> they weren't invited by the folks living in the place they wished to settle
This is false for several reasons. Places that jewish settlers have chosen have mostly been uninhabited and the land bought by willing absentee landlords. There's plenty of arabic towns across Judea and Samaria, and in general farther from the coast. Can you find a single one on the coast from Jaffo to Haifa? May be you think that there's no way that plentiful rainfall on flat plains would cause malaria swamps to appear? And that all documentation about said malaria swamps, and numerous deaths from malaria is false, too?
> the new migrants were more or less welcomed by the locals, from the Mamluk period onwards
That's false. Native Jewish population across the whole Middle East have always been a second-class citizen persecuted minority in the Muslim Arab countries, as all other conquered people — if they had the fortune to survive and save their identity at all.
Jews have been slaughtered and persecuted across the whole of Arab world, just as in Palestine, for centuries. So were other ethnical and religious groups. Can you find a single one which was not?
Why, do you think, in modern Israel it's exactly the mizrahim, jews from Muslim Arab countries, are one of the mast hawkish, anti-Arab groups in Israel? If you take a look at the peace activists who wave Palestinian flags in Tel Aviv, they're almost universally ashkenazi. It's because their families remember. Now, it's important to notice that I'm not making a value judgement here. The fact that mizrahim have a grudge to hold doesn't mean that it's necessarily right; all I'm saying that they do have a huge grudge.
Also, please don't think that my description of Arab Muslim world shows prejudice. Almost all other nations have always worked the same way. Arab Muslims, especially at the time, were not dissimilar from Chinese or English. Humans become more tolerant and humane as their level of living increases, but for most of history, humans across the whole world were equally horrible to one another.
> once they started arriving in highly disproportionate numbers, post-1880, and signaling an intention not to assimilate
I'm confused here. Is it supposed to be something bad? Are you implying that conserving a national and religious identity is something that immigrants should not be doing?
> pretending that they had a supremacist "right" to settle there based on what the region's temporary colonial occupier (the British)
No, I'm pretty sure the only reason they had the right to settle is because they followed the legal procedures to move to another country, buy property or land and develop it. Religion has nothing to do with it. Religion was why the _wanted_ do it.
You see, _right_ to do something and _desire_ to do something are different things. First, you get a _desire_. Then, you go about fulfilling it. If you break laws or human morality, then you don't have a right to it. Otherwise, you have.
Nobody of local Arab population was forcefully expelled in late 1880 onwards. How do you even imagine this could have happened? Do you think that a small group of a persecuted ethnic minority can actually conquer some part of a small village, kill and expel a few local families, all in the middle of a hostile ethno-religious majority, and just... Survive? You make a point elsewhere that immigrants which are viewed as "others" are rarely tolerated. Do you think that immigrants who behave like that are more tolerated? Or, may be, you think that in 1880, around the time of Dreifus case in France an similar persecution across Europe, somehow landed with superior European arms and battleships, guns blazing?
There were no armed Jews there until Jews started to get killed.
What happened in 1880 onwards is, Jews started buying land from absentee Ottoman landlords, and, more importantly, local Arab leaders. Big part of local population was convicted not to register their property rights as to avoid Ottoman taxation by said Arab leaders — who then cheated their people and sold that land.
Some people reply that there's no way that these Arab leaders were corrupt like that. But personally, I fail to see why these people think that said Arab leaders would be less corrupt than modern politicians.
> the scribblings of some weird Austro-Hungarian ideologue told them
All other points in your comment at least have arguments behind then. Good, bad, but it's a legitimate discussion. However, this right here is use of diminishing language and a personal attack without any justification.
Why "scribblings"? Why "weird"? Why the accent on citizenship? Would his figure be more acceptable if he didn't have a huge beard? If he did speeches instead of publications? If he was an Ottoman citizen? Why?
> that's when things started to get "complicated", and they began to find themselves not so welcome in their desired place of residence
No. As I already said, almost any other ethnical and religious groups have found themselves just as "not so welcome" in Muslim Arab world. The only reason Jews got special attention is because they were actually successful in their resistance to this world.
Let's recall what was happening in latter half of 19th and first half of 20th century. Muslims were fighting with Hindus in India/Pakistan. Muslim Turks were fighting with Greek Christians. Muslims were fighting with Christians in Lebanon. Christians were fighting against Muslim persecution in Serbia. Arabs were fighting with Ottomans in Egypt. Turk Muslims have been slaughtering Christian Armenians. Turks, Arabs, Alawites and Armenians were fighting in Syria. Assyrian Muslims were fighting with Kurds. Ottoman Muslims were fighting against Kurds. Druze Muslims were fighting against Ottoman Turks. There's probably even more conflicts that I don't know about.
Just to be clear, all of these conflicts are abhorrent. I think that there were horrible atrocities on all sides. But do you honestly think that in this horrible world, where different people have constantly been massacring one another Jews were "welcomed" by Arab Muslims living around?
> As any group should naturally expect if they tried to settle somewhere where they could not trace reasonably close ancestry, and in very large numbers.
That's a fair description of reality. However, this argument is not about "what is", but also about "what ought to be" (yes, I like Hume). Are you implying that this, resistance to outsiders, is a good thing? Something that we should see in a bright light?
> Also "homeland" is nonsense of course as applies to post-1880 migrants. We need to have some kind of a reasonable definition for what constitutes an "ancestral right" to live somewhere. The simple fact the component of ancestry that this group does have with historic Palestine lies with groups that were expelled or otherwise left in successive waves, ending the Crusades (but for most of them, back to the Roman/Byzantine eras), and which mixed significantly with other groups (far removed from the region in their origins) along the way.
I'm afraid that once again, this paragraph confuses "desire" with "right". Why Jews wanted to settle there doesn't matter. I have good arguments on this point as well, but this can't make Jews right or wrong. The only thing that matters if they had the right to do this or not. There's nothing in this, or following text that touches on the matter, so it's irrelevant.