That's a very simplistic way of looking at a complex issue. Did they own the country when it was a British protectorate?
Try this
In describing the following encounter, Shabtai Teveth (one of Ben-Gurion's official biographers) briefly summarized Ben-Gurion's relations with the Palestinian Arabs, Teveth stated:
"Four days after the constituent meeting, on October 8, 1906, the ten members of the platform committee met in an Arab hostel in Ramleh. For THREE DAYS they sat on stools debating, and at night they slept on mats. An Arab boy brought them coffee in small cups. They left the hostel only to grab an occasional bite in the marketplace. On the first evening, they stole three hours to tour the marketplace of Ramleh and the ruins of the nearby fortress. Ben-Gurion remarked only on the buildings, ruins, and scenery. He gave no thought to the [Palestinian] Arabs, their problems, their social conditions, or their cultural life. Nor had he yet acquainted himself with the Jewish community in Palestine [which was mostly non-Zionist Orthodox Jews prior to 1920]. In all of Palestine there were [in 1906] 700,000 inhabitants, only 55,000 of whom were Jews, and only 550 of these were [Zionists] pioneers." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 9-10)
David Ben-Gurion-A Brief Biography & Quotes - Palestine Remembered
Kinda flies in the face of the Zionist recruiting slogan--'A land without people for a people without land'.
While this might be a Palestinian-slanted website, it is quoting an Israeli writer and historian, and, as the blurb says, an official biographer of David ben Gurion.
The rest of the page is worth exploring to see how attitudes changed
™ Version 4.2
