Israel Should Give Back the Land to the Palestinian Arabs

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Or so some people claim…

Israel cannot “give back” the land to the Palestinian Arabs because the Palestinian Arabs never had it!

This is a very common misunderstanding.  Consider the history:

From the time of the Mandate for Palestine (1922), all of Palestine was designated for a Jewish Homeland.

As soon as Israel declared independence in 1948, the Arab states attacked in order to try to destroy the new Jewish state.  At the end of the war, Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip and Jordan occupied Judea-Samaria. These areas were not in the hands of Palestinian Arabs.

In fact, the Palestinians said they didn’t want the land of Judea-Samaria and Gaza!!

In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded.  Written into their charter was a clause stating that they had no claim on the areas in the possession of Egypt and Jordan.  If they considered Gaza and Judea-Samaria theirs, wouldn’t they have appealed to Egypt and Jordan to turn over the land to them??

The claim that Gaza and Judea-Samaria were “theirs” was not made until Israel was in possession of this land in 1967: the Palestinian Arabs reversed their position in order to put pressure on Israel.