The claim to what is now the State of Israel and the Palestinain Authority is so ancient that it is overgrown with ancient moss. It was debated in ancient Rome and again, in the comments of Rashi on the Bible during the Crusades. Since the rise of political Zionism and the Second Arab Awakening, it is still front and center even today, 78 years after the founding of the State of Israel as recognized by the United Nations.
During WWII, as Jews were being slaughtered en masse in Europe and the knives were being sharpened in the Middle East, the Congress of the United States held an inquiry as to whar should be done to save the Jews. This led to a claim by noted Arab historian, Phillip K . Hitti and a rebuttal by the great Nobel Prize winning Albert Einstein and the equally noted scholar and philsopher, on the faculkty of Cornell and Princtein, Erich Kahler.
Phillip K .Hitti denounced the attempt to allow for a Jewish homeland, as, he claimed, Jews came and went:
"The so-called Arabs of Palestine, particularly the Christians among them, are the modern representatives of that ancient native stock. The Hebrews came and went. The natives remained. The Hebrew Kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 722 B.C. by the Assyrian Sargon II; that of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.c. First the ten, then the two tribes were carried away' into captivity. All flickers of national life. were extinguished by later rulers and the hold of the Jews over Palestine was gone forever."
This is the same claim repeated today by Hamas and by the Palestinian Authority.
Einstein and Kahler's rebuttal was that we never totally vanished from the land:
"Professor Hitti says: "The Hebrews came and went. The natives remained." Now the fact is that the Israelites-we prefer to use this term because the Arabs also belong to the "Hebrew" peoples-the Israelites came, but they never went. From Professor Hitti' s picture one would gain the impression that Jewish history in Palestine did not amount to very much after the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC ,A few "flickers of national life," that's all. But after the Babylonian captivity the second great period, a true renaissance, of Jewish Palestine began, leading, on the one hand, to the elaboration of the Palestinian Talmud and, on the other, to the birth of Christianity from Judaism. If we were vindictive we could ask Professor Hitti whether he knows something of the revolt of the Maccabees and the ensuing independent Kingdom of the Hasmoneans lasting nearly a century. He knows, of course.
It was as late as A.D. 429 that the Jewish Patriarchate in Palestine was abolished. Jewish communities persisted in Palestine uninterruptedly throughout the ages. In the tenth century,the Arab writer, Mukadassi, complained about the predominance of the Jewish population in Jerusalem. From the fifteenth centnry on, the city of Safed in Upper Galilee became a flowering Jewish intellectnal center where the mystical philosophy of the Kabbalah was taught and perfected. It lasted until it was wiped out by the Turkish governor in the seventeenth centnry. Spanish Jews, after their expulsion, sought refuge in their homeland of old; messianic movements in the_ eighth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries aimed at the liberation and reestablishment of Jewish Palestine. And constantly from all over the world Jewish individuals who felt their end approaching made pilgrimages to the Holy Land to die and and be buried in its sacred soil." [ Note: this author's great-great grandparents were such idealists who gave away their property to their heirs while they were in their 80's and went to Safed, sadly to be murdered in their own home by robbers who took what they had.]
Here is the text of the debate in print
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