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You shouldn't be doing that generally on HN, either, and unfortunately your comments (as I've been attempting to communicate to you) have swung too far in the flamewar direction in recent months (or maybe the last year or two, I'm not sure). You've been a good HN contributor for a long time before that, so if you'd please revert to status quo ante, we'd appreciate it.
Which in the context of the cited request for 1967 borders and right of return, could read to be an additional call for the right of return of Palestinians to the lands within the Israeli side of the 1967 borders.
In 637 the non-urban population of Palestine (incl. Galilee) was still majority Jewish - Justinian had only turfed them out of Jerusalem. There was no genocide in 637.
Furthermore, no one elected Hamas as the restoration of the caliphate and spokesperson for entire Muslim world. They’re actually not Isis.
I have no problem with Islam’s wars of conquest and civilization. I just find the victimhood mentality that’s been adopted in the 20th century to be undignified for such a culture.
Now when Israel is their colonizer, things are a bit different. Not only has Israel imposed a new language, culture and religion onto their lands, but they have also severely displaced them. No colonizer has done that to the Palestinians in the past, not even the British.
Modern Judaism permits conversion but refuses to promote or encourage it, and sometimes even goes out of its way to make it hard (especially some of the more conservative Orthodox). Hence, there has never been any encouragement for Palestinians to convert. It wasn’t always thus - John Hyrcanus forced the Idumeans to convert to Judaism; but that was over 2000 years ago now.
By contrast, Islamic conquerors always made it easy for conquered peoples to convert to Islam, and encouraged it through a mixture of carrots and sticks. The same is true of Christianity.
Possibly, this is part of what sustains the Israel-Palestine conflict; if contemporary Judaism were pro-conversion, many of the Palestinians might have already become Jews by now.
The Muslims are the colonizers. Israel is just taking their land back. Who built the Temple Mount the Dome of the Rock is sitting on?
Israelis are not native to this land. Sharing a religion with one of many religions Palestinians have held in the past does not make the land indigenous to anyone except the Palestinians them selves. Just like Roman Catholics are not indigenous to the Vatican, not even the Roman Catholic minority in Romania.
European Jews have been a very real part of European history for dozens of generations. The history of European Jews is indeed a very rich history. They are a culture of their own, some even speak their own Germanic language (Yiddish). They are as European as me (an Icelander) and are indeed indigenous to Europe, not Palestine. The minority of European Jews who migrated to Palestine and later founded their own state on Palestinian lands did so by establishing a colony. This by definition makes them colonizers.
“Who built the Temple Mount the Dome of the Rock is sitting on?” Palestinians did, back before they converted to Islam, back when majority of Palestinians were still Jewish, and probably called the land Judea. Likewise, the Jews built the Temple Mount, back when they lived in historic Palestine. European Jews can claim that their ancestors built the Temple Mount, and they wouldn’t be wrong. In fact they can be proud of their ancestors. However, claiming that European Jews built the Temple Mount, that would be wrong.
This is no different than the question of “Who built the Pyramids?” Egyptians built the Pyramids. When the Egyptians built the Pyramids they practiced a different religion and spoke a different language. Since then they have been colonized multiple times over, by the Greeks, by the Romans, by the Byzantines, by the Umayyad Caliphate, by the Ottomans, by the French, by the British, etc. The Egyptians that built the Pyramids didn’t call them selves Egyptians and they probably didn’t call their land “Egypt”, It was still the Egyptians that built the Pyramids.
As a matter of academic interest, when would you say the statute of limitations runs out on the right of displaced peoples to reclaim their ancestral lands? If your answer is "it never runs out," then the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, Midianites, and Amalekites† would like a word ....
† According to the Hebrew Bible, the ancient Israelites violently (and genocidally?) displaced these peoples; see, e.g., Num. 31, Josh. 10:40, 11:15. But it's not clearly established that this actually happened.