What else are they lying about, Seth?

Seth Rogen belatedly discovers that there were people living in Palestine before the Jews arrived:

I also think that as a Jewish person… I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life,” he said. “You know, they never tell you, that oh by the way, there were people there.” 

It’s a bit ironic, considering that the information is right there on Wikipedia. In the 1931 census of Palestine – which, by the way, has been the proper name for the region since the Romans merged its province of Judea with the province of Syria to form Syria Palaestina in 135 Anno Domini – Jews made up 18 percent of the population since there were 174,610 Jewish Palestinians and 794,658 non-Jewish Palestinians.

There are now in the whole of Palestine hardly 700,000 people, a population much less than that of the province of Gallilee alone in the time of Christ. Of these 235,000 live in the larger towns, 465,000 in the smaller towns and villages. Four-fifths of the whole population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic. The minority are members of the Latin or of the Uniate Greek Catholic Church, or—a small number—are Protestants. The Jewish element of the population numbers 76,000. Almost all have entered Palestine during the last 40 years. Prior to 1850 there were in the country only a handful of Jews. In the following 30 years a few hundreds came to Palestine. Most of them were animated by religious motives; they came to pray and to die in the Holy Land, and to be buried in its soil. After the persecutions in Russia forty years ago, the movement of the Jews to Palestine assumed larger proportions.

Does this demographic history negate Israel’s right to exist by virtue of its right of conquest? Of course not, anymore than the right of the United States to exist is negated by the conquest and dispossession of the American Indian tribes. But any time a group of people feel it is necessary to lie about their own history, it naturally calls into question both a) their motivations and b) their veracity concerning other historical matters.