From a Comment on an article The New Republic:

When communism failed, the intellectual infrastructure for that vast enterprise did not uniformly leave the debate.  Indeed the dialectic has been transformed from workers and capitalists to colonies and colonizers. If you thought for one second about the way things work in the real world you would realize that your basic assumptions are false.  Lets start with the premise that the land is by definition Palestinian.  It is not.  You conjure up a mythical period where palestinians worked with their olive trees in comfort and independence but that time never existed in History.  The last recognized sovereign in the West Bank and Gaza was Great Britain and before them the Ottomans who ruled as an empire for over 400 years in the area. Indeed there are the names of many of the past peoples of this land who if they existed as a cohesive unit could make the same claim as the Palestinians to being the indigenous peoples.  How about the Samaritans?  It is for this reason that the Palestinians claim to be Jebusites or Canaanites, because only in this way can they claim to be before the Hebrews who most certainly controlled the land at one point in the past.  The falsehood here is that the line of the Canaanites is dead because the culture is dead.  What exists among the Palestinians is Syrian Arab culture and Arab culture was an import to the region by force, much later than the expulsion of the Jews from the land.  In other words, your history of indigenousness is a tissue of lies, easily exposed by a grammar school student.  The Hebrews predated the Palestinians as a people, their language predates Arabic and their religion predates Mohammed (even he admits it).  If indigenousness really mattered Israel has the better claim to it. 

( DavidSher )