Origin of the Palestinians

The origin of the Palestinians, an ethnonational group residing in the Southern Levant, has been the focus of studies in history, linguistics and genetics, as well as nationalistic ideology and myths of shared ancestry. The Palestinian population, despite being predominantly Arab and Muslim, is not a homogeneous entity, and there is diversity within the population in terms of religious, linguistic, and cultural practices.

The demographic history of Palestine is complex and has been shaped by various historical events and migrations. Throughout history, the region has been subject to the influence and control of various imperial powers, leading to political, social, and economic changes that have affected the demographic composition of the region. Wars, revolts and religious developments have also played a significant demographic role in encouraging immigration, emigration and conversion. With the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 7th century, the region began to be Arabized and Islamized as a result of local conversion and acculturation combined with Muslim settlement.[1] This ultimately led to the creation of an Arab Muslim population, which, despite being considerably smaller than the area's population in late antiquity, would go on to become the region's main religious group beginning in the Middle Ages and lasting until the 20th century.

The ongoing effort of nation-building and the effort to solidify Palestinian national consciousness as the primary framework of identity, as opposed to other identities dominant among Palestinians, including primordial clannish, tribal, local, and Islamist identities, have an impact on internal Palestinian historical discourse regarding the origins of Palestinians.[2]

Historical analysis

The complex demographic history of Palestine has been influenced by several historical occurrences and migrations. The region has been home to diverse populations over centuries. During the Bronze Age, it was inhabited by the Canaanites.[3] In the early Iron Age, the Israelites emerged as a separate ethnoreligious group in the region, forming the two related kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The fall of those kingdoms to Assyrian and Babylonian conquests was accompanied by forced exile eastwards. The region then came under Achaemenid, Ptolemaic and Seleucid rule. Jews eventually formed the majority of the population in Palestine during classical antiquity, even enjoying a brief period of independence under the Hasmonean dynasty, before the area was incorporated into Roman rule. However, the Jewish-Roman Wars and especially the Bar Kokhba revolt resulted in the death, displacement or slavery of many Jews, and as a result, the Jewish population in Judea declined significantly.[4] In the centuries that followed, the region experienced political and economic unrest, conversions to the rising new religion of Christianity, and the religious persecution of minorities.[5][6] A Christian majority eventually formed under Byzantine rule as a result of Christian immigration, Jewish departure, conflicts such as the Samaritan revolts, and the conversion of locals.[7][1][8]

The Arabs, having adopted the religion of Islam, conquered the Levant in the 7th century, and in the following centuries, several Arabic-speaking Muslim dynasties such as the Umayyads, Abbasids, and Fatimids came to rule the region.[9] Palestine's population sharply declined throughout the subsequent centuries, falling from an estimated 1 million during the Roman and Byzantine periods to roughly 300,000 by the early Ottoman period.[10][11] As time passed, many of the existing population converted to Islam and adopted Arab culture and language.[1] Arab settlement both before and after the Muslim conquest is thought to had hastened the pace of Islamization.[12][13][14][15] Much of the local Palestinian population in the area of Nablus is believed to be descended from Samaritans who converted to Islam.[16]

It is unknown whether Palestine's population shifted toward Islam before or after the Crusader period. Some academics suggest that Palestine was already predominately Muslim at the time the Crusaders arrived.[17][18] Alternatively, it has been argued that the process of mass Islamization occurred much later, perhaps during the Mamluk period.[12][19]

Palestine's demographic composition was again impacted by the waves of Egyptian migration during the reigns of Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim Pasha, as well as Algerians who immigrated following Abdelkader El Djezaïri's revolt in the first half of the 19th century, and the subsequent immigration of Algerians, Bosnians, and Circassians during the second half of the 19th century.[20][21][22] Palestine's population dropped and hovered between 150,000 and 250,000 people for several centuries under the Ottoman Empire; it wasn't until the 19th century that the country's population started to expand rapidly.[23]

Pre-Arab/Islamic influences on the Palestinian national identity

While Palestinian culture is today primarily Arab and Islamic, many Palestinians identify with earlier civilizations that inhabited the land of Palestine.[24] According to Walid Khalidi, in Ottoman times "the Palestinians considered themselves to be descended not only from Arab conquerors of the seventh century but also from indigenous peoples who had lived in the country since time immemorial."

In 1876, Claude R. Conder of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) wrote that:

It is well known to those familiar to the country that whatever else they may be, the Fellahin, or native peasantry of Palestine, are not Arabs; and if we judge from the names of the topographical features their language can scarcely be called Arabic.[25]

Similarly Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist, argues:

Throughout history a great diversity of peoples has moved into the region and made Palestine their homeland: Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines from Crete, Anatolian and Lydian Greeks, Hebrews, Amorites, Edomites, Nabataeans, Arameans, Romans, Arabs, and Western European Crusaders, to name a few. Each of them appropriated different regions that overlapped in time and competed for sovereignty and land. Others, such as Ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, Babylonians, and the Mongol raids of the late 1200s, were historical 'events' whose successive occupations were as ravaging as the effects of major earthquakes ... Like shooting stars, the various cultures shine for a brief moment before they fade out of official historical and cultural records of Palestine. The people, however, survive. In their customs and manners, fossils of these ancient civilizations survived until modernity—albeit modernity camouflaged under the veneer of Islam and Arabic culture.[24]

George Antonius, founder of modern Arab nationalist history, wrote in his seminal 1938 book The Arab Awakening:

The Arabs' connection with Palestine goes back uninterruptedly to the earliest historic times, for the term 'Arab' [in Palestine] denotes nowadays not merely the incomers from the Arabian Peninsula who occupied the country in the seventh century, but also the older populations who intermarried with their conquerors, acquired their speech, customs and ways of thought and became permanently arabised.[26]

American historian Bernard Lewis writes:

Clearly, in Palestine as elsewhere in the Middle East, the modern inhabitants include among their ancestors those who lived in the country in antiquity. Equally obviously, the demographic mix was greatly modified over the centuries by migration, deportation, immigration, and settlement. This was particularly true in Palestine, where the population was transformed by such events as the Jewish rebellion against Rome and its suppression, the Arab conquest, the coming and going of the Crusaders, the devastation and resettlement of the coastlands by the Mamluk and Turkish regimes, and, from the nineteenth century, by extensive migrations from both within and from outside the region. Through invasion and deportation, and successive changes of rule and of culture, the face of the Palestinian population changed several times. No doubt, the original inhabitants were never entirely obliterated, but in the course of time they were successively Judaized, Christianized, and Islamized. Their language was transformed to Hebrew, then to Aramaic, then to Arabic.[27]

Arabization of Palestine

The term "Arab", as well as the presence of Arabians in the Syrian Desert and the Fertile Crescent, is first seen in the Assyrian sources from the 9th century BCE (Eph'al 1984).[28] Southern Palestine had a large Edomite and Arab population by the 4th century BCE.[29] Inscriptional evidence over a millennium from the peripheral areas of Palestine, such as the Golan and the Negev, show a prevalence of Arab names over Aramaic names from the Persian period, 550-330 BCE onwards.[30][31] Bedouins have drifted in waves into Palestine since at least the 7th century, after the Muslim conquest. Some of them, like the Arab al-Sakhr south of Lake Kinneret trace their origins to the Hejaz or Najd in the Arabian Peninsula, while the Ghazawiyya's ancestry is said to go back to the Hauran's Misl al-Jizel tribes.[32] They speak distinct dialects of Arabic in the Galilee and the Negev.[33]

