'Indigenous Palestinian' is a lie.
The Holy Land didn’t become “Palestine” until it became useful against Jews.
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This is a guest essay by Sheri Oz, who writes the newsletter, “Israel Diaries.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Critics of sovereignty redirect the debate to questions of citizenship and political practicality rather than addressing the premise itself.
But before we can have an honest conversation about the future, we must first be clear about the past. Do we truly understand the history of the Jews and Palestinians? Do we understand the origins of the apartheid claim, both under the current Oslo Accords1 framework, and should Israel apply sovereignty in a region with an Arab majority?
If the foundational narrative is wrong, every conclusion built upon it collapses.
Recently, someone said to me: “Ignoring the national aspirations of more than a million people who have lived on their land for generations going back to Ottoman rule is both presumptuous and dangerous.”
But that narrative does not match what Arab leaders themselves said at the time. In 1937, the Arab Higher Committee stated: “There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented.” They described the land not as a national homeland, but as Southern Syria.
As longtime professor Kenneth W. Stein noted, the Arab Higher Committee and the surrounding Arab states were never interested in creating an independent Palestinian Arab government. Their goals were to deny any form of Jewish statehood and to maintain Arab dominance by avoiding participation in any acts that could legitimize Jewish political presence.2
Their refusal was not about borders; it was about Jewish existence.
In October 1947, the Arab Higher Committee made this clear in its statements to the United Nations: “The partition of Palestine was illegal. The Arabs of Palestine do not recognize the legality of the partition or the right of any power to impose it. They insist upon their right to the whole of Palestine.”
Why was there no call for a Palestinian state between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan ruled Judea and Samaria (rebranding it as “the West Bank”) and Egypt controlled Gaza? During those 19 years, Jordan annexed the West Bank and granted citizenship to its Arab residents. Egypt administered Gaza as occupied territory. If Palestinian nationalism was their priority, this would have been the perfect opportunity to establish that state without Israeli interference.
The idea of Palestinian statehood only gained momentum when it became strategically useful against Jewish self-determination. Identity formation does not retroactively create ancient sovereignty.
In any case, Arab rejection of Jewish sovereignty in 1947 shaped not only the wars that followed, but the myths about who belongs here.
The claim that “more than a million” Arabs in Judea and Samaria have roots going back to the Ottoman era is often made without question, but rarely with evidence.
The British Mandate census data tell a different story. According to records, between 1922 and 1931 alone, the Muslim population grew by 37 percent, a rate suggesting significant migration beyond natural increase. But the growth was not evenly spread; it surged in cities experiencing Jewish economic development.
According to British Mandate census data, several major cities saw striking population surges during this period. Haifa experienced the most explosive growth, with its non-Jewish population increasing by an astonishing 290 percent in just nine years. Jaffa also saw a major rise, with a 158 percent increase, while Jerusalem’s non-Jewish population grew by 131 percent. Other areas experienced more moderate but still significant growth: Jenin increased by 78 percent, Nablus by 42 percent, and Bethlehem by 37 percent.
People migrated toward economic and financial opportunity, not “ancestral homelands.”
Bosnian Muslims fled Austrian occupation after 1878, with Ottoman authorities resettling them in Ottoman Palestine. Circassians and Algerians arrived as part of systematic Ottoman resettlement programs throughout the 19th century. Armenian refugees fled Turkish massacres after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Christian minorities, like the Maronites and Syriacs, often reject the “Arab” label entirely and wish to assert their older ethno-religious identities.
The definition of the UN agency for Palestinians required only that a person reside in British Mandatory Palestine between 1946 and 1948, a window short enough to encompass many recent migrants with no claim to indigenous roots or long-term residency. Two years of residence became hereditary refugee status forever; Arabs who now call themselves Palestinians are the only population on earth treated this way.
Some families indeed trace residence to Ottoman times. But continuity of residence is not the same as national continuity, and Ottoman Palestine was a province, not a nation. The claim of “indigenous Arab sovereignty” is simply not true.
This question of historical presence is often distorted into a moral claim about who deserves sovereignty. And even if we accepted every population figure at face value, numbers alone cannot determine legitimacy.
Those who oppose sovereignty often point to population figures as if they determine legitimacy. But numbers do not decide who a people are or where they belong. If they did, no indigenous nation would have survived conquest or exile.
