Israel should never have been founded.

I shall start the argument by evaluating the legitimacy of Israel"s claim to the lion"s share of Palestine. I am not arguing for a moment that the Holocaust did not occur, nor am I arguing that it was not to the same severity as most historians believe; I am merely arguing that it does not serve as a justification to claim a stretch of land that is among the most prosperous areas of the Middle East, at the expense of a people that were given no say in the matter. The Holocaust was terrible, perhaps one of the greatest historical crimes ever committed, but it was also the one thing that ended the wholesale persecution of the Jews in the West (note that I did not mention the Middle East, as the Islamic world was the only place Jews could reside safe from persecution until comparatively recently). Because the world has seen how prejudice and casual racism can lead to the unthinkable being perpetrated. No one, save a few knuckle-dragging white nationalists whose collective breath reeks of cheap lager and chewing tobacco, would subject the Jews to a pogrom or a genocide like those experienced by the Jews by the Christian population of Europe and, to a lesser extent, America. Now, the Jews can live in America and Europe, for the most part, without persecution and without alienation. Ironically, after the heinous crime of the Holocaust occurred, Britain, the USA and the Zionist lobbyists in those countries found that the best way for the Jews to avoid persecution was to have them run their very own apartheid state as first-class citizens, as opposed to the Palestinians, who had lived there for thousands of years. Zionism is a Bronze Age, or Iron Age at best, idea that has unfortunately survived, and I view it as on an equal ground to White or Black Nationalism in the USA. The majority of the Jewish people lived in what is now Israel from about 1500 BCE until the First Crusade in 1096 CE, when there was a major flight. After that, there was a small Jewish population, a minority in Palestine, as many had either fled to elsewhere in the Islamic world or converted to Islam and remained in Palestine. This population was bolstered by immigrants from Europe for the next few centuries, until the end of the First World War in 1919, when Britain gained control of Palestine; Jews represented 13% of the population of Palestine by 1947. It is true that Jerusalem was roughly two thirds Jewish, though the surrounding area was predominantly native Palestinian. Is 13% enough of a population to justify even considering creating a state to accommodate that 13%, along with any Jews from outside Palestine that wished to move there? It was a romantic notion of neoclassicism that inspired the 1926 Balfour Declaration, which occurred before the Holocaust, not a sense of concern for the Jewish people. Well, that combined with colonial disregard for the feelings of the locals and Islamophobic sentiment which ran nearly as deep in early twentieth century Britain as it does in post 9/11 USA. This romantic notion that because the Jews were in Palestine around the times of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, made the British and American governments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wish to restore that status quo. The Jews have no claim to Israel, as people have lived there since they had left, and still live there, albeit in horrible conditions and subject to persecution by Israeli forces armed with British, French and American weapons and financial backing.