The entirety of today’s hostility is rooted in the fiction that there was a “Palestinian” nation in Palestine, and that these were the indigenous people, whose allegedly ancient homeland the Zionists stole. Never mind that 100% of the evidence from pre-Zionist Palestine is empty of any proof of this fairy tale fit for A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
The first Zionist Congress convened in 1897. Forty years earlier (one Biblical generation), in 1857, American novelist Herman Melville, visiting the country, described it as a “caked, depopulated Hxell.” A decade later, Mark Twain made his pilgrimage and wrote that the Holy Land “sits in sack cloth and ashes” with neither writer encountering any “Palestinians.” The Zionists built on barren wasteland and dispossessed nobody.