Arab populations had existed in some parts of Palestine prior to the conquest, and some of these local Arab tribes and Bedouin fought as allies of Byzantium in resisting the invasion, which the archaeological evidence indicates was a 'peaceful conquest', and the newcomers were allowed to settle in the old urban areas. Theories of population decline compensated by the importation of foreign populations are not confirmed by the archaeological record.[15]

A loom at work making a traditional Palestinian keffiyeh in Hebron, Palestine. The keffiyeh is a traditional headdress with origins in Arabia

Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant by the Arab Muslim Rashiduns, the formerly dominant languages of the area, Aramaic and Greek, were gradually replaced by the Arabic language introduced by the new conquering administrative minority.[34] Among the cultural survivals from pre-Islamic times are the significant Palestinian Christian community, roughly 10% of the overall population in late Ottoman times and 45% of Jerusalem's citizens,[35] and smaller Jewish and Samaritan ones, as well as an Aramaic substratum in some local Palestinian Arabic dialects.[36]

The Christians appear to have maintained a majority in much of both Palestine and Syria under Muslim rule until the Crusades. The original conquest in the 630s had guaranteed religious freedom, improving that of the Jews and the Samaritans, who were classified with the former.[37][38][39] However, as dhimmi, adult males had to pay the jizya or "protection tax". The economic burden inflicted on some dhimmi communities (especially that of the Samaritans) sometimes promoted mass conversions.[40] When the Crusaders arrived in Palestine during the 11th century, they made no distinction between Christians who for the Latin rite were considered heretics, Jews and Muslims, slaughtering all indiscriminately.[41][42] The Crusaders, in wresting holy sites such as the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem from the Orthodox church were among several factors that deeply alienated the traditional Christian community, which sought relief in the Muslims. When Saladin overthrew the Crusaders, he restored these sites to Orthodox Christian control.[43] Together with the alienating policies of the Crusaders, the Mongol Invasion and the rise of the Mamluks were turning points in the fate of Christianity in this region, and their congregations – many Christians having sided with the Mongols – were noticeably reduced under the Mamluks. Stricter regulations to control Christian communities ensued, theological enmities grew, and the process of Arabization and Islamicization strengthened, abetted with the inflow of nomadic Bedouin tribes in the 13th and 14th centuries.[44]

A veiled Arab woman in Bersheeba, Palestine c.1940

Arabs in Palestine, both Christian and Muslim, settled and Bedouin were historically split between the Qays and Yaman factions.[45] These divisions had their origins in pre-Islamic tribal feuds between Northern Arabians (Qaysis) and Southern Arabians (Yamanis). The strife between the two tribal confederacies spread throughout the Arab world with their conquests, subsuming even uninvolved families so that the population of Palestine identified with one or the other.[45][46] Their conflicts continued after the 8th century Civil war in Palestine until the early 20th century[47] and gave rise to differences in customs, tradition, and dialect which remain to this day.[45]

Beit Sahour was first settled in the 14th century by a handful of Christian and Muslim clans (hamula) from Wadi Musa in Jordan, the Christian Jaraisa and the Muslim Shaybat and Jubran, who came to work as shepherds for Bethlehem's Christian landowners, and they were subsequently joined by other Greek Orthodox immigrants from Egypt in the 17th–18th centuries.[48]

During the first half of the 19th century, there were several waves of immigration from Egypt to Palestine. They favored settling in already established localities. There used to be 19 villages in the southern coastal plains and near Ramla with families of Egyptian descent, and to this day, some villages in the northern parts of the region of Samaria, especially the 'Ara Valley, have a sizeable population of Egyptian descent.[20] In addition, some rural and urban Palestinians have Albanian, Bosnian, Circassian, or other non-Arab ancestry due to the legacy of the Ottoman period, which brought non-Arab communities to the region in the 19th century.[20][21][22]

Linguistics

According to Bassal, Palestinian Arabic dialects contain layers of languages spoken in earlier times in the region, including Canaanite, Hebrew (Biblical and Mishnaic), Aramaic (particularly Western Aramaic), Persian, Greek, and Latin, indicating the impact of former peoples and civilizations on the linguistic profile on the region. As a result of the early modern period, Palestinian dialects came to be influenced by Turkish and European languages. Since the founding of Israel in 1948, Palestinian dialects have been significantly influenced by Modern Hebrew.[49] Over time, linguistics have identified a few substrate terms derived from Canaanite, Hebrew, and Aramaic that have persisted in contemporary vocabulary.[50][49]

In oral traditions

Many Palestinians trace their collective ancestry to the Canaanites, and consider the concept of "Arab" to be pre-Islamic (including the Quranic and Biblical patriarchs). This identity was described in the early 20th century by writers such as Tawfiq Canaan, Abdallah Frangi and Akram Zu'aytir.[51] Some Palestinian families follow oral traditions that trace their roots to Jewish and Samaritan origins. Traditions of Jewish ancestry are especially prevalent in the southern Hebron Hills, a region with documented Jewish presence until the Islamic conquest. One notable example is of the Makhamra family of Yatta, who according to several reports, traces its own ancestry to a Jewish tribe in Khaybar.[52][53] Traditions of Samaritan origins were recorded in Nablus and villages in its vicinity, including Hajjah.[54][55][16][56] Several Palestinian Muslim families, including the Al-Amad, Al-Samri, Buwarda, and Kasem families, who defended Samaritans from Muslim persecution in the 1850s, were named by Yitzhak Ben Zvi as having Samaritan ancestry.[55] He further asserted that these families elders and priests had kept written records attesting to their Samaritan lineage.[55] Many Palestinians referred to their Jewish neighbors as their awlâd 'ammnâ or paternal cousins.[57] Under Ottoman rule, Palestinian Arabs distinguished between their compatriot Jews, whom they referred to as abna al-balad, 'natives', or yahūd awlâd 'arab, 'Arab-born Jews', and recent Zionist immigrants.[58][59]

Some Muslim Palestinian villagers avow oral traditions of descent from nomadic Arab tribes that migrated to Palestine during or shortly after the Islamic conquest.[60][61] Such traditions are also noted among some Palestinian families of the notable class (a'yan),[61] including the Nusaybah family of Jerusalem,[62] the Tamimi family of Nabi Salih, and the Barghouti family of Bani Zeid.[63][64] The Shawish, al-Husayni, and Al-Zayadina[65][66] clans trace their heritage to Muhammad through his grandsons, Husayn ibn Ali and Hassan ibn Ali.[67] Other Muslim Palestinians have linked their ancestors' entry into Palestine to their participation in Saladin's army; Saladin is revered not only as a hero of Islam but also as a national hero, downplaying his Kurdish roots.[60]

Muslims of Moroccan descent settled in Jerusalem following the Reconquista in Spain in 1492; these Muslims were granted land by the Ottoman Empire, that became the Moroccan Quarter. It's people were called "Mughrabi" which means "Moroccan" in Arabic till the 20th Century. Many Palestinians carry the surname "Mughrabi" to this day.

