I can give you the background to everything happening up to today if that helps (my father is a retired history teacher and the ME was actually on the national curriculum during the 80s/90s - the good thing about learning from school text books is that they are balanced). It may be a bit long though.
Jewish people are, by definition, Indigenous to the Land of Israel. They were displaced numerous times by colonizers, most notably in the first and second centuries, when Roman colonizers enslaved hundreds of thousands of Jews and took them to Europe as slaves. So they arrived to Europe as slaves - they are not European (this is key).
It was the Romans that changed the name of the land to “Palestine." (The Emperor Hadrian to be precise). The letter "p" doesn't even exist in Arabic. They changed the name to humiliate Jews.
The Islamic armies conquered Palestine in the seventh century - genociding entire Jewish communities along the way. By the time of the Arab/Islamic conquest, Jews were the majority in Palestine.
The process of Arabization of Palestine is a prime example of settler colonialism. Like colonizers before them, the Arabs displaced the Jewish population (Hakim Edict of 1012) or forced them to convert to Islam (forced Arabization/Islamization).
For 2500 years straight Jews have tried, repeatedly, to regain sovereignty in the land.
The modern political Zionist movement was one of hundreds of movements that sought to bring Jews sovereignty in their ancestral, indigenous homeland. The Ottomans, who then occupied Palestine, banned Jews from purchasing land in Palestine, because Jews were second-class citizens.
Zionists aimed, explicitly, to retain autonomy via legal mean - not through violence. Though they used the word "colonist" (which had a different meaning in the 1800s dictionary), they explicitly said that Zionism was not a colonialism movement but the restoration of autonomy of an ancient nation. They then armed themselves in repose to repeated Arab kidnappings and murders of Jews.
During WWI, the British sponsored Arab nationalism to weaken their enemy, the Ottoman Empire. The British designed the Palestinian flag. There was no "Palestinian nationalism" independent of Arab nationalism until the 1920s, when raging antisemite and future Hitler BFF Amin Al-Husseini ( it’s a bit of a stretch to say he’s the god father of Palestinian nationalism, but he sort of is) had a little falling out with the rest of his Arab nationalists and decided he wanted to do his own thing.
In fact, the Arab nationalists in Palestine, at the 1919 Jerusalem Congress, affirmed the following: "We consider Palestine nothing but part of Arab Syria and it has never been separated from it at any stage. We are tied to it by national, religious, linguistic, moral, economic, and geographic bounds."
After genocidal maniac Al-Husseini had his falling out, he began inciting the Muslim masses against the Jews by proliferating the lie that the Jews were trying to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque (which the Arab colonizers built atop the ancient Jewish Temple to humiliate the Jews). This lie got hundreds of Jews slaughtered in the most horrific ways all the way into the 1930s and it's still disseminated all over Palestinian social media to justify violence against Israeli Jews.
In reality, it is the Jordanian Islamic Waqf that has sovereignty over Al Aqsa - not Jews or Israel. Jews are not even allowed to pray there and can only visit at limited hours. This is the status quo agreed upon with Jordan which Jews have not broken.
During WWII, not only did the Palestinian Arab leadership join the Nazis (many of the Palestinian leadership were made honorary SS officers, actually), and prevent Jewish immigration, but they also REJECTED repeated offers from the British for a sovereign Palestinian state in ALL of Palestine. Multiple times. The reason? They wouldn't accept a state if there were any Jews there.
After decades of increasing violence and Arab rejections of a unified state, the British got sick of Palestine. So they handed the problem over to the United Nations. The UN decided to investigate what to do. They held an investigative committe meant to interview both Arab and Jewish leaders. The Jews pleaded their case. The Arabs threatened their people with death if they engaged with the investigators. Is there any surprise then that the UN committee concluded partition was the best way forward?
To back track a bit. Not even Jews had considered partition until the 1930s. What they envisioned was something of a binational federation for both Jews and Arabs. But after the genocidal Arab antisemitic violence of the 1930s, the Jewish leadership pretty much concluded that a kumbaya coexistence was impossible. And so they began supporting the idea of partition.
Anyway, in 1947 the UN voted in favor of partition, with predominantly Arab territory assigned to the Arab state, and predominantly Jewish territory assigned to the Jewish state. The Jews were naturally elated - sovereignty for the first time in 2000 years! The Arabs were incensed. They immediately published a leaflet which stated the following: "The Arabs have taken into their own hands the Final Solution of the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out."
