The Palestine question goes back about 3500 years. Abraham left the Tigris-Euphrates valley and settled in what is now known as the lower Middle East, north of Egypt and South of Persia. The then residents were known as Philistines or, as now pronounced, Palestinians. They've been fighting over the land ever since.

As far as when they started fighting in the Modern Era, there were various pogroms prior to the first world war, as often as the Ottomans permitted it.