Turks in Palestine are a known group amongst Palestinians to this day, many of them pride on their Ottoman roots and are openly discussing their arrival to the Southern Levant. In 2014, many of the modern inhabitants of the Shujaya and A-Turkmen neighborhoods in Gaza stated that they were of Turkmen and Kurds in Palestine descents. The A-Turkmen neighborhood bears this name because of its people's origin.[68]

Al-Sudania neighborhood in Gaza City, was inhabited by Sudanese migrants in the 20th Century, leading to its name. Some Gaza Strip residents are thus of Sudanese descent due to intermarriages, they live in Deir El-Balah, Al-Shati and Jabalia. Even the granddaughter of the former Sudanese sultan, Ali Dinar, is among them.[69]

The Ajami, Jaffa neighborhood was founded by Maronites who migrated there from Lebanon in the middle of the 19th Century, to serve as a Christian enclave in the Sanjak of Jaffa.

In Palestinian historical discourse

The ongoing effort of nation-building and the effort to solidify Palestinian national consciousness as the primary framework of identity, as opposed to other identities dominant among Palestinians, including primordial clannish, tribal, local, and Islamist identities, have an impact on internal Palestinian historical discourse regarding the origins of Palestinians. In order to strengthen Palestinian historical claims to the territory and counter Israeli-Zionist arguments, the Palestinian discourse attempts to employ origin ideas as a weapon in the ongoing conflict with Israel. Academic standards for the use of historical evidence are rarely followed in the Palestinian historical discourse, and evidence that is antagonistic to the national cause is either disregarded or dismissed as false or hostile.[2]

Canaanism
Tawfiq Canaan (1882–1964) was a pioneering Palestinian ethnographer and Palestinian nationalist. Deeply interested in Palestinian folklore (principally Canaanite, Philistine, Hebraic, Nabatean, Syrio-Aramaic and Arab),[70] Canaan wrote several books and more than 50 articles on the matter

During the 20th century, claims that Palestinians have direct genealogical connections to the ancient Canaanites, without an intermediary Israelite relationship, began to emerge from certain sections within Palestinian society and their followers. The Canaanites are often portrayed as Arabs, allowing the Palestinians to assert that they had lived in the region for a very long period, predating Israelite settlement.[71] The claim of kinship with the Israelites, according to Bernard Lewis, allows to "assert a historical claim antedating the biblical promise and possession put forward by the Jews."[27][72]

While non-Palestinian Arab writers categorized the Israelites as one of the ancient Semitic peoples, some Palestinian writers rejected this idea, and denied that there is any historical connection between the ancient Hebrews and the modern Jews, claiming that the latter are either the offspring of the Khazars, who converted to Judaism in the eighth century, or a composite of people from various ethnic groups who converted to Judaism over the course of the previous two thousand years.[73] Aref al-Aref, in order to undermine Jerusalem's Jewish history and emphasize its Arab identity, linked the founding of the city to the "Arab" Jebusites.[73] In actuality, the Hebrew Bible is the only extant ancient document that uses the name "Jebusite" to describe the pre-Israelite residents of Jerusalem, and the identification of Jerusalem with Jebus has been disputed.[74]

Following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Palestinian writer Mustafa Dabbagh published his book "Our Country Palestine" in which he attributed the first settled civilization in Palestine to the Banu-Can'an tribe, which he claimed was closely linked to the Amorites and Phoenicians, and asserted that all of them emigrated to the region from the Arabian Peninsula around 2500 BCE. In his book he claimed that the blend of the Canaanites and the Philistines, who migrated from the Greek islands around 1500 BCE, eventually formed the nucleus of the current Palestinian Arab population.[71]

Some Palestinian scholars, like Zakariyya Muhammad, have criticized arguments based on Canaanite lineage, or what he calls "Canaanite ideology". He states that it is an "intellectual fad, divorced from the concerns of ordinary people."[75] By assigning its pursuit to the desire to predate Jewish national claims, he describes Canaanism as a "losing ideology", whether or not it is factual, "when used to manage our conflict with the Zionist movement" since Canaanism "concedes a priori the central thesis of Zionism. Namely that we have been engaged in a perennial conflict with Zionism—and hence with the Jewish presence in Palestine—since the Kingdom of Solomon and before ... thus in one stroke Canaanism cancels the assumption that Zionism is a European movement, propelled by modern European contingencies..."[75]

Commenting on the implications of Canaanite ideology, Eric M. Meyers, a Duke University historian of religion, writes:

What is the significance of the Palestinians really being descended from the Canaanites? In the early and more conservative reconstruction of history, it might be said that this merely confirms the historic enmity between Israel and its enemies. However, some scholars believe that Israel actually emerged from within the Canaanite community itself (Northwest Semites) and allied itself with Canaanite elements against the city-states and elites of Canaan. Once they were disenfranchised by these city-states and elites, the Israelites and some disenfranchised Canaanites joined to challenge the hegemony of the heads of the city-states and forged a new identity in the hill country based on egalitarian principles and a common threat from without. This is another irony in modern politics: the Palestinians in truth are blood brothers or cousins of the modern Israelis — they are all descendants of Abraham and Ishmael, so to speak.[76]

In Zionist thinking

A number of pre-Mandatory Zionists, from Ahad Ha'am and Ber Borochov to David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi thought of the Palestinian peasant population as descended from the ancient biblical Hebrews, but this belief was disowned when its ideological implications became problematic.[75] Ahad Ha'am believed that, "the Moslems [of Palestine] are the ancient residents of the land ... who became Christians on the rise of Christianity and became Moslems on the arrival of Islam."[75] Israel Belkind, the founder of the Bilu movement also asserted that the Palestinian Arabs were the blood brothers of the Jews.[77] Ber Borochov, one of the key ideological architects of Marxist Zionism, claimed as early as 1905 that "[t]he Fellahin in Eretz-Israel are the descendants of remnants of the Hebrew agricultural community",[78] believing them to be descendants of the ancient Hebrew residents "together with a small admixture of Arab blood".[75] He further believed that the Palestinian peasantry would embrace Zionism and that the lack of a crystallized national consciousness among Palestinian Arabs would result in their likely assimilation into the new Hebrew nationalism, and that Arabs and Jews would unite in class struggle.[75][79]

