National sovereignty and rights are not like the title deeds to your house. If startling new archaeological evidence was to demonstrate that some Roman emperor had ceded not only the land occupied by Israel today but Gaza and the West Bank too, to the Jewish people for all eternity, could that be taken to mean the extinction of Palestinian national rights? Of course it wouldn’t. Who occupies a given territory, who exercises sovereignty there, how the people identify themselves and what they want are all factors that must be taken into account when examining the political history of any region. However, there is no “originally” in history, no virgin moment when everyone was in their place and there was a place for everybody; there is only a certain state of affairs at a certain date and a certain balance of forces, with a scaffolding of class, national, ethnic and religious interests, yearnings and desires underlying them.
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