There was already a people living in the land the zionists chose, the vast majority of whom weren't Jewish.
Therefore to create a Jewish State in Palestine necessitated violence, dispossession, massacres and ethnic cleansing
No it didn't. The State of Israel could have been formed without any of that. It is tragic and was utterly avoidable but the dye was cast before 1948.
There were approximately 850,000 people living in what is now Israel in 1948. More than three quarters of them were Jewish. When the Zionist movement started in the 1880's the total population of what is now Israel was around 450,000. Due to the first century Roman ethnic cleansing, the Muslim conquest and ethnic cleansing and the Ottoman conquest and ethnic cleansing only around 25,000 of them were Jewish at that time. By the end of the First World War it had grown to over 80,000. The 1922 Census carried out by the British showed that 590,890 (78 percent) were Muslims, 83,794 (11 percent) were Jewish, 73,024 (9.6 percent) were Christians, and 9,474 were others. It's interesting that the disappearance of the Christian community from the region gets so little coverage. They, along with the Jews, pre-date the Muslims (obviously).
The big demographic change took place during the British Mandated period with the Jewish population growing to over 600,000 and the Muslim Arab population dropping significantly due to the
Arab Revolt and the resulting expulsions and economic hardship as well as the large scale sale of land to relatively richer European Jewish immigrants. The British support of Zionism had more to do with aa fear of pan-Arab nationalism and the potential loss of control of the Suez Canal and so access to India.
Islam only became the majority religion in the region after the 13th Century, and it may have been as late as the 16th Century, but certainly some time during the Malmuk period (a little before the Plantation of Ulster). Before that Christianity had been the majority religion for almost a thousand years.
All of that gives the impression of massive shifts in population but it was actually mainly through forces conversion, firstly from Judaism to Christianity once Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome, and then to Islam after the very slow Islamic conquest of the region.
What is different in modern times about the Zionist period (1880's onward) is the plantation of Jews from outside the region.
I do not think that Israel should have been formed in the way that it was but it cannot be un-formed. The same applied to the partition of India and Ireland etc. There is no historical equation which makes one side right or wrong, or justifies present day evils. There is the here and now and how people behave. In that context I cannot support the actions of either side though my sympathies are largely with the civilian population of Gaza, people who are viciously oppressed by their own fundamentalist rulers, nothing better than a suicide cult, and massacred by the fundamentalist government of Israel. Neither government cares one iota about the death and suffering which is being inflicted upon the people of Gaza.