Fellahin women crushing olives in order to make olive oil, early 20th century

David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later becoming Israel's first Prime Minister and second President, respectively, suggested in a 1918 book written in Yiddish that the fellahin are descended from ancient Jewish and Samaritan farmers, "Am ha'aretz" (People of the Land), who continued farming the land after the Jewish-Roman Wars and despite the ensuing persecution for their faith. While the wealthier, more educated, and more religious Jews departed and joined centers of religious freedom in the diaspora, many of those who remained converted their religions, first to Christianity, then to Islam.[80] They also claimed that these peasants and their mode of life were living historical testimonies to ancient Israelite practices described in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.[81] Ben Zvi stated in a later writing that "Obviously, it would be incorrect to claim that all fellahin are descended from the ancient Jews; rather, we are discussing their majority or their foundation", and that "The vast majority of the fellahin are not descended from Arab conquerors but rather from the Jewish peasants who made up the majority in the region before the Islamic conquest".[82] Tamari notes that "the ideological implications of this claim became very problematic and were soon withdrawn from circulation."[75] Salim Tamari notes the paradoxes produced by the search for "nativist" roots among these Zionist figures, particularly the Canaanist followers of Yonatan Ratosh,[75] who sought to replace the "old" diasporic Jewish identity with a nationalism that embraced the existing residents of Palestine.[83]

In his book on the Palestinians, The Arabs in Eretz-Israel, Belkind advanced the idea that the dispersion of Jews out of the Land of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman emperor Titus is a "historic error" that must be corrected. While it dispersed much of the land's Jewish community around the world, those "workers of the land that remained attached to their land," stayed behind and were eventually converted to Christianity and then Islam.[77] He therefore, proposed that this historical wrong be corrected, by embracing the Palestinians as their own and proposed the opening of Hebrew schools for Palestinian Arab Muslims to teach them Arabic, Hebrew and universal culture.[77]

Tsvi Misinai, an Israeli researcher, entrepreneur and proponent of a controversial alternative solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, asserts that nearly 90% of all Palestinians living within Israel and the occupied territories (including Israel's Arab citizens and Negev Bedouin)[84] are descended from the Jewish Israelite peasantry that remained on the land, after the others, mostly city dwellers, were exiled or left.[85] Irish theologian Michael Prior had a similar perspective on the Palestinians' ancestry.[86]

According to Israeli historian Moshe Gil, in order to accept the theory of the Jewish origin of the Palestinians, it must be assumed that there was a mass conversion of Jews to Islam at some time, but according to him "there is no information in the sources - Jewish, Christian or Muslim - about a mass conversion of Jews to Islam in any place and at any time, unless it is a case of a forced conversion," and in any case "there is no such information about the Land of Israel" and therefore "there is no reason to think that the Arabs of the Land of Israel were descendants of Jews".[81]

Genetics

DNA and genetic studies
See also: Genetic studies on Arabs and Genetic history of the Middle East

A study found that the Palestinians, like Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis and Kurds have what appears to be Female-Mediated gene flow in the form of Maternal DNA Haplogroups from Sub-Saharan Africa. 15% of the 117 Palestinian individuals tested carried maternal haplogroups that originated in Sub-Saharan Africa. These results are consistent with female migration from eastern Africa into Near Eastern communities within the last few thousand years. There have been many opportunities for such migrations during this period. However, the most likely explanation for the presence of predominantly female lineages of African origin in these areas is that they may trace back to women brought from Africa as part of the Arab slave trade, assimilated into the areas under Arab rule.[87]

Palestinian children in Hebron

According to a study published in June 2017 by Ranajit Das, Paul Wexler, Mehdi Pirooznia, and Eran Elhaik in Frontiers in Genetics, "in a principal component analysis (PCA) [of DNA], the ancient Levantines [from the Natufian and Neolithic periods] clustered predominantly with modern-day Palestinians and Bedouins..."[88] In a study published in August 2017 by Marc Haber et al. in The American Journal of Human Genetics, the authors concluded that "The overlap between the Bronze Age and present-day Levantines suggests a degree of genetic continuity in the region."[89]

In a 2003 genetic study, Bedouins showed the highest rates (62.5%) of the subclade Haplogroup J-M267 among all populations tested, followed by Palestinian Arabs (38.4%), Iraqis (28.2%), Ashkenazi Jews (14.6%) and Sephardic Jews (11.9%), according to Semino et al.[90] Semitic-speaking populations usually possess an excess of J1 Y chromosomes compared to other populations harboring Y-haplogroup J.[90][91][92][93] The haplogroup J1, the ancestor of subclade M267, originates south of the Levant and was first disseminated from there into Ethiopia and Europe in Neolithic times. J1 is most common in Palestine, as well as Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and Arabia, and drops sharply at the border of non-semitic areas like Turkey and Iran. A second diffusion of the J1 marker took place in the 7th century CE when Arabians brought it from Arabia to North Africa.[90]

A Palestinian girl in Qalqilya.
Haber et al.'s 2013 study's PCA map with Palestinians clustering with Saudis and other Arabian defined populations

A 2013 study by Haber et al. found that "The predominantly Muslim populations of Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians cluster on branches with other Muslim populations as distant as Morocco and Yemen." The authors explained that "religious affiliation had a strong impact on the genomes of the Levantines. In particular, conversion of the region's populations to Islam appears to have introduced major rearrangements in populations' relations through admixture with culturally similar but geographically remote populations leading to genetic similarities between remarkably distant populations." The study found that Christians and Druze became genetically isolated following the arrival of Islam. The authors reconstructed the genetic structure of pre-Islamic Levant and found that "it was more genetically similar to Europeans than to Middle Easterners."[94]

In a genetic study of Y-chromosomal STRs in two populations from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area: Christian and Muslim Palestinians showed genetic differences. The majority of Palestinian Christians (31.82%) were a subclade of E1b1b, followed by G2a (11.36%), and J1 (9.09%). The majority of Palestinian Muslims were haplogroup J1 (37.82%) followed by E1b1b (19.33%), and T (5.88%). The study sample consisted of 44 Palestinian Christians and 119 Palestinian Muslims.[95]

Between the Jews and Palestinians
See also: Genetic studies on Jews
Principal Components Analysis of ancient and modern populations, with Palestinians clustering with Arabian populations.

In recent years, genetic studies have demonstrated that, at least paternally, Jewish ethnic divisions and the Palestinians are related to each other.[96] Genetic studies on Jews have shown that Jews and Palestinians are closer to each other than the Jews are to their host countries.[97][98] At the haplogroup level, defined by the binary polymorphisms only, the Y chromosome distribution in Arabs and Jews was similar but not identical.[99]

According to a 2010 study by Behar et al. titled "The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people", Palestinians tested clustered genetically close to Bedouins, Jordanians and Saudi Arabians which was described as "consistent with a common origin in the Arabian Peninsula".[100] In the same year a study by Atzmon and Harry Ostrer concluded that the Palestinians were, together with Bedouins, Druze and southern European groups, the closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish populations.[101]

Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim in Sevilla, 2002

One DNA study by Nebel found substantial genetic overlap among Israeli/Palestinian Arabs and Jews.[102] Nebel proposed that "part, or perhaps the majority" of Muslim Palestinians descend from "local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD".[96]

