Arab publications and others have compared Zionism to German Nazism and other historical examples of oppression and ethnic cleansing. Many Arabs, and others, believe Israel practices a form of Israeli apartheid against the Palestinian people, as bad as, or worse than, that practiced by South Africa, and that Zionism is a form of colonialism and has been carried out through extensive ethnic cleansing against the "indigenous people of Palestine", even though Jews are also indigenous to the area encompassing modern day Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and are closely related to the Palestinian Arabs. Furthermore, pro-Israel advocates reply that these claims are non-factual and the comparisons are specious, or with assertions that such claims are hypocritical, since Arabs have created twenty-two Arab states, in some of which the remaining Jews are discriminated against. Palestinians hold that the existence of other Arab nations is irrelevant; they want to have the land they owned back, rather than being forced to throw themselves on others' charity in foreign countries.