Alternatively, various ethnic groups have been fighting over the region for thousands of years, so it's impossible to say.

Wild how many liberals are so incurious they actually use this as justification. I remember like 20 years ago when I was studying Iran-CONTRA for a sociology final project and it led me to digging into wider regional conflicts and then digging into the history of Israel and it took all of a couple hours to trace back to its founding and then the Nakba in 1948 and I was like "hey wait a minute this isn't that complicated at all, it's just more European settler colonial shit".