One of the biggest propaganda victories in modern history was convincing millions of people that Palestine was basically a frozen civilization: an ancient Arab population sitting in the same villages for a thousand years until, one day, foreign Jews suddenly showed up from Europe. It’s an astonishingly dishonest version of history. Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Its population was never frozen in time. People, including Jews, Arabs, and others, migrated throughout the region, settled, moved, intermarried, and crossed boundaries that were nothing like today’s national borders. Arabs came into Palestine from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere, just as people moved out of Palestine and throughout the wider region. Yes, Arabs lived in Palestine before modern Zionism. So did Jews. And yes, much of the later Arab population boom came from natural increase. But somehow Palestinian ancestry gets treated as if it comes with a 1,000-year certificate of authenticity, while a Jew whose people originated in that exact land is automatically branded a “foreign settler.” And the irony is incredible: an Arab can immigrate to America or Europe and immediately call himself American, British, French, or German. Yet a Jew can return to the land where the Jewish people originated, where Jewish civilization was born, and where Jews have maintained a continuous presence for thousands of years, buy land, build a house, and somehow he is still the “foreign settler.” It’s a political mythology built around one ridiculous rule: Every Arab is presumed indigenous, no matter where he immigrates to. Every Jew is presumed foreign.