Hello LJ....:)

To understand this you have to right back to Roman times, almost to the time of Christ.

About ( I think ) 66 AD and for the next fifty years the Jews rebelled repeatedly against the Romans, eventually ( About AD 135) they were banned from the land known as Judea and from Jeruselam....

The Byzantine empire introduced Christianity into the region (AD 320 through to mid sixth century and enacted many anti-jewish laws.

By the end of the sixth century the Jews are a minority in Israel\Palestine.

Then the Arab conquest came in and even more were pushed out....

By the time we hit the 11th century crusades, the Jews number just a few thousand...

They had all left for wherever they could find refuge, North africa and eastern Europe mostly ( Though Arthur Koestler had a very, very intrigueing theory as to the true origin of the East Europe Jews )

This whole process is known as the "Jewish Diaspora"... a tragedy for an entire nation.

But it does mean that for at least a thousand years or more the land known as Palestine was home to a peoples called the Palestinians.... they lived quietly, kept thier heads down and didn't trouble the history books much... wisely as it turns out considering what happened to them once the big powers did notice thier existence.

These are the people who had thier land taken from them, at the point of a gun.

Oh... and when we talk about the UN circa 1948... we are really talking about the victorious WW2 powers. US, UK , France and Russia.... no other nation was going to gainsay anything we decided.

By now the Jews a minority in Israel\Palestine