A 2020 study on remains from Canaanaite (Bronze Age southern Levantine) populations suggests a significant degree of genetic continuity in Arabic-speaking Levantine populations (such as Palestinians, Druze, Lebanese, Jordanians, Bedouins, and Syrians), as well as in several Jewish groups (such as Ashkenazi, Iranian, and Moroccan Jews), suggesting that the aforementioned groups derive over half of their entire atDNA ancestry from Canaanite/Bronze Age Levantine populations,[103] albeit with varying sources and degrees of admixture from differing host or invading populations depending on each group. The results also show that a significant European component was added to the region since the Bronze Age (on average ~8.7%), excluding the Ashkenazi populations who harbour a ~41% European-related component. The European component is highest in Moroccan and Ashkenazi Jews, both having a history in Europe.[104] The study concludes that this does not mean that any of these present-day groups bear direct ancestry from people who lived in the Middle-to-Late Bronze Age Levant or in Chalcolithic Zagros; rather, it indicates that they have ancestries from populations whose ancient proxy can be related to the Middle East. These present-day groups also show ancestries that cannot be modeled by the available ancient DNA data, highlighting the importance of additional major genetic effects on the region since the Bronze Age.[104]: 1146–1157 

Palestinian identity
Main article: Palestinian identity

The term "Palestinians" tends mainly to be used as a short form for the Palestinian people, defined as equivalent to Palestinian Arabs, i.e., an Arabic-speaking people descended from the people who have lived in Palestine over the centuries. This usage may be intended to imply that other residents of Palestine (historical or otherwise), particularly Palestinian Jews, are not Palestinians.

The emergence of Palestinian identity is relatively recent, coming in the first decades of the 20th century, according to legal historian Assaf Likhovski,[105] though several scholars have traced it to as early as the mid-18th century.[106] The historical discourse regarding the origins of Palestinians has been significantly impacted by the attempt of Palestinian nationalism to establish itself as the dominant framework of identity among Palestinians, and to use origin ideas to counter Zionist arguments.[2]

