David_Jay: Many Jews, like myself, believe they have a claim to the land as well and all should live in harmony there.
Yes, but that's not quite what has happened, is it?
Do you think there is a case to call the Palestinian/Jewish friction, fratricide?
Think about it. The Jews were eventually driven out of Jerusalem by the Roman army, but continued to live in the surrounding areas. And then came Islam - I think there is a very strong possibility that many people who may have worshipped as Jews, switched to Islam, some perhaps by force, but not necessarily by force. Islam did not always use force to convert. The population of the land became Muslim with the possible exception of brief periods during the Crusades.
Is there any evidence? Consider the evidence provided by genetics:
Blood Brothers: Palestinians and Jews Share Genetic Roots
"Confronted by the violence sweeping over Israel, it can be easy to overlook the things that Jews and Palestinians share: a deep attachment to the same sliver of contested land, ... a common tradition of descent from the patriarch Abraham, and, as scientific research shows - a common genetic ancestry, as well.
Ostrer’s research on “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,” published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, sampled 652,000 gene variants from each of 237 unrelated individuals from seven Jewish populations: Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek and Ashkenazi. These sequences were then compared with reference samples from non-Jews drawn from The Human Genome Diversity Project, a global database of genetic information gathered from populations across the world.
Each of the Jewish populations, they found, “formed its own distinctive cluster,” indicating their shared ancestry and “relative genetic isolation.”
... Ostrer’s team also identified two major groups of Jews: Middle Eastern Jews (Iranian and Iraqi) and European/Syrian Jews. The split between these two groups of Jews occurred some 2,500 years ago.
... In addition, a “compact cluster” of Yemenite Jews “overlaps primarily with Bedouins but also with Saudi individuals.” Ethiopian and Indian Jews are more closely related to their own neighboring, host populations.
... Are these genetic ties between Jews, Palestinians, Bedouin, and Druze important in a contemporary context? “It doesn’t matter to me personally,” Skorecki says, “since I think that global human identity supersedes all other considerations.”
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/science/1.681385
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David_Jay: Except for some fundamentalist Orthodox, most Jews believe the claims of the Bible to the land of Israel somewhat symbolic to stand for each human having a claim to a place on earth to call home.
A pious hope, but one I agree with, except, does it really have to be based on developed ancestry.
Consider what is currently happening in Myanmar, where (maybe some of) Myanmar's Buddhists began a genocidal campaign against the country's Moslem Rohingyas. A persecution now being continued by Myanmar's Army.
It shares an ethnic connection with the Jewish problem also, in that Imperial Britain is at the root of both problems. In the case of Burma (as the Brits called it) they defined the border between India and contemporary Myanmar. I cannot argue that they purposely included unlike groups, although it is a common difficulty in many former British colonies, but there is an argument that the Brits liked to play different groups against each other, hoping that it would be easier to maintain control of the area.
