Almost from the outset of British rule in the Levant after World War I, tensions steadily increased between Arabs and Jews, culminating in outbreaks of violence such as the 1929 Hebron Massacre and the 1936–1939 Arab revolt. After World War II, with Mandatory Palestine spiraling in violence, the UK referred the question of the land to the United Nations, which created an inquiry committee – UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) – tasked with proposing a solution. UNSCOP issued a report recommending that the region be bisected into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem to be a “corpus separatum,” or “separate entity.”

What many people don’t realize is that the original recommendation was based largely on pre-existing settlements with the borders of Israel and Palestine drawn based on Arab and Jewish population centers. The UN did not seize land that a majority of Arabs lived on and hand it to the Jews.

Arabs and Jews lived intermixed throughout the land, and when the division happened and Israel declared independence, the Arab League refused to form Palestine. They then kicked out the Jewish villages that had existed in the West Bank before they continued on to invade the newly founded state of Israel.

Until it was wiped out by Arab riots in 1929 in what is known as the Hebron Massacre, there was a large Jewish community in the center of Hebron — the capital of the West Bank.

Arabs and Jews fought one another before the founding and the innocent in their population have always suffered for it.

A reminder: Deligitimizing Jewish or Palestinian connections to the homeland is a bad look. Peace is the right look. Let’s focus on that.