Citations
  1. Ehrlich, Michael (2022). The Islamization of the Holy Land, 634-1800. Leeds, UK: Arc Humanities Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-1-64189-222-3. OCLC 1302180905. Samaritan rebellions during the fifth and sixth centuries were crushed by the Byzantines and as a result, the main Samaritan communities began to decline. Similarly, the Jewish community strove to recover from the catastrophic results of the Bar Kokhva revolt (132–135 ce). During the Late Roman and Byzantine periods, many Jews emigrated to thriving centres in the diaspora, especially Iraq, whereas some converted to Christianity and others continued to live in the Holy Land, especially in Galilee and the coastal plain. [...] Accordingly, most of the Muslims who participated in the conquest of the Holy Land did not settle there, but continued on to further destinations. For most of the Muslims who settled in the Holy Land were either Arabs who immigrated before the Muslim conquest and then converted to Islam, or Muslims who immigrated after the Holy Land's conquest. [...] Consequently, many local Christians converted to Islam. Thus, almost twelve centuries later, when the army led by Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in the Holy Land, most of the local population was Muslim. [...] The Holy Land's transformation from an area populated mainly by Christians into a region whose population was predominantly Muslim was the result of two processes: immigration and conversion
  2. Litvak, M. (2009). "Constructing a National Past: The Palestinian Case". In Litvak, M. (ed.). Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 97–133. doi:10.1057/9780230621633_5. ISBN 978-1-349-37755-8.
  3. Mark, Joshua J. "Palestine". World History Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2023-01-03.
  4. Oppenheimer, A'haron and Oppenheimer, Nili. Between Rome and Babylon: Studies in Jewish Leadership and Society. Mohr Siebeck, 2005, p. 2.
  5. Edward Kessler (2010). An Introduction to Jewish-Christian Relations. Cambridge University Press. p. 72. ISBN 978-0-521-70562-2.
  6. Denova, Rebecca. "Christianity". World History Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2023-01-03.
  7. David Goodblatt (2006). "The Political and Social History of the Jewish Community in the Land of Israel, c. 235–638". In Steven Katz (ed.). The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. IV. pp. 404–430. ISBN 978-0-521-77248-8. Few would disagree that, in the century and a half before our period begins, the Jewish population of Judah () suffered a serious blow from which it never recovered. The destruction of the Jewish metropolis of Jerusalem and its environs and the eventual refounding of the city... had lasting repercussions. [...] However, in other parts of Palestine the Jewish population remained strong [...] What does seem clear is a different kind of change. Immigration of Christians and the conversion of pagans, Samaritans and Jews eventually produced a Christian majority
  8. Bar, Doron (2003). "The Christianisation of Rural Palestine during Late Antiquity". The Journal of Ecclesiastical History. 54 (3): 401–421. doi:10.1017/s0022046903007309. ISSN 0022-0469. The dominant view of the history of Palestine during the Byzantine period links the early phases of the consecration of the land during the fourth century and the substantial external financial investment that accompanied the building of churches on holy sites on the one hand with the Christianisation of the population on the other. Churches were erected primarily at the holy sites, 12 while at the same time Palestine's position and unique status as the Christian 'Holy Land' became more firmly rooted. All this, coupled with immigration and conversion, allegedly meant that the Christianisation of Palestine took place much more rapidly than that of other areas of the Roman empire, brought in its wake the annihilation of the pagan cults and meant that by the middle of the fifth century there was a clear Christian majority.
  9. Gil, Moshe (1997). A History of Palestine, 634-1099. Ethel Briodo. Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-59984-9. OCLC 59601193.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  10. Broshi, Magen (1979). "The Population of Western Palestine in the Roman-Byzantine Period". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 236 (236): 1–10. doi:10.2307/1356664. ISSN 0003-097X. JSTOR 1356664. S2CID 24341643.
  11. Broshi, M., & Finkelstein, I. (1992). "The Population of Palestine in Iron Age II". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 287(1), 47-60.
  12. Levy-Rubin, Milka (2000). "New Evidence Relating to the Process of Islamization in Palestine in the Early Muslim Period: The Case of Samaria". Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. 43 (3): 257–276. doi:10.1163/156852000511303. ISSN 0022-4995. JSTOR 3632444.
  13. Ellenblum, Ronnie (2010). Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-58534-0. OCLC 958547332. From the data given above it can be concluded that the Muslim population of Central Samaria, during the early Muslim period, was not an autochthonous population which had converted to Christianity. They arrived there either by way of migration or as a result of a process of sedentarization of the nomads who had filled the vacuum created by the departing Samaritans at the end of the Byzantine period [...] To sum up: in the only rural region in Palestine in which, according to all the written and archeological sources, the process of Islamization was completed already in the twelfth century, there occurred events consistent with the model propounded by Levtzion and Vryonis: the region was abandoned by its original sedentary population and the subsequent vacuum was apparently filled by nomads who, at a later stage, gradually became sedentarized
  14. Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages; Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–900, Oxford University press 2005. p. 130. "In Syria and Palestine, where there were already Arabs before the conquest, settlement was also permitted in the old urban centres and elsewhere, presumably privileging the political centres of the provinces."
  15. Gideon Avni, The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Approach, Oxford University Press 2014 pp.312–324, 329 (theory of imported population unsubstantiated);.
  16. Ireton 2003.
  17. Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, (1988) Cambridge University Press 3rd.ed.2014 p.156
  18. Mark A. Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-253-20873-4, M1 Google Print, p. 70.
  19. Ira M. Lapidus, Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 201.
  20. Grossman, David (2017). Distribution and Population Density During the Late Ottoman and Early Mandate Periods (9781315128825 ed.). New York: Routledge. pp. 44–52. doi:10.4324/9781315128825. ISBN 9781315128825. They came from Circassia and Chechnya, and were refugees from territories annexed by Russia in 1864, and the Bosnian Muslims, whose province was lost to Serbia in 1878. Belonging to this category were the Algerians (Mughrabis), who arrived in Syria and Palestine in several waves after 1850 in the wake of France's conquest of their country and the waves of Egyptian migration to Palestine and Syria during the rule of Muhammad Ali and his son, Ibrahim Pasha. [...] In most cases the Egyptian army dropouts and the other Egyptian settlers preferred to settle in existing localities, rather than to establish new villages. In the southern coastal plain and Ramla zones there were at least nineteen villages which had families of Egyptian origin, and in the northern part of Samaria, including the 'Ara Valley, there are a number of villages with substantial population of Egyptian stock.
  21. Frantzman, Seth J.; Kark, Ruth (2013-04-16). "The Muslim Settlement of Late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine: Comparison with Jewish Settlement Patterns". Digest of Middle East Studies. 22 (1): 77. doi:10.1111/j.1949-3606.2012.00172.x. ISSN 1060-4367. Some of these Muslims were Egyptian and Algerian immigrants who came to Palestine in the first half of the nineteenth century from foreign lands. There were also Algerians, Bosnians, and Circassians, who came in the second half of the nineteenth century, but most were from within the borders of Palestine.
  22. Davis, Rochelle (2011). Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced. Stanford University Press. p. 200. ISBN 9780804773133.
  23. Kacowicz, Arie Marcelo; Lutomski, Pawel (2007). Population Resettlement in International Conflicts: A Comparative Study. Lexington Books. p. 194. ISBN 9780739116074.
  24. Ali Qleibo (28 July 2007). "Palestinian Cave Dwellers and Holy Shrines: The Passing of Traditional Society". This Week in Palestine. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 17 August 2007.
  25. Conder, Claude R. (1876). "Notes on the Language of the Native Peasantry in Palestine". Palestine Exploration Quarterly. 8 (3): 132–140. doi:10.1179/peq.1876.8.3.132. ISSN 0031-0328.
  26. Antonius, The Arab Awakening, p390
  27. Lewis, 1999, p. 49.
