I have gotten so tired of hearing about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the news. In some sense, it's just another facet of - on both sides - the enduring negative legacy of colonialism, claims to land on the basis of ethnohistorical criteria (or worse, religious criteria), general sociocultural backwardity (to the point of making American fundies and their like look like hippies) in not insignificant percentages of the 'combatants', and Abrahamic religious interests. I'm pretty sure the fact that Israeli territory contains the most important places to members of the world's two largest religions (which encompass more than half of the world's population) and another fairly powerful one besides isn't a coincidence.

Your land claims are fundamentally what 1) you can defend and 2) what those with more firepower let you have. This is not even remotely nice or fair, but it always boils down to this. Might doesn't make right, but fighting off might isn't an easy task.