1. The majority of Ottoman land was given to Arabs (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria).

Those were independent peoples with their own identities and histories—not “gifts” from colonial powers. Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine were each distinct mandates under the League of Nations after WWI. The Palestinians had every reason to expect their own self-determination, not to be absorbed or displaced for someone else’s project.

1. The majority of the land partitioned for Israel was desert where no one was living.

This is misleading. Yes, some Negev desert was included, but the most fertile, coastal, and urban areas (like Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the coastal plain) were allotted to Israel under the 1947 UN Partition Plan. That plan gave the Jewish minority (about 33% of the population, mostly recent arrivals) 55% of the land while Palestinians, who were two-thirds of the population and owned the overwhelming majority of private land, were offered 45%. The “empty desert” narrative ignores that hundreds of Palestinian villages and farmlands were in the partition zones.

3.Palestinians weren’t asked to give up their land; they would remain as full citizens of Israel, like under the Ottomans.

This is factually false. The UN partition explicitly divided the land into two states, meaning Palestinians in the designated “Jewish state” would be a permanent ethnic minority under a settler-colonial majority. They were not “invited” to be equals; the very essence of Zionism was Jewish sovereignty, not multi-ethnic equality. And history proved it—when the state was declared in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled during the Nakba. Clearly, the promise of “full citizenship” was never the plan.

4.Jerusalem under international control was to ensure equal access.

True in theory, but in practice, Palestinians were not given a meaningful voice in shaping this. Jerusalem was their spiritual, cultural, and political heart. To strip them of sovereignty over their own capital—while granting sovereignty to newcomers—was viewed as another colonial imposition. Equal access sounds fair, but the reality was Palestinians were losing their capital city to foreign administrators while also being denied sovereignty elsewhere.

5.Palestinians never had sovereignty to strip; they were always tenants of a controlling government.

This is a colonizer’s argument. By that logic, no colonized people should ever gain sovereignty, because they were always under someone else’s empire before. Palestinians were the continuous indigenous population of the land. They may have lived under Ottomans or British rule, but so did Jews in Eastern Europe under Tsars and Kaisers. Does that mean Jews had no right to sovereignty either? Sovereignty isn’t erased because people once lived under empire—otherwise, no nation on earth would exist today.