What "Arab Majority Country" Did Israel Allegedly Replace?

A prominent professor of Arab studies at Columbia University recently blamed the United States, along with Israel, for the cruel carnage of the current war in Gaza.

“How the U.S. has fueled Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinians,” proclaimed the headline to Rashid Khalidi’s column for the Los Angeles Times in mid-December. “This is an anti-colonial struggle,” he insisted. “Israel was established as a European settler colonial project…This approach was essential in order to turn a majority Arab country into a majority Jewish state.”

These claims raise a question that neither Professor Khalidi nor his sympathetic readers can honestly answer: please identify that un-named “majority Arab country” that the alleged colonialists attempted to transform?