No doubt with Yellow Stars attached.

Dear Bazz,

Mark Twain relates the following in his book Innocents Abroad;

"Here, under the quiet stars, these old streets seem thronged with the phantoms of forgotten ages. My eyes are resting upon a spot where stood a monument which was seen and described by Roman historians less than two thousand years ago, whereon was inscribed:

“WE ARE THE CANAANITES. WE ARE THEY THAT HAVE BEEN DRIVEN OUT OF THE LAND OF CANAAN BY THE JEWISH ROBBER, JOSHUA.”

Joshua drove them out, and they came here."

Perhaps it is the Palestinians who have the ultimate right to the land given your 'historical possession trumps everything' narrative.

Except the Palestinians are Arabs.

Dear Bazz,

Nobody has an "ultimate right" to a land, any land: we have not created this land, this planet, we even know too little about what is under it and how it was formed.

That said, if there was such a right in respect to the land of Israel, then some (though not all) of the so-called "Palestinians" would be the best candidates, because they are in fact the descendants of the Jewish people that originally lived on that land and never left it. Indeed at some stage they bowed down to the pressure and converted into Islam, but why should that matter?

But as I just said above, nobody should have rights over a land, only over one's development of that land. In that regard, the Jewish settlers invested in and developed the land of Israel by orders of magnitude far beyond what the Arabs/Palestinians/Ottomans did for all centuries.

'Nobody has an "ultimate right" to a land, any land: we have not created this land, this planet, we even know too little about what is under it and how it was formed.'

Who says Yuyutsu. If God wanted to drive out the pagan nations and give land to Israel who are you to tell Him otherwise?

Dear Runner,

«If God wanted to drive out the pagan nations»

While I am aware that the bible in its current form claims so, modern research shows that most of the tribes of Israel, all other than the Levites, were still pagan at the time they allegedly conquered the land. In fact they never left Israel to begin with when the returning Levites arrived from Egypt.
- http://reformjudaism.org/exodus-not-fiction

Further research indicates that Israel only accepted monotheism at the times of King Josiah (648-609 B.C) and until then even the Jerusalem temple was used to worship the goddess Asherah.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/42154769/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/did-god-have-wife-scholar-says-he-did/
http://evidenceforchristianity.org/is-it-true-that-josiah-removed-polytheistic-elements-from-the-pentateuch-joshua-judges-and-kings/

Yet even without modern research, the bible itself is full of descriptions of continuous idolatry by the Israelites - so WHY WOULD GOD DRIVE OUT SOME PAGANS IN ORDER TO LET OTHER PAGANS IN?

Sorry, I understand that you consider the whole bible to be the word of God and it may have been so originally, but the historical accounts in what later became known as the Old-Testament were severely tampered with for political gains. This is not to diminish the glory of Jesus Christ, but it could indicate that his mention of "the law and the prophets" referred to the true law and true prophets rather than to the book we now have which was finalized about 200 years after Jesus. In any case Jesus did omit the chronicles from his famous statement (not an iota), he did not say "the law, the prophets and the histories".

Further, even if God granted the land of Israel to the Jews, it was still conditional. The prophets continually warned that if Israel continued to sin, the land will be taken away from them, and so it was. There is no indication that Israel was somehow forgiven in the 20th century, as they just took the land defiantly by secular means rather than by divine intervention.

OTOH, those former Jews who remained in Israel and converted to Islam, kept worshiping the one and only God, albeit under the name of Allah. Had God indeed acted as a land-agent, whom should He favoured?