There's a great deal of preening, primarily on the Left, about "stolen land", the notion that the Europeans who arrived on these shores in the 15th century and on 'stole' the land from the indigenous people whose land then is still rightfully theirs. A more ridiculous position has not been held for ages, potentially never.
When the explorers and conquistadors first set foot in the Americas (and Africa and Australia, if it matters), the inhabitants were Stone Age people. They knew about fire, but not about wheels. They hunted with spears, bows, and atlatl, and got their 'greens' largely by picking fruit from trees. Any animal husbandry was focused on keeping the goats alive until it was time to eat them. To suggest that any of that gave some property rights to the inhabitants is the prelude to demanding that we all regress to their lifestyle.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect had intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. — Galileo Galilei
Having attained a modicum of civilization — whatever form that might take — the duty of the newcomers — not to the locals, but to themselves — is to make what use they can of the environment — the environment that the then-current inhabitants had neither the skill nor the impulse to exploit.
Israel is, funnily enough, in the same general position. When the current crop of modern Jews began drifting back to what would become Israel, the Ottomans were in charge, and the land was barely fit for raising goats. It had been in roughly that condition for millenia. There had been no serious effort at making it more productive. The arriving Jews changed that. They converted the desert-like landscape into a productive greenspace such that 'Jaffa oranges' (among many other things) became something never before seen.
Suddenly, the 'Palestinians' want their ancestral homeland back from those who stole it from them — and brought it from the Stone Age into the Modern Age.
Don't make me laugh. More importantly, don't make me cry.
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