There is a chain of theme parks that began its life in Texas, called ``Six Flags Over Texas", ostensibly as a celebration of the rich history of Texas, ruled by the Spanish, the French (briefly and not too extensively), the Mexicans, the Americans, and the Confederates, in addition to the decade it was the Lone Star Republic. Presumably the Comanche, Kiowa, Caddo, Arapaho, and other Native American groups didn't have flags.
The notion of Texas having a rich history would be a joke in the rest of the world, and nowhere more than in Palestine. Modern humans originated in Africa and those who left Africa did so almost entirely through Palestine. When people spread into a new region, it was generally at a rate of no more than twenty miles a generation, so even groups that were just passing through probably lived in Palestine for several hundred years. So in a sense, all of us not of recent African origin are Palestinian somewhere in our past. Modern humans appeared there sometime around 100,000 to 90,000 years ago, alternating with Neanderthals in their occupation of some caves. Wheat-cattle-pig agriculture probably originated somewhere near there in Syria or Anatolia, and soon spread to Palestine. There is evidence of a city at Jericho 9000 years ago, and indeed the earliest architectural remnant anywhere is a 26-foot-high tower unearthed in Jericho.
The first name we have for people who lived there are the Canaanites. Recently I read a newspaper story about a 2000-year-old body found in the bogs of southwestern England. It turned out that his DNA nearly matched the DNA of the butler of the man who owned the property. If Palestine had bogs and bogpeople were found, probably their DNA would almost match that of some modern Palestinian. In the second millennium B.C. control of Palestine was frequently contested between the New Kingdom in Egypt, the Babylonian Empire, and the Hittites from Anatolia.
Around 1200 B.C. a group of people arrived, probably from Greece, probably because of the economic collapse of the Mycenaean civilization around the Aegean. They terrorized Egypt, where they were known as, in translation, the Sea Peoples, and when they settled in southwestern Palestine around Gaza and Ashkelon, they became known as the Philistines. The name ``Palestine" derives from that, and indeed the Arabic name for Palestine is filistiin.
Discounting the Bible, the origin of the Israelites is obscure. A word used in documents from the second millennium B.C., ``hibiru", similar to ``Hebrew", seems to refer to bandits living on the periphery of civilized society in the hills of Judea. One theory is that the Israelites gradually coalesced from these groups in the era between 1200 and 1000 B.C.,
The Bible tells us of the empire that Solomon established during his reign of about thirty years in the mid 900s B.C. It encompassed all of what I've been referring to as Palestine, along with the fertile parts of present-day Jordan and spilling over into present-day Lebanon and Syria. There is no evidence for such an empire in the archaeological record, and in fact no evidence for Solomon or a kingdom based at Jerusalem at that time. According to the Bible, the kingdom of the Israelites split up into two kingdoms on the death of Solomon, Judah and Israel, and thereafter they controlled no more than Judea and Samaria, essentially the modern West Bank. They alternately defeated, were allied with, and were defeated by each other, the Philistines, the Syrians, the Moabites of present-day Jordan, and the Egyptians. The kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 B.C., and the kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.
The Babylonians, and then the Persians controlled the area after that. The Israelites were allowed to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem, but they had at best very limited political power. Alexander the Great conquered it on his way to Egypt, the people of Gaza putting up a short but fierce resistance. It was then contested by Alexander's successors in Egypt, a bunch of kings named Ptolemy, and his successors based in Antioch, a bunch of kings mostly named Antiochus.
The Maccabees, local Jewish leaders exploited the weakness of Antioch's kings and took some portion of central Palestine. For a period of about sixty years until the Roman conquest under Pompey, they controlled all of Palestine; this was only the second time in history that was true, if Solomon's empire existed, and for the first time in history if not. The Romans, too busy conquering other lands, put most of Palestine under the care of a successor to the Maccabees, King Herod of New Testament fame. For about thirty years, and for the last time until modern era, a Jewish ruler ruled over most of Palestine, though with Roman indulgence. Herod's progeny, just as Solomon's progeny are said to have done, split the kingdom between them. The Jews rebelled in 70 A.D., and the Romans took over direct rule. The Jews rebelled again in the 130s A.D. and were massacred by the Romans and expelled from Jerusalem. Thereafter the Jews were the majority only in Galilee.