  28. Eph`al I (1984) The Ancient Arabs, Magnes Press, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  29. David F Graf, 'Petra and the Nabataeans in the early Hellenistic Period:the literary and archaeological evidence', in Michel Mouton, Stephan G. Schmid (eds.), Men on the Rocks: The Formation of Nabataean Petra,] Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH, 2013 pp.35–55 p.46:'The question remains, what is the nature of the population in Petras during the Persian and Hellenisic period. The answer may come from southern Palestine, where Aramaic ostraca have been accumulating at a rapid pace in the past five decades, attesting to a large Edomite and Arab population in southern Palestine in the 4th century BC. None of this is surprising. There is evidence for the Qedarite Arab kingdom extending its sway in to southern Palestine and Egypt in the Persian and Hellenistic eras.'
  30. Hagith Sivan, Palestine in Late Antiquity, Oxford University Press 2008 p.267, n.116:'On the persistence of an Aramaic-speaking population in spite of Arabic penetration and the ensuing Arabization see R.Zadok, "The Ethno-Linguistic Character of the Semitic-Speaking Population (excluding Jews and Samaritans) of Lebanon, Palestine and Adjacent Regions during the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Periods: A Preliminary Survey of the Onomastic Evidence,” Michmanim 12 (1998),5–36, who uses 450 names, mainly from inscriptions, over a period of a thousand years. Perhaps the most interesting conclusion of Zadok's survey is the predominance of Arabic names over Aramaic names in ‘peripheral areas’ namely the Golan/Hermon and the Negev already from the Achaemenid period (p.22).'
  31. Ran Zadok (1990). "On early Arabians in the Fertile Crescent". Tel Aviv. 17 (2): 223–231. doi:10.1179/tav.1990.1990.2.223.
  32. Muhammad Suwaed, Historical Dictionary of the Bedouins, Rowman & Littlefield 2015 p.181.
  33. Raphael Talmon, 'Arabic as a Minority Language in Israel,' in Jonathan Owens (ed.) Arabic as Minority Language, Walter de Gruyter, 2000 pp.199–219 pp.208–209.
  34. Griffith, Sidney H. (1997). "From Aramaic to Arabic: The Languages of the Monasteries of Palestine in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods". Dumbarton Oaks Papers. 51: 13. doi:10.2307/1291760. JSTOR 1291760.
  35. Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine, University of Texas Press, 2011 p.3.
  36. Kees Versteegh (2001). The Arabic Language. Edinburgh University. ISBN 978-0-7486-1436-3.
  37. Yizhar Hirschfeld, Katharina Galor, ‘New Excavations in Roman, Byzantine, and Early Islamic Tiberias,’ in Jürgen Zangenberg, Harold W. Attridge, Dale B. Martin (eds.)Religion, Ethnicity, and Identity in Ancient Galilee: A Region in Transition, Mohr Siebeck, 2007 pp.207–330 p.211.
  38. Milka Levy-Rubin, ‘The Role of the Judean Desert Monasteries in the Monothelite Controversy in Seventh Cenbtury Palestine,’ in Joseph Patrich (ed.) The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present, Peeters Publishers, 2001 pp.283–300, p.204:’Jerusalem capitulated to the Arab conquerors and received in return a guarantee (Arabic: amân) that secured the lives, property, and religious freedom of its inhabitants. This was a common procedure used by the Arab conquerors and accepted by most of the cities in Palestine.’
  39. Monika Schreiber, The Comfort of Kin: Samaritan Community, Kinship, and Marriage, BRILL, 2014 pp.46–7.
  40. Levy-Rubin, Milka (2000). "New Evidence Relating to the Process of Islamization in Palestine in the Early Muslim Period the Case of Samaria". Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. 43 (3): 257–276. doi:10.1163/156852000511303. ISSN 0022-4995.
  41. Alexander Treiger, ‘The Arabic tradition,’ in Augustine Casidy (ed.), The Orthodox Christian World, Routledge 2011pp.89–104 p.93.
  42. Samuel J Kuruvilla, Radical Christianity in Palestine and Israel. Liberation and Theology in the Middle East, I. B. Tauris 2013 p.5.
  43. Lapidus, p.201.
  44. Lapidos, p.201.
  45. Patai, Raphael (8 December 2015). Kingdom of Jordan. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9781400877997 – via Google Books.
  46. Johnson, Nels (3 June 2013). Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism (RLE Politics of Islam). Routledge. ISBN 978-1134608584 – via Google Books.
  47. "Palestine-Family.net". palestine-family.net.
  48. Bård Kårtveit,Dilemmas of Attachment: Identity and Belonging among Palestinian Christians, BRILL, 2014 p.39.
  49. Bassal, Ibrahim (2012). "Hebrew and Aramaic Substrata in Spoken Palestinian Arabic". Mediterranean Language Review. 19: 85–104. ISSN 0724-7567. JSTOR 10.13173/medilangrevi.19.2012.0085.
  50. Hopkins, Simon (1995). "ṣarār "pebbles" — A Canaanite Substrate Word in Palestinian Arabic". Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik (30): 37–49. ISSN 0170-026X. JSTOR 43525653.
  51. Swedenburg, Ted (2003). Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. University of Arkansas Press. p. 80. ISBN 978-1-55728-763-2. Many old Palestinians traced their people's collective ancestry back to the "Arab Canaanites." By such means they meant to affirm that their originary title to the land of Palestine predated and took precedence over rival Israeli Jewish claims. Such assertions resembled those made by Palestinian nationalistic folklorists like Tewfik Canaan in the 1920s and 1930s (Canaan 1927), as well as arguments found in more recent official nationalist discourse. Abdallah Frangi, for instance, claims that the Arab Palestinians are the descendants of the autochthonous Canaanite inhabitants of Palestine and that the Israels are the offspring of ancient Hebrews who invaded Palestine later, The Zionist movement, Frangi therefore concludes, is simply another instance of the perennial interventionist projects of the ancient Hebrews (Frangi 1983: 1-16). Similarly, Akram Zu'aytir has asserted that Palestine was historically "Arab" long before the Islamic conquests, The Jews were not the original inhabitants of Palestine, according to Zuayur, but "foreigners" who owned only a part of Palestine and never comprised a majority of its population. The Jewish kingdom, he asserts, lasted only a short time and left no lasting influence on the country's civilization (Zuaytir 1955: 35, 58-59). People I met told stories that elaborated or expanded upon these "official" narratives. Some alleged that because the prophet Abraham (revered by Muslims) was an Arab, the Jews were therefore the descendants of the Arabs. The Arabs, who were Abraham's original off-spring, therefore possessed prior rights to the land of Palestine. One shopkeeper in Jerusalem was a veritable fountain of Arab-nationalist-inflected stories derived from the biblical tradition. He explained, for instance, that when Moses came to Palestine from Egypt, the Jews were reluctant to believe in him but the indigenous Arab Bedouin population of Palestine immediately accepted him as a prophet. The Arabs, by this account, were therefore more genuine followers of the Mosaic creed than the Jews and hence were the true and deserving heirs to the sacred land. Such claims represented a kind of shadow discourse to that of the Zionists, a discourse articulated in virtually the same terms as its rival's. Yet at the same time, many people also routinely referred to the Jews as "our paternal cousins," aulad 'ammnd, and recognized a common descent from Abraham (the Jews as offspring of Isaac, the Arabs as offspring of Ishmael). This view coded the struggle as a kind of feud occurring within the same Semitic family. Such "genealogical" dis-course, typical of the nation's impulse to represent itself as having an eternal past, had the unfortunate side effect of reproducing Orientalist and Zionist assertions that the "Arab-Jewish" struggle is ancient and virtually natural, and thereby obviated any need to understand the conflict in its current context.
  52. Lowin, Shari (2010-10-01), "Khaybar", Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, Brill, pp. 148–150, doi:10.1163/1878-9781_ejiw_com_0012910, retrieved 2023-06-22, Khaybar's Jews appear in Arab folklore as well. [...] The Muḥamara family of the Arab village of Yutta, near Hebron, trace their descent to the Jews of Khaybar. Families in other nearby villages tell of similar lineages.
  53. "The killers of Yatta". The Jerusalem Post. 8 July 2016. Retrieved 2022-02-16.
  54. Erlich (Zhabo), Ze’ev H.; Rotter, Meir (2021). "ארבע מנורות שומרוניות בכפר חג'ה שבשומרון" [Four Samaritan Menorahs from the village of Hajjeh, Samaria]. במעבה ההר. Ariel University Publishing. 11 (2): 188–204. doi:10.26351/IHD/11-2/3. S2CID 245363335.
  55. Ben Zvi 1985, p. 8.
  56. Yousef & Barghouti 2005.
  57. Swedenburg, Ted (2003-07-01). Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1-61075-263-3.
  58. Jacobson, A., & Naor, M. (2016). Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine. Brandeis University Press. p. 8
  59. Klein, Menachem (2014). "Arab Jew in Palestine". Israel Studies. 19 (3): 134–153. doi:10.2979/israelstudies.19.3.134. ISSN 1084-9513. JSTOR 10.2979/israelstudies.19.3.134. S2CID 143231294.
