The current PLO and Arab claim (and mainstream media regurgitation of it) is indeed a very distorted version of `recorded history' and can only qualify as pure Orwellian propaganda. In fact, putting aside all the myths and propaganda, the only area that would qualify historically as truly Arab land, is the Arabian desert peninsula. Unfortunately, it seems that Goebbels was correct in stating that if a lie were repeated often enough, it would come to be "perceived" as truth.
Palestinian leaders claim that Israel is built on Arab land, when the truth is that eyewitnesses such as Mark Twain and Rev. Manning of England who visited the Holy Land in the last century wrote that the land was barren and empty. The population then was less that 5% of today's population.
In fact, the return of the Jews in 1800's and early 1900's created jobs and Arabs from impoverished areas were drawn into the Holy Land for work. Peters also tells us that in 1948 so many Arabs were new to the area and could not qualify for the UN requirement for refugee status (people forced to leave "permanent" or "habitual" homes) that they added a clause permitting refugee status for Arabs who had been there as little as two years.
Thus the Zionist slogan "The Land without a people for the people without a land" was absolutely correct. The slogan did not mean that there were no inhabitants at all in Palestine; it just indicated that the non-Jewish population constituted a conglomeration of dozens of heterogeneous groups of residents having very little in common, i.e. not constituting a single nation, a people. These residents were not united by any specific national idea. Parkes wrote that the Balfour declaration for the first time established a "unit called Palestine on a political map. ...There was no such thing historically as a 'Palestinian Arab', and there was no feeling of unity among 'the Arabs' of this newly defined area".
No doubt, some Arabs have lived in the area of the Mandate of Palestine for many centuries, but not as many of them as had the Jews. What is more, Jews had lived in Arab lands since times preceding Islam itself. And yet, these Jews in Arab lands were never regarded as citizens of the Arab lands they lived in and were unceremoniously expelled in the years subsequent to Israel's establishment. In other words, residency alone did not confer national rights on those who inhabited an area. Nor did it make a people out of congeries of Arabs and other nationalities that had come to the area of the Mandate of Palestine while the Jewish people were restricted. The nations of the world recognized this after World War I when the League of Nations determined that the geographical area called Palestine was to become a homeland for the Jewish people, the people that had been continuously associated with this land since ancient times when it was known as Judea and Samaria.