What I haven't seen mentioned yet in the other comments is how a lot of orthodox Jews are against zionism because it goes against their religion, which says that the promised land can only be achieved after the Messias has returned to earth. Creating a promised land in the name of Judaism before this has happened is blasphemy even. Saying it's about religious land is zionist propaganda because, even to Jewish people, it isn't.

The claim that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes back hundreds or thousands of years is a lie. It is a lie designed to obfuscate the clear and simple fact that it started in 1947 and is NOT about religion but about settler colonial land theft, occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

GRAZIANI: ‘Italy has as much right here as anybody else… England has a right to Egypt, France to Tunisia, Algeria, Spain to Morocco… but none of them have our pedigree. We have hundreds of years of right here.’
OMAR: ‘Hm. Soon you will take everything from me, and you want me to justify your thefts? No nation has the right to occupy another.’
GRAZIANI: ‘…we’re back here, that’s all. No‐one can deny us… read the date on this coin. It’s a coin of the Caesars. Dated, minted, in Libya.’
OMAR: ‘You will also find Greek, Turkish, Phoenician coins—all over Libya you’ll find them. Buried in our sand.’

(Source.)

This applies to Palestine in a similar way. Palestine was once the property of empires like the Neo‐Assyrian Empire, the Neo‐Babylonian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhat, but nobody would seriously argue that Syria, Iraq, Italy, Greece, Turkey, or any other nation should kick out all of the inhabitants and replace them with colonists of their choosing. Likewise, Philistia (which included Gaza) was actually separate from the Kingdom of Israel and remained separate until the Neo‐Babylonian conquest of 604 B.C.E.

The only Jewish people who have a deep connexion to Palestine are the small precolonial minority, and even they had no interest in establishing a ‘Jewish state’. Zionism is a fundamentally European concept, and European Jews have a much slimmer connexion to the land by comparison.

He said that my argument that the Palestinians were being oppressed worse because they are dying at such a greater rate is the same as saying the South in the American Civil War were the oppressed because most people who died were in the south.

False equivalence, and it was needlessly insolent of him to make that comparison. The Palestinians have no interest in protecting chattel slavery or otherwise subjugating people. They just want to be left alone, without a neocolony inhibiting or ruining their lives. Honestly, I think that at this point reclaiming all of their land is a much lower priority for them than surviving.

First of all, my guy says "following the call of god" accompanied by a picture of Jesus. Second of all, he says the patriarchs of the Israeli and Judean peoples were themselves settlers and not indigenous to the region. There is no consistent argument for why the Israeli (Israel/Zionists do not speak for Jewish people as a whole!) claim to Israel is more legitimate than the Palestinian if neither "originated" in the region.

Also implicitly mentioned in the video was that the populations of Historical Israel and Judea were not homogenously Jewish.

Just some grist for the mill. The key take away though is that Jewish people had not been the dominant ethnic group in the region in more than 2000s years whereas muslim and Arab peoples have been there continuously since the genesis of Islam.

I don't have answers as I'm still learning the history myself. But I'm currently reading The Hundred Years War on Palestine, which covers 1917-2017, so it gets you a detailed look earlier than 1947.

More crucially for this discussion with your uncle, perhaps, it describes the emergence of Zionism and Israeli identity as a modern phenomenon, as something distinct from just 'ancient land disputes'.

It's available as an audiobook if you find that helpful, and you can find the ebook in Library Genesis if you otherwise have trouble getting a copy.

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

• yewtu.be
• inv.zzls.xyz
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video