However, who did the Irish get the land from. Who had it before them?
The Firbolgs and the Tuatha da Danaan.
The Jews ceased to be the majority in Palestine from the 400s onward.
Christians predominated for the next 600 years, and then were conquered by Muslims, who became the majority in the 1200s, after the failure of the Crusades to defeat the Muslim invaders. From that time until 1800, another 600 years, there were three to five times as many Christians in Palestine as Jews, and 95% of the population was Muslim.
In the 1600s, there were only about 2000 Jews in Palestine, versus 11,000 Christians and 219,000 Muslims. Certainly one cannot credibly claim that this was a "Jewish land", any more than one could claim that New England, which still has a few thousand Mohegan Indians, is still Indian Territory.
The formal political Zionist movement began in 1897, with a book by an Austrian Jew. At that point, we should be clear, Jews had not been the majority of the population of Palestine for 1500 years, and Christians had outnumbered the Jews in Palestine throughout that entire time. Muslims had outnumbered both Christians and Jews for 1300 years.
In 1890, the Ottoman records show 43,000 Jews in Palestine, 57,000 Christians, and 432,000 Muslims.
Jews flowed into Ottoman Palestine starting in the late 1890s, and outnumbered Christians by a few thousand by the time the territory passed under British control at the end of World War I. But the Muslims outnumbered the Jews and Christians together by a factor of four-to-one.
Muslims outnumbered Jews until after the 1948 declaration of the State of Israel.
The Jews were given a country because of the suffering of World War II. There was no particular reason to give them Israel, other than the fact that THAT was the specific land they wanted, because of a claim based on an old book that the Western powers exalted.
Logically, the Jews should have had a chunk of Germany carved off and depopulated of Germans, and given to them, as the due to the victims and perpetrators of the crimes against them. Bavaria, for example, where the Nazis were strongest and where Hitler had his powerbase. It would have been reasonable to declare Bavaria the new Jewish homeland, as a spoil of war, and command the defeated Germans to evacuate Bavaria, without compensation, as the reparation for war and genocide.
As a matter of justice it did not make sense for the protectors of Middle Eastern lands to declare that a protectorate filled with Muslim people and culture, in lands that had been Muslim already for twice as long as Europeans had settled America, would now be a Jewish state. Of course the Muslims (and the Arab Christians) reacted very badly. Of course it's not a reconcilable issue. Of course the Muslims, the Arabs (including Arab Christians) are not going to give up.
What we've done is decide, for reasons germane to our own politics (to wit: many Americans favor Judaism because of the Bible, Western Europeans didn't care for Jews and welcomed the opportunity to get them out of Europe, and Arab Muslims were as good as Apache to the deciders), that Israel will be made a Jewish state. So it exists.
But it exists by force, as an imported colony of Eastern and Western European Jews who dispossessed the native Muslim population that was there, and that had been there as the majority for 750 years.
Israel exists because Europe and America armed and financially supported a Jewish military expedition to carve a country out of a Muslim land. It can last as long as the Americans and Europeans provide arms and financial support. The Muslims will never give up, because they feel strongly, morally and spiritually, that they have been wronged. And objectively speaking, they have been.
Now, the hope of the West is that the Israeli conquest will have been so strong and so enduring that it cannot be reversed. The Anglo-Saxons dispossessed the Celts of England, and the white Europeans dispossessed the Amerindians, and these faits accomplis do not seem likely to be reversed, although America may end up Spanish-speaking Latino, and England may end up Hindi or Urdu speaking, again thanks to unwanted immigration.
