A Zionist and a pro-Palestinian liberal are having a big debate on my Facebook wall. One of the key questions that seems to be relevant is whether the Palestinians are the descendants of the people who lived in those territories before Jews started returning, or whether they just arrived to take advantage of the hard work of the Jews.
There is no chance whatsoever of ending the debate, but for purely intellectual reasons I'd like to know the genetic and cultural history of the people who live in the occupied territories right now.
Genetically Palestinians are closely related to European Jews](http://www.pnas.org/content/97/12/6769.long) rather than Egyptians or Saudis. This means both that they tend to descend from people who were there for a long time and that the Jews were in fact returning.
OP, you've got the privilege to see a real-life invocation of Terra Nullius in action - and in the 21st century no less! It's the legal principle that the land in question is uninhabited, which allows it to be legally occupied. As far as I can tell, however, it's mostly claimed incorrectly. The most notable example of this is of course Australia, where the British crown claimed the land as Terra Nullius because the Aboriginal population couldn't own or sell land - or according to others because they weren't part of civilised society. The concept has since been overturned (like twenty years ago), because of the - y'know - huge human rights implications it has. But it reared its ugly head elsewhere too. In New Zealand, the Southern Island was claimed as Terra Nullius back in the 19th century, despite the Maori population there.
More relevant to this discussion however, are the more controversial instances like in the Western Sahara and... South Africa. During Apartheid, there was a government policy which taught that at the time of Dutch colonisation in the 1600s South Africa was uninhabited and Africans only started migrating to the area once the Dutch were there. This was, of course, rubbish, but it was an important aspect in the legitimising of Apartheid. Any research that would prove the opposite was opposed - archaeology was heavily censored as it was pretty easy to uncover evidence of African civilisation before the 1600s.
The same claim's now being pushed by some more unhinged Zionists for much the same reasons, despite it being totally false. Palestinians lived there before the Jewish migration streams and there's so much evidence pointing at this that it's not even worth taking any claim otherwise seriously.