked into the very architecture of the ruin.
As the Nation of Israel, it continues to serve the purpose of a Crossroads of the World as evidenced by the multitude of nationalities represented in the victims and hostages of the October 7th attack.
Anyway point being not that the 2000 year long exile of most of the Jews from our native lands is any fault of the folks who from around 1900 started referring to themselves as "Palestinians". It was the ancient Romans, and every colonial force that came after.
But by the time Israel was established, the Palestinian identity was not even a half century old. Which conflicts greatly with the narrative given by the Palestinians.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
