I have mentioned the 2002 Historical Atlas of Jerusalem by Meir Ben- Dov before. Here's a chronology of control (rounded to the nearest century or so):

1000-600 BC: Israel and Judah---Jewish states with Jerusalem as their capital.
600- 150 BC: Babylonia, Persia, and Alexander the Great and his successors. Just a province of a state with a capital elsewhere.
150-0 BC: Independent again, under the Maccabees and Herod, and again the capital of a Jewish state. 0-300 AD: Roman pagan rule. A province.
300-600 AD: Roman/Byzantine Christian rule. A province.
600-750 AD: Ummayads. Moslem rule from Damascus. A province.
750-900 AD: Abbasids. Moslem rule from Baghdad. A province.
900-1000 AD: Various Moslem warlords, with capitals at Cairo and Ramla.
1000-1050 AD: Fatimids. Shiites with their capital in Egypt. A province.
1050-1100 AD: Seljuk Turks, with most of their kingdom in Syria and Iraq. A province.
1100-1250: Crusaders, a Christian state with Jerusalem as its capital, mixed with periods of rule by the Kurdish Ayyubids, whose capital was in Egypt.
1200-1500: Mameluke Turks, with their capital in Egypt. A province.
1500-1900: Ottoman Turks, with their capital at Istanbul. A province.
1900-1950: Britain. Christian rule from London. A province.
1950-2000: Israel. Jerusalem again is the capital.

That's a broad-brush picture, but it is revealing. Note several points:

1. Jerusalem was never the capital of a Moslem state.

2. There was almost never a Moslem Palestinian state. Instead, Palestine was a minor part of some larger Islamic state. The Palestians almost never ruled themselves or formed a distinct country under Moslem rule (an exception may be in the troubled 900- 1000 period when, at least one warlord did have a Palestinian state with its capital at Ramla).

3. Palestine was under Arab rule only from 600 to 1050 AD. The rest of Moslem rule was by Kurds and Turks, not Arabs. By now, Arabs have not ruled Palestine for 950 years.

4. The only periods when Palestine was its own country were the Jewish periods, 1000- 600 BC, 150-0 BC, and 1950-2000 AD, and the Christian Crusader period, 1100-1250. The Crusaders, however, were not people indigenous to the region, so Palestine has been a state ruled by people from Palestine only during the Jewish periods.

The historical claim is perhaps not the main moral argument for a Palestinian state. Nowadays, a more popular one is that a country should be ruled by the people who live there. That kind of "squatter" claim, however, is weak, since it can be eliminated by movin the people somewhere else. And of course most people do not apply that argument to most countries, since it involve granting self-rule to lots of minority regions presently ruled by neighboring larger peoples (e.g., the Kurds in Iraq, ruled by the Arabs who are the majority in the country).

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