Let’s erase 3,000 years of Jewish history with a snide remark about the Mojave Desert shall we.

Jews didn’t arrive in the land of Israel - they returned to it. Jews are indigenous to that land, with an unbroken historical, cultural, and spiritual connection that predates Islam, Arab conquests, Palestine and modern colonialism by millennia. Jerusalem wasn’t just a capital - it was the heart of Jewish civilization long before Rome fell or Europe even had kingdoms.

Comparing the return of an indigenous people to their ancestral homeland to European colonization - which imposed foreign rule on lands oceans away - is not only historically illiterate, it’s morally warped. Jews weren’t sent by an empire to subjugate another people - they were fleeing pogroms, expulsions, and genocide. From Europe. From Russia. From Arab lands. From everywhere.

As for the “expulsion” narrative: war broke out in 1948 because five Arab armies invaded the Jewish state to annihilate it. Many Arabs fled - some were tragically displaced, as happens in every war. But many left at the urging of their own leaders who promised return after victory. (Not to mention the actual expulsion of some 700,000 Jews from Arab states) The Jews didn’t invade someone else’s land. They defended their own lives and declared sovereignty on land they bought, cultivated, lived in, and died for.

If your problem is with the idea of a Jewish state existing at all, just say it. But don’t pretend you’re making a moral argument when what you’re really doing is denying an indigenous people their right to exist in their homeland - something you curiously don’t seem to apply to anyone else on Earth.And no, no one needs to build a Jewish state in the Mojave. Because Jews already had one - in Judea.