And I obviously don’t have to tell you what the original Final Solution was (they were making reference to the Holocaust). Al-Husseini was well aware because he was Hitler's good mate, there’s even photographic and primary source evidence that he personally went to visit the concentration camps in Europe https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/amin-al-husseini-nazi-concentration-camp).
I think Al-Husseini also died in Germany if I’m not mistaken.
These weren't just empty words. They began slaughtering Jews on the street (a bit like what we saw on October 7th last year) and a civil war broke out. This is the one that Palestinians call the Nakba, meanwhile the Israelis call it their War of Liberation.
For the first four months of the war, while the Arabs committed massacre after massacre, the Jewish forces used a policy of restraint, fighting a purely defensive war. But then something happened. The Arab forces - the Palestinian Arab forces, because the other Arab countries hadn't entered the conflict yet - besieged 100,000 Jewish civilians in Jerusalem (what with blockades being rather topical today), cutting them off from water, food, and medical supplies. These weren't recent immigrants. These were Jews belonging to some of the most ancient Jewish families in Palestine. Arab villagers destroyed Jewish relief trucks (and even Red Cross trucks!) attempting to break through the siege. The Jewish forces got really fed up. And so they moved from the defensive to the offensive. Remember, this is three years after the Holocaust and these people are explicitly threatening - and executing - a genocide against the Jewish people. In trying to liberate Jerusalem, the infamous Deir Yassin massacre happened. Every single Jewish leader condemned it. No Arab leader condemned the many massacres of a Jews before that. And you know what? The Arabs retaliated, slaughtering an entire medical convoy attempting to reach Jerusalem. On May 14, 1948, in accordance with the end of the British Mandate and the UN partition plan, Israel declared its independence. Seven much more powerful Arab armies immediately invaded, with the help of BRITISH commanders and a force of about 30,000 former Nazis. The US - the whole world - enacted an arms embargo on the Jews. Israel basically had no outside help.
There are NO Zionist recorded expulsions during the first four months of the war, before the tide turned. The first 300,000-350,000 Palestinians to flee did so before the Arab armies invaded, and generally belonged to the upper classes or were the families of Palestinian leaders. Were there expulsions after that? Yes. But these expulsions were not a one way street. After the Jews failed to liberate Jerusalem, the remaining 40,000 Jews of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (which Jordan renamed the West Bank), and Gaza were expelled. Another 850,000 Jews were expelled in retaliation from the rest of the Arab world...Jews who had lived there for centuries, if not millennia. So it was ugly (that's what war is). “Population exchanges" were extremely common during the time period (so we need to observe the context of all of this) and the Israel-Palestine population exchange is peanuts statistically compared to other much larger population exchanges, such as the Turkish-Greco population exchange or the India-Pakistan population exchange. After the war, Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip. Neither tried to form a Palestinian state there. In fact, the original Palestinian Charter (like constitution) explicitly stated that those territories did not belong to Palestine. But wait - there’s more. Because when Israel captured those territories in 1967, all of a sudden the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) amended their little Charter to say that those territories belonged to them. It's almost like they wanted them because the Jews had them.
The PLO was established in Moscow in 1964. In their Cold War with the US, the Soviets had a vested interest in gaining the support of Arab nations, many of which were oil-rich. So they did what, for 2000 years, people have done best: use antisemitism as a political tool to mobilize the population. The Soviets, the sworn enemies of the Nazis, disseminated Nazi propaganda films from the 1930s all over the Arab world. They even enacted a secret KGB operation in the Middle East called "Zionist Governments." According to the then head of the KGB: "We had only to keep repeating our themes-that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries" bankrolled by rich Jews.'" KGB allies even told the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, to stop talking about annihilating Jews and Israel and “turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights." (yes, really).
From day one, the PLO's tactics were pure and unabashed terrorism, like the stuff we saw on 7th Oct, but also attempted biological warfare like poisoning Israel's water supply. So as a result, Israel wanted to destabilise the PLO and started investing into a HUMANITARIAN organisation named Mujama al-Islamiya, which sponsored and ran nurseries, clinics, universities, etc. many, many years later, this organisation turned into Hamas - an organisation that explicitly aims to annihilate every last Jew, not just in Israel, but on planet earth.
This took a me while to type in the end, so I’ll explain about Iranian and Israeli relations after a break!