Unless you are going back to the war with the Romans, the Jews were not a persecuted minority in that region any more than any other minority, which would include the Arabs themselves seeing as they were controlled by the Ottomans for hundreds of years previous. The Jews were tolerated, and there was a very small religious community living in Jerusalem during the hundreds of years of Ottoman control that got along perfectly fine. The greater diaspora, especially in Eastern Europe through the 18th and 19th centuries was, however, constantly persecuted and were victims of numerous pogroms.

The Zionist movement was a reaction to the fact that European countries could not be trusted. It was a common cycle that the Jews would make a living for themselves, beginning to think that they could finally establish a home but then get attacked, scapegoated, and forced to flee. It was the Eastern European Jews fleeing such pogroms who would make up the majority of the first settlers of the Zionist mission in Palestine.

All this is simply to say that when people claim "oh they've been fighting there for thousands of years" and "the Jews were being persecuted there for so long" is not accurate. There really has not been a Jewish presence in the region since the Jewish revolt was put down by the Romans 2,000 years ago. While the current conflict is decades old, it is entirely related to the circumstances around the founding of Israel.