It’s something to bear in mind, as people furiously insist that the land ‘belonged’ to an immemorial ancient indigenous Palestinian people, and therefore partition was robbery and colonialism. And they do. And that narrative has nothing to do with actual history in the region.

However, my answer to this sort of thing tends to be “It does not matter if there was a Palestinian state in 1800, or a Palestinian people before the 1960s. The fact remains that there is a group that defines itself as Palestinian now, and quite reasonably so.”