Did you miss this?
“...Sand argues that it is likely that the ancestry of most contemporary Jews stems mainly from outside the Land of Israel and that a “nation-race” of Jews with a common origin never existed, and that just as most Christians and Muslims are the progeny of converted people, not of the first Christians and Muslims, Jews are also descended from converts. According to Sand, Judaism was originally, like its two cousins, a proselytising religion, and mass conversions to Judaism occurred among the Khazars in the Caucasus, Berber tribes in North Africa, and in the Himyarite Kingdom of the Arabian Peninsula...”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_the_Jewish_People
“It also has no real bearing on current boundary, building and zoning disputes. These are not determined by a genetic claim on land tenure.”
On what other basis should such determinations be made? If genetics and descent are excluded from the question, then what are we talking about?
I don't think there is a legal basis for a strictly genetic claim on land tenure. The argument has been more along the lines of ethnicity or "sense of nationhood," more broadly defined.
In some ways it's analogous to my learning in grade school that "our Pilgrim and Puritan" forebears settled in New England, and "our American founding fathers" adopted the Constitution.
I have zero - 0 - Pilgrim/Puritan forebears; when "our" founding fathers were adopting the Constitution, my ancestors were in Rheinpfalz.
Nevertheless it makes a kind of sense to teach history that way to American school children, since it tends to bind us into a shared past, a shared sense of nationhood.
Lose that, and you end up with --- what we have: the centrifugal disintegration of nation, based on "Black history," "La Raza history," "the Americo-Muslim heritage," etc. etc. This is no way to build a nation.
Do not think I am saying here that minority histories and perspectives must be excluded. I myself am scandalized that Catholic history is simply not taught at the classroom level in America, not even in Catholic schools. I am simply saying that nationhood is more generated by shared stories than by shared DNA.
Back to the topic: UNESCO's words were lies; the Pope's words --- in the narrow sense of "what he actually said" --- were true. I'll vouch for that.
And then there are those Orthodox Jews who are against the “State of Israel”:
http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/Zionism/opposition.cfm