Watch how the "ancestors from the area" argument immediately vanishes when you tell them this means every single Palestinian who had to flee their homeland since 1948 has a right to return there. These arguments always rest on the implicit assumption that there is a settler class that counts as actual people and a racialized class that doesn't.

Tell them this means they support Russia invading and settling Scandinavia because Russia was founded by an exiled viking.

It really doesn't matter where they are from, ancestry doesn't excuse genocide. You could apply your friend's logic to defending colonialism in Africa, because on a long enough timeline, all humans originated from there, so Europe really had a legitimate claim to those colonies.

Imagine if the Roma people living in Europe invaded Rajasthan, killed thousands, displaced more, and instituted a system of apartheid and oppression on the remaining Rajasthani people. All because the ancestors of the Roma lived there thousands of years ago.

eh send them to utah to battle it out with the Mormons in Zion National Park

half polish half baltic

He grew up in Philadelphia

Nah, it's just them trying a "I am rubber and you are glue" style comeback to the fact that Israelis are not native to the Levant

There's something do disentangle about "go back to your country" presumably being entangled with Nazi rhetoric about Jews. Therefore criticisms of Israel and the desire for its dissolution as a result of its actions of a supremacist, apartheid state doing a genocide link you to the... critiques of the Nazis.

Which would be bad, of course, because the implication being the persecuted Jews of Europe just fucking loved to genocide and they're just going to be genocidal whether they're in Europe or the Middle East. This would therefore give breathe to neo-Nazis who go "see, Hitler was right to object!" Hitler did not, in fact, dislike them for the content of their character.