Richard Bridge—Thank you for your response. I'm sorry to have to use your full post to frame my answers to you in brackets [-], but I know not HTML to colorize or italicize what I wanted to say...and I didn't want to use all CAPS, lest you think I'm yelling at you. It is difficult to present thousands of years of history into a few paragraphs, so I'm happy to clarify my post for you. Richard, I make you the same offer I made Mrrzy, PM me and I will send you a brief reading list, but everything I've written can be easily searched on the web.

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That is interesting John, but surely the more important question is who occupied the lands before the Ottoman Empire. It seems to me that the history is very relevant. You for the first time suggest that the population of the Levant (a useful naming suggestion) [maybe on this thread, but over the years I have used 'Levant' on occasion on the 'Cat] was then not Arabian but "Philistine" - that is to say from other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. [The Philistines did not control the Levant, only a small portion in the southwest around Gaza-five cities] At least I think that that is your thesis. I should like to see more support for that, and perhaps it turns at least in part on who is "an Arab".

However, if they were "Philistine" (which you equate to "Palestinian") [This is not my equation, it is the accepted etymology of the word.] then upon the fall of the Ottoman Empire the Philistines became, by reversion, those entitled to the Levant. [The irony of the Roman renaming the area for the Jews most feared enemy, is that they had disappeared as an entity centuries before.]

I progress from there to say that the difference between Israel and the other states to which BB refers is that Israel was given to invaders who had not been there for thousands of years [this is incorrect. Jews, always were a portion of the population of the Levant, although not in control of any of it after the failure of the Bar Khochba revolt in the 2nd century CE] whereas although the rulership of other states may have been from outsiders the people there were those to whom reversion (under government) occurred. [I'm sorry, I don't understand what your conclusion, here, is.]

I do note however that BB offers some factual support for the view that the proposers of what has become Israel were terrorists. [It is true that the Romans considered Judeans to be what we call terrorists, the historic term is the Zealots. In modern times the British considered some Jews--both Palestinian born and immigrants—who were denied their promised portion of Palestine for a homeland after the Palestinians had received theirs].