Jewish legitimacy in our homeland does not depend on majority ratios, but on history, law, and continuity. Demographic anxiety is surrender to fear disguised as policy. The demographic debate often serves as a proxy for the claim that Jews are foreigners here.
Calling Jewish sovereignty “presumptuous” ignores the fact that Jews are not foreign to this land. Judea and Samaria are not just names; they are the heart of Jewish history, culture, and religion. Archaeological evidence and historical records document continuous Jewish presence for over 3,000 years. In 2018, for example, archaeologists at Shiloh uncovered a 3,000-year-old Hebrew seal impression bearing the name of a biblical era official, discovered exactly where the Book of Joshua records the Mishkan stood.
And Michal Eshed, when working as a psychologist for the Samaria Regional Council, mapped the original Hebrew place names across Judea and Samaria — names later changed by the seventh-century Islamic conquerors during the Arab imperial expansion — showing geographic continuity between the biblical record and modern terrain.
We are not occupiers in Hebron, where Jewish communities existed for millennia before being massacred and expelled in 1929. We are not colonizers in Beit El or Shiloh, sites central to Jewish scripture and identity. It is not presumptuous to assert sovereignty over our ancestral homeland. It is overdue.
Critics warn that sovereignty would create apartheid. They have it backwards; the Oslo Accords created it. First off, under the current dual legal regime created by the Oslo Accords, Israelis and Arabs in Judea and Samaria are governed by entirely separate court systems. Israelis are tried in Israeli military courts, while Arabs fall under the Palestinian Authority’s civil courts — except for Jerusalem residents, who are tried in Israeli civil courts. Under full Israeli sovereignty, this duality disappears, replaced by a single civilian legal system that applies equally to everyone.
Residency laws are also divided. Israelis are legally prohibited from living in areas A and B, while Arabs freely reside in those areas and, in some cases, in Area C as well. A unified sovereign framework would eliminate these divisions, granting full, equal residency rights to all under one authority.
Freedom of movement is similarly split. Israelis are banned by law from entering Area A, while Arabs can move throughout all areas, requiring permits only when crossing the Green Line into Israel proper. With Israeli sovereignty, movement would be governed by a single jurisdiction rather than fragmented by ethnicity-based restrictions.
Finally, the checkpoint system today is rooted in security screening rather than legal separation, but it is still administered under a military framework. Under sovereignty, security and mobility would shift to civilian policing instead of military rule, creating a more normalized and unified system for everyone.
Sovereignty ends the double standard and the military courts. And once jurisdiction is determined, citizenship status will be determined. Perhaps it will resemble the Jerusalem model whereby over 350,000 Arabs have permanent resident status and 20,000 have requested and received citizenship.
The lesson of the Oslo Accords and the 2005 Gaza withdrawal3 is painfully clear: When Israel retreats, terrorism follows. When we act like guests in our own land, our enemies treat us like tenants: temporary, revocable, disposable.
Sovereignty is not about dominance; it is about permanence. We cannot let our enemies continue dreaming that one day we will pack up and leave. We will not. But unless we declare our sovereignty over this land, they will continue to believe otherwise — and the next October 7th is waiting.
The historical record is complex, but it does not support a simplistic narrative of indigenous Palestinians displaced by foreign Jewish colonizers. The Jewish people are indigenous to this land, with roots in Judea and Samaria going back over 3,000 years.
The Arab presence, by contrast, began with the seventh-century Islamic conquest, an act of imperial expansion, not indigeneity. While some Arab families may have lived in the area for generations, their presence is the result of conquest, not origin.
Exile never erased Jewish identity or our connection to this land, and no amount of time can turn Arab colonization into a claim for “indigenous” sovereignty.
A pair of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, signed in the 1990s
Kenneth W. Stein, “What if the Palestinian Arab Elite Had Chosen Compromise Rather than Boycott in Confronting Zionism?” in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (ed.) “What ifs of Jewish History,” Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 215-237.
Israel completed its withdrawal of all military forces and dismantled its settlements in the Gaza Strip on September 12, 2005, as part of its unilateral disengagement plan.
Excellent essay, however you should have addressed the Arab High Committee’s 1937 statement that “ The Zionists invented Palestine “ for their own benefit. It was the Roman Empire that coined the name Syria - Palestina to erase Jewish identity to the land. Zionists have always called it Eretz Yisrael.
I have always regarded Israel as a sovereign state. Its existence goes back 3,000 years. It belongs to the Jewish people.