It’s also an asinine argument, “they were there first.” According to Scripture, the 12 tribes of Israel were shepherds who came from southern Babylon, and they created the state of Israel by slaughtering the Canaanites, Philistines, and Phoenician tribes that populated the region. A little bit of history repeating huh?

And to say “they’re were Jews there before 1948” is similarly meaningless. Whether or not Jews still lived their after the Expulsion doesn’t equate to ownership. They lived under the Umayyads, the Crusaders, the Kurds, the Ottomans, and then the British. It was this last empire that declared Palestine a land for the Jewish people, a decision they had no right to make.

And if we’re going by this “there first” rule, that effectively means the U.S., Canada, Australia, and all nations created through colonization are illegitimate and are the rightful lands of the Indigenous Peoples. I say this because the same exact twisted logic used to deprive Indigenous people of sovereignty are used against the Palestinians.

But of course, these arguments are not meant to make sense. They’re meant to instil a sense of warm, comfortable denial and make it seem as if blood isn’t on anyone’s hands. Even today, people argue that the Palestinians left on purpose, rather than forced from their homes by militias who lined civilians up against walls and executed them and massacred entire villages.

The takeaway seems to be nothing more than, “it’s okay when WE do it.”