Roman rule passed to the Byzantine Empire when the Roman Empire split in two in the 300s A.D., a Greek empire based in what is today called Istanbul. The Byzantines and the Persians hotly contested control of Palestine in the early 600s, until the Arabs defeated both the exhausted opponents, on their way to conquering half the world. Before long, the people of Palestine, like much of the rest of the Middle East, had largely adopted the Arabs' language and religion, and for that reason are today known as Arabs.
As the Arab empire weakened and disintegrated, Palestine again became a bone of contention, mostly between the Arab or Berber kingdoms based in Egypt and the Arab, Turkish, or Kurdish kingdoms based in Syria. At the end of the 1000s, a new force appeared in Palestine, bent on conquering Jerusalem--the Crusaders, who came from all over Europe but were primarily French and were known to the Arabs as ``Franks". The Christian kings of Jerusalem were mostly relatives of the royal family of France. Of course virtually all of European royalty was related to each other at that time, one big extended family. Salah ad-Din, a Kurd and a ruler of Egypt, descended from rulers of Syria, in 1187 conquered Jerusalem back from the Crusaders, who then regained it in 1229 through negotiation by Frederick the Great, who was the Holy Roman Emperor and thus the ruler of Germany, but was also and more particularly the king of Sicily. He and his people held it for fifteen years, when it finally fell to the Egyptians.
Palestine remained Egyptian until the Ottoman sultan of Turkey, Selim III, conquered both in the early 1500s. It was a quiet provincial backwater of the global Ottoman Empire for several hundred years. In 1799 Napoleon, in one of history's more bizarre military campaigns, took Egypt and led an incursion into Palestine, bogging down at Acre. Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman governor of Egypt of Albanian origin, became essentially independent of the Ottomans, and his son tried to extend their realm into Palestine and Syria, and succeeded for a while, until the British fearing an independent power in that region, put a stop to it.
Upon the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the British took over Palestine and Jordan as mandates. After World War II the area was divided between the Jews, who had immigrated there in large numbers since the 1880s, and the Arabs, who had been living there all along. War broke out, and at the end of it, the Jews had more land, and the Arab portion was taken over by Egypt and the new kingdom of Jordan.
Suppose all those six countries whose flags have flown over Texas demanded to own it now. The six flags would be flying over armies, and there would be Six Wars Over Texas.
One claim for the legitimacy of Israel is that it is the Chosen Land, the ancestral home of the Jews. You can see how this would exercise a powerful pull over believing Jews. But the Chosen Land argument will have little force for those who don't believe the Bible is the Word of God, or who don't accept that particular interpretation of the Bible, or who believe that the Old Testament has been superseded by other holy writ. The doctrine can motivate a particular group of believers, but it can't function as a justification on a global scale.
The idea that Israel's claim to Palestine is legitimate because they once lived and ruled there is ludicrous. If everyone who ever lived and ruled there made that claim, we would have a war involving--let's see--Egypt, Syria, Greece, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Arabia, Italy, France, Germany, Albania, Azerbaijan, Jordan, and Great Britain, at least, as well as Israel and the local Palestinians. Moreover, even accepting a claim based on occupation 2500 years ago, the claim for all of Palestine is very weak indeed. The Israelites ruled all of Palestine only four times: once for about thirty years under King Solomon, if he existed, which is doubtful; once sporadically under the Maccabees for about sixty years, and once for about thirty years under King Herod as a client of the Romans. That's a total of 90 to 120 years in the last three thousand. The real historical homeland of the Jews is not all of Palestine, but Judah, that is, the southern half of the West Bank. The current state of Israel largely coincides with the ancient land of the Philistines.
If one were really sincere in applying this argument, then one should be in favor not of Israel's taking all of Palestine, but in favor of the Israelis and the Palestinians trading countries.
I haven't heard any of the Israeli settlers on the West Bank proposing that.