Yesterday there may not have been a Palestinian people, but today there is.

Submitted by Sid Perloe (United States), Dec 12, 2011 at 16:14

The experience of being treated as a people during the British mandate, the experiences they had as they encountered early zionist settlers and, above all, their conflict with Israel made them into a separate people.

None of this negates the fact that Jews are also a people linked to the same territory that Palestinians claim. It seems to me that the big difference between the peoplehood of Jews and Palestinians is that the territory they both claim is surrounded by peoples who are much more similar in religion, language, and history to Palestinians than to Jews . The effect of this similarity would have allowed the Palestinians, some of whom moved willingly into neighboring nations, to become integrated into these nations. There were no nations anywhere in the world into which displaced Jews could have been integrated. The historic homeland of the Jews was the only territory in which Jews in DP camps, or who were expelled from the Muslim nations in which they had lived for centuries, could live as a people.

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