From the very beginning, Islam positioned itself as a successor to Judaism and Christianity - it is unsurprising that even early Islam classified as a holy city

From the very beginning, Islam positioned itself as a successor to Judaism and Christianity - it is unsurprising that even early Islam classified as a holy city the city which both of its predecessors (from its own perspective) viewed as the holiest city on Earth. As a non-Muslim I don’t believe that Muhammad was a genuine prophet, but I doubt he was a conscious fraud either - I think he genuinely believed his revelations were from God, even if they actually arose somehow from his unconscious mind. He came out of a community of Arabs (the Hanifs) who were attracted to monotheism and dissatisfied with the traditional Arab polytheist religion, but who at the same time viewed both Judaism and Christianity as too “foreign”-they viewed Judaism’s religious laws as overly onerous, and as an ethnic religion, conversion to Judaism involved effectively giving up their pre-existing Arabic ethnic identity for a new Jewish one; Christianity was the state religion of their external Byzantine enemy, plus its Trinitarianism seemed too close to the polytheism they’d rejected. Coming out of this milieu, Muhammad was familiar with the idea of Jerusalem as a holy city from both of those religions, so he essentially “split the difference”: proposed Mecca and Medina as holy cities of his own, while simultaneously inheriting the idea of Jerusalem as holy from those two earlier monotheistic religions which he positioned his own as a replacement for. And to reiterate, even if this was his unconscious logic, consciously he was just doing and saying whatever God told him to. Also, it wasn’t just Jewish people who lived in what is now the territory of Israel in ancient times - it always had a significant population of polytheists (Canaanite, Phoenician, etc), plus two thousand years ago the Samaritans were a massive community of military significance, not the tiny minority they are today. Most of its non-Jewish population converted to Christianity - along with a significant chunk of its Jewish population. And then when Islam came along, the majority of its Christian population converted to Islam (a slow process over many centuries). Arguably, Palestinians are just as much descendants of its ancient population as Jews are, indeed, Palestinians are likely in part descended from Jewish converts to Christianity and Islam.