Depends on how you define "Palestinian".

There were people living there for generations, yea verily, unto the distant past, lost in the mists of time.  The Romans booted out the Jews on their diaspora around 70 AD, so from 70 AD until the post-WWII influx the Jews weren't around much.  Someone else was.  Since those someones were living in Palestine, I guess they're the Palestinians, even though Islam (which is what most people define them by) wasn't invented until around 600 AD.

Israel was created in 1948, so 1948-70 = 1878.

So, by what you probably wanted to know, the Palestinians had been inhabiting Palestine for roughly 1878 years before the Jews held a revolution and forced them out of their homes.

The British came to control Palestine after WWI.  Before that, it was a province of the Ottoman Empire.  The British controlled Egypt since....gee, I don't know when they took control of Egypt.  Probably after they defeated Napoleon.  

But in WWI, the Brits organized the Arabs in a revolt against the Turks who were aligned with Germany and Austro-Hungary.  After Armistice, the Brits and France split up the Mideast with the Balfour Plan of 1917, creating Palestine (You can see all this in Lawrence of Arabia).

Since the Arabs helped them defeat Turkey, the British clearly favored the Arabs in their administration of Palestine, especially once oil began to be discovered and developed in Arabia.

A small number of Zionist Jews had been coming to Israel from Europe for decades, setting up communal farms and settlements as part of the ultimate goal of seizing Israel for themselves and re-establishing a homeland. This migration really stepped up after WWI. The Brits weren't too keen on this and suppressed them.  The Jews fought back with a guerilla war (which you can see in the movie, Exodus)

Yer gettin' political information from TV???


Kinda like gettin yer koolaid from Jim Jones.

Both have a pretty bad reputaton for what they sprew.

[rolleyes]

Or getting your religion from the internet...

[:P]

The Brits did not "own" Egypt until the outbreak of W.W. 1. Before that the Brits had from my understanding been one of the the parties that guarenteed the ancestoral fiefdom of Mohammed Ali and his desandents.