And most of arabs living there migrated from Egypt and Jordan in 18th and 19th century themselves, just like zionists did not a long time later. Arabs who call

And most of arabs living there migrated from Egypt and Jordan in 18th and 19th century themselves, just like zionists did not a long time later. Arabs who call themselves "palestinians" now didn't have any identity linked to the land. The first statement is simply false. As a result, the second is equally vacuous. While migrations in the late Ottoman period were significant, they were not nearly large enough to offset the "core" (pre-1781) population, which had been continually resident for over a thousand years. Going by all the known data we have (for example the tables in the page below) the influx due to migrations could not have amounted to a net increase of more than about 20 percent. The vast bulk of the net population increase during the 19th century was due to improvements in living conditions and infant morality rates, not migration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palesti... The fact that Palestinian national identity is largely a 20th-century creation (as with modern Israeli nationalism) is irrelevant to the core issue, "connection to the land". The central fact here is that all nationalisms are modern inventions, and up until the late 19th century, most people self-identified in terms different from the names of the nation states their descendants live in today. What's sad here is that instead of trying to say something positive about Herzl's ideas, or the Jewish diaspora's claim of a connection to the land -- all you can think to do is attempt to water-down and delegitimize the largely (by all the data we have) indigenous population's history, and their connection to that land.