Sure, many claim that Israel is our promised land, promised by G-d. I'm far from qualified to judge such claims and tend to discount them.
Instead, I look at the historical and archeological record, that proves the Jews have had an unbroken presence in that area since over 3000 years ago, including the ancient states of Judea, centered around Jerusalem, and Israel, centered around Samaria and reaching north to the Galilee.
Successive conquests by ancient empires including the As Syrians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc. displaced the majority of Jews and sent them into the diaspora.
Then, in the late 1800s, driven by pogroms mostly in Russia and East Europe, but also by racist antisemitism, the Jews of East and Central Europe started migrating back to the area and taking up farming, reclaiming land from malaria-infested swamps, paying high (for the area) wages for help, that enticed many Arabs from around the region to move into the same area.
Over time, the Arab majority started their own attacks against the Jews, souring that relationship. Then, following the Holocaust (and the Arab leaders of Palestine heavily sided with the Nazis), the UN came up with a partition plan, dividing the land between the Arabs and the Jews.
The Jews accepted it, despite grave misgivings about how small a portion we got, and how it was impossible to defend. The Arabs rejected it, and multiple neighboring Arab countries invaded the fledgling Israel, vowing to drive the Jews into the sea, and calling for the Arab residents to get our of their way, promising them that after the victory they were expecting to be quick and easy, they'd be able to come back and share in the spoils.
They lost, and those Arabs who heeded the call to move out of the way became refugees. There were certainly also several places where Israeli forces, not ordered by Israel's government or army command to do so, forcibly expelled the local Arab residents. In some especially shameful cases, they even killed those civilians.
The rest, as they say, is history.
