Thank you for providing that viewpoint.
The short, short history as I know it. Of course, there is my side of the story, the Arab side of the story, and somewhere in the middle is the truth.
The Jewish people (race and religion, as they were more tightly coupled before Constantine) have lived our entire existence in the land of Judea (since about 1040 BC). We were mostly dispersed by the Romans in 70 AD, but having been trying to return ever since. In the mean time, lots of other peoples have settled here. Most have come and gone (Romans, Byzantine, etc) and as of 1900 AD there were about 94% Muslims, 5% Jews, and a few others in the area. That was the start of the modern Zionist movement, when a series of political events came together and the time was deemed right to stop yearning for a return to Judea and to pack up and go. Nobody really had a problem with this yet: the Ottomans tolerated us and the Europeans were happy to see us go! Arabs and Jews were for the most part friendly, the place was barely populated (well under one million people).
With the fall of the Ottoman empire all the differing groups wanted their own state. Jews were pouring in from Europe, especially after the second great war, and tensions flared between the Jews who considered the land their ancestral homeland and the Muslims who have been living there for as long as they remember. Both have a claim to the land: the Jews have considered the land "theirs" for millennia and in fact it was made clear to them that nowhere else is safe for them (See: holocaust), and the Arabs were already living there.
Both sides tried rewriting history and both committed atrocities. A bunch of disinterested foreigners (UN) split up the land between Jews and Arabs: the Jews said thank you and the Arabs said "War!": thus the war that is today known as the War of Independence to me and is known as The Catastrophe to the Arabs. The Jews won that war, and the one after it (1956, started by Britain and France to steal the Suez canal from Egypt) and the one after is (1967, started by Egypt to destroy Israel) and the one after it (1973, started by Egypt and Syria to destroy Israel) and so on.
Just as an aside, with specific regard to Gaza, that area fell from Egyptian hands in 1956 and when that war ended Egypt refused to have it back! There are those (Gazans themselves, mostly) who argue that Gaza was deliberately ignored by Egypt to fester a people of hate to be used as a weapon against Israel. It worked: we were stuck with Gaza which had seen no development for the seven years following the 1948 war. Just look at where it is geographically in Egypt, and understand that Egyptians (yes, I have been to Egypt more than once) don't consider even Sinai to be a part of Egypt Proper just like Americans don't see Guam as part of America Proper. The Egyptian government barely has any control over the area, even today. Gaza especially was completely ungoverned during that (1948-1956) time. Since then, it has only gotten worse.
