Throughout history claims to land have been based on two principles. The Right of Discovery and the Right of Conquest. So, a people can claim they were the first to occupy a land (that is not the case with the Palestinians, it is true when speaking of Native Americans generally... though it is not clear, what tribe discovered the various parts of America. Unlikely, they were the same tribe that occupied the land when Europeans arrived.
Far more often than the right of Discovery is the right of Conquest. This was true of the many groups throughout history that conquered the land known as Israel today. And most nations of the world are occupied by groups that conquered the land from someone else.
In recent decades, there has been an attempt to replace these two historical basses for claiming rights to land with an international consensus approach. Of course, countries like China with respect to Tibet, Russia with respect to Ukraine, have made it clear this third option only applies if more powerful nations are prepared to impose such an approach and, in some sense, it is a modified form of the right of conquest designed to minimalize "land grabs" and thereby minimize war.
The Palestinians are trying to make the argument that they had the right to the land by virtue of occupation as a people even though the land itself never belonged to them. It went from belonging to the Ottomans to belonging to the British to being given to both the Jews and Palestinians, who then fought a war of conquest that the Palestinians lost.
Even in the US, the government has a right to take someone's land and give it to someone else. So, once Israel conquered the land, it had the right under imminent domain to take control of the land and use it as it saw fit. One can argue the fairness of it, but every government has that right and exercises it routinely.
For some arcane reason, people keep trying to treat the Palestinians different than any other group of people, who have had their land taken by conquest. It simply does not work that way. If so, can someone convince Russia to give back the land it has taken from Ukraine and China the land it has taken from Tibet. And the list goes on... I know many families that once owned land in what is now Poland but was once Germany, I hear no one saying return half of Poland to Germany or to return to Poland that large parts of Poland that Russia seized. The whole madness of this argument only exists because people want a rationale to argue that Israel should surrender land it has conquered even as that land had been conquered by various groups many times before it was done by Israel.
I suspect there is not a square foot of the land that is Israel today that has not been taken from its original owners by force. That is one reason why the right of Discovery tends not to have much application today.
