What's amazing is that Palestinian Arabs were doing land acknowledgements back when Americans were still openly talking about
Manifest Destiny. As the former mayor of Jerusalem and Ottoman parliamentarian Yusuf
Diya al-Din
Pasha al-Khalidi put it: "Who could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically, it is certainly your country!"
Palestinian activists sometimes claim this is taken out of context, but they are mistaken. He says it is the Indigenous
land of the Jews, but that it now constitutes "an integral part of the Ottoman Empire," and that the Arabs living on Jewish land would never stand for Zionism. He says that violence would erupt, that the fanatics among the Arabs and Turks would take hold and threaten the safety of Jews throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
He was right, but this is not the fault of the Jews. It is the responsibility of the Arab imperialists to stop being imperialists, not of the Jews to avoid offending them by returning to our Indigenous homeland.