Wrong. They were given the authority by general consensus after WW2. Maybe a poor choice, but it's not at all the responsibility of current Israelis to think about what their grandparents did. For a Gen Z Israeli, there's only one country.

If a majority agree to rob you, it is no longer robbery?

If they don't control it, it's not the "other people's" land either.

Land belongs to whoever controls it. That's it. That is all it will ever be.

If there is not some higher power (e.g. the UN, who you say does not have authority), you have no recourse.

No matter what land it is or who they are: nobody currently living was there first. The only claim is always "I was the last to control it". But none of us are the first.

From wikipedia's article on the history of Palestine:

> "Most of Palestine's population, estimated to be around 200,000 in the early years of Ottoman rule, lived in villages. The largest cities were Gaza, Safad and Jerusalem, each with a population of around 5,000–6,000."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine

That's in the 16th century. Almost no Jews at that time either.

> That's in the 16th century.

OP's point was "Under the Ottoman Empire it was (relatively) scarcely populated and a mix of Jews, Christians and Muslims, plus some religious minorities."

What are you trying to dispute here? That the territory of today's Israel was sparsely populated back then, or that the Ottoman Empire existed back then?

> Almost no Jews at that time either.

What a wild claim: almost no Jews in places like Jerusalem? Please cite whatever source you have to make such an extraordinary claim.

> What are you trying to dispute here? That the territory of today's Israel was sparsely populated back then, or that the Ottoman Empire existed back then

Exactly the part that you left out: that the Jewish presence (before zionist immigration began) was of any relevance in the demography of the region.

The censuses were always flip-flopping back and forth, until the 1880s. You cherry picked one nice one, but I could check pick over half a dozen censuses that show Jewish majority during the 19th century - no less than the amount of censuses that promote the other competing narrative. And all the later censuses, after 1880, show Jewish majority. That was over three decades before the fall of the Ottoman empire.

  Source for census data:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Jerusalem