  60. Swedenburg, Ted (2003). Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. University of Arkansas Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-1-55728-763-2. These primordialist claims regarding the Palestinians' primeval and prior roots in the land operated at the level of the collective. When it came to an individual's own family, however, Arab-Islamic discourse took precedence over archaeological justifications. I ran across no Palestinian villager (or urbanite) who claimed personal descent from the Canaanites. Villagers typically traced their family or their hamila's origins back to a more recent past in the Arabian peninsula. Many avowed descent from some nomadic tribe that had migrated from Arabia to Palestine either during or shortly after the Arab-Islamic conquests. By such a claim they inserted their family's history into the narrative of Arab and Islamic civilization and connected themselves to a genealogy that possessed greater local and contemporary prestige than did ancient or pre-Islamic descent. Several men specifically connected their forefathers' date of entry into Palestine to their participation in the army of Salih al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), a historical figure whose significance has been retrospectively enlarged by nationalist discourse such that he is now regarded not merely as a hero of "Islamic" civilization but as a "national" luminary as well.+ (Modern nationalist discourse tends to downplay Salah al-Din's Kurdish origins.) Palestinians of all political stripes viewed Salah al-Din's wars against the Crusaders as a forerunner of the current combats against foreign intruders. Many considered Salah al-Din's victory over the Crusaders at Hittin (A.D. 1187) as a historical precedent that offered hope for their own eventual triumph even if, like the Crusader wars, the current struggle with Israel was destined to last more than two centuries. Family histories affiliated to earlier "patriotic" struggles against European aggression tied interviewees to a continuous narrative of national resistance. Villagers claiming descent from Arabs who entered Palestine during the Arab-Islamic conquest equally viewed these origins as establishing their historical precedence over the Jews
  61. Muṣṭafá Murād Dabbāgh, 1965
  62. Sari Nusseibeh, Once Upon A Country, Halban Books 2007 pp.18ff.
  63. Bussow, 2011, p. 114
  64. Sharon, 2004, p.41
  65. Joudah, Ahmad Hasan (1987). Revolt in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: The Era of Shaykh Zahir Al-ʻUmar. Kingston Press. ISBN 9780940670112.
  66. Joudah, 1987, p. 20.
  67. "Sheikh Zuhayr Al-Shawish and His Conservation of Islamic Authentic Heritage". Al Riyadh. 14 November 2003. Archived from the original on 14 February 2005. Retrieved 18 June 2016.
  68. Gaza’s Shujaya: Stronghold of Palestinian resistance, Andolu Ajansi, 21.07.2014.
  69. Gaza-based granddaughter of former Sudanese sultan longs for home, Middle East Monitor, January 12th, 2021.
  70. Tamari, 2009, pp. 97–99
  71. Litvak, Meir (1994). "A Palestinian Past: National Construction and Reconstruction". History and Memory. 6 (2): 24–56. ISSN 0935-560X. JSTOR 25618669.
  72. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999, ISBN 0-393-31839-7, p. 49.
  73. Litvak, Meir (1994). "A Palestinian Past: National Construction and Reconstruction". History and Memory. 6 (2): 24–56. ISSN 0935-560X. JSTOR 25618669.
  74. Lemche 2010, p. 161.
  75. Salim Tamari (Winter 2004). "Lepers, Lunatics and Saints: The Nativist Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and his Jerusalem Circle" (PDF). Jerusalem Quarterly. Issue 20. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 April 2015. Retrieved 31 May 2015.
  76. Eric M. Meyers, "Revisionist History and the Quest for History in the Middle East Today", in Seymour Gitin, J. Edward Wright, J. P. Dessel (eds.), Confronting the Past: Archaeological and Historical Essays in Honor of William G. Dever, Eisenbrauns, 2006, pp. 255–263; p. 260.
  77. Israel Belkind, Arabs in Eretz Israel, Tel Aviv: Hermon Publishers, 1969, p. 8.
  78. Ber Borochov, Writings of Ber Borochov, Volume 1, Kibbuts Meukhad Publishing, 1955, p. 10.
  79. "Ber Borochov". Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 17 December 2012.
  80. David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, The Land of Israel in the Past and the Present, Yad Ben-Zvi, 1980, pp. 196–200. [In Hebrew]
  81. Gil, Moshe. [1983] 1997. A History of Palestine, 634–1099. Cambridge University Press. pp. 222–3: "David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi claimed that the population at the time of the Arab conquest was mainly Christian, of Jewish origins, which underwent conversion to avoid a tax burden, basing their argument on 'the fact that at the time of the Arab conquest, the population of Palestine was mainly Christian, and that during the Crusaders’ conquest some four hundred years later, it was mainly Muslim. As neither the Byzantines nor the Muslims carried out any large-scale population resettlement projects, the Christians were the offspring of the Jewish and Samaritan farmers who converted to Christianity in the Byzantine period; while the Muslim fellaheen in Palestine in modern times are descendants of those Christians who were the descendants of Jews, and had turned to Islam before the Crusaders’ conquest."
  82. בן צבי, יצחק (1929). אוכלוסנו בארץ [The population of our land] (in Hebrew). Warsaw: הועד הפועל של ברית הנוער ומרכז החלוץ העולמי בהשתתפות הלשכה הראשית של הקרן הקימת לישראל. p. 39.
  83. Kuzar, Ron. Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study. (New York: Mounton de Gruyter, 2001). ISBN 978-3110169935
  84. The lost Palestinian Jews Archived 16 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine- 20 August 2009
  85. A tragic misunderstanding – Times online, 13 January 2009.
  86. Prior, Michael. 1999. Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry. Psychology Press. p. 201: "While population transfers were effected in the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian periods, most of the indigenous population remained in place. Moreover, after Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 the population by and large remained in situ, and did so again after Bar Kochba's revolt in AD 135. When the vast majority of the population became Christian during the Byzantine period, no vast number were driven out, and similarly in the seventh century, when the vast majority became Muslim, few were driven from the land. Palestine has been multi-cultural and multi ethnic from the beginning, as one can read between the lines even in the biblical narrative. Many Palestinian Jews became Christians, and in turn Muslims. Ironically, many of the forebears of Palestinian Arab refugees may well have been Jewish."
  87. Richards, Martin; Rengo, Chiara; Cruciani, Fulvio; Gratrix, Fiona; Wilson, James F.; Scozzari, Rosaria; Macaulay, Vincent; Torroni, Antonio (2003). "Extensive Female-Mediated Gene Flow from Sub-Saharan Africa into Near Eastern Arab Populations". American Journal of Human Genetics. 72 (4): 1058–1064. doi:10.1086/374384. PMC 1180338. PMID 12629598.
  88. Das, R; Wexler, P; Pirooznia, M; Elhaik, E (2017). "The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish". Frontiers in Genetics. 8: 87. doi:10.3389/fgene.2017.00087. PMC 5478715. PMID 28680441.
  89. Haber, M; Doumet-Serhal, C; Scheib, C; Xue, Y; Danecek, P; Mezzavilla, M; Youhanna, S; Martiniano, R; Prado-Martinez, J; Szpak, M; Matisoo-Smith, E; Schutkowski, H; Mikulski, R; Zalloua, P; Kivisild, T; Tyler-Smith, C (3 August 2017). "Continuity and Admixture in the Last Five Millennia of Levantine History from Ancient Canaanite and Present-Day Lebanese Genome Sequences". American Journal of Human Genetics. 101 (2): 274–282. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2017.06.013. PMC 5544389. PMID 28757201.
  90. Semino; et al. (2004). "Origin, Diffusion, and Differentiation of Y-Chromosome Haplogroups E and J". The American Journal of Human Genetics. 74 (5): 1023–1034. doi:10.1086/386295. PMC 1181965. PMID 15069642.
  91. Rita Gonçalves; et al. (July 2005). "Y-chromosome Lineages from Portugal, Madeira and Açores Record Elements of Sephardim and Berber Ancestry". Annals of Human Genetics. 69 (4): 443–54. doi:10.1111/j.1529-8817.2005.00161.x. hdl:10400.13/3018. PMID 15996172. S2CID 3229760.
  92. E. Levy- Coffman (2005). "A Mosaic of People". Journal of Genetic Genealogy. 1 (1): 12–33. "J1 is the only haplogroup that researchers consider "Semitic" in origin"
  93. Cinnioglu; et al. (29 October 2003). "Excavating Y-chromosome haplotype strata in Anatolia" (PDF). Human Genetics. 114 (2): 127–148. doi:10.1007/s00439-003-1031-4. PMID 14586639. S2CID 10763736.
  94. Haber, Marc; Gauguier, Dominique; Youhanna, Sonia; Patterson, Nick; Moorjani, Priya; Botigué, Laura R.; Platt, Daniel E.; Matisoo-Smith, Elizabeth; Soria-Hernanz, David F.; Wells, R. Spencer; Bertranpetit, Jaume; Tyler-Smith, Chris; Comas, David; Zalloua, Pierre A. (2013). "Genome-wide diversity in the levant reveals recent structuring by culture". PLOS Genetics. 9 (2): e1003316. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1003316. PMC 3585000. PMID 23468648.
  95. Ana Teresa Fernandes; Rita Gonçalves; Sara Gomes; Dvora Filon; Almut Nebel; Marina Faerman; António Brehm (November 2011). "Y-chromosomal STRs in two populations from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area: Christian and Muslim Arabs". Forensic Science International: Genetics. 5 (5): 561–562. doi:10.1016/j.fsigen.2010.08.005. hdl:10400.13/4485. PMID 20843760.
  96. Nebel, Almut; Filon, Dvora; Weiss, Deborah A.; Weale, Michael; Faerman, Marina; Oppenheim, Ariella; Thomas, Mark G. (December 2000). "High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews" (PDF). Human Genetics. 107 (6): 630–641. doi:10.1007/s004390000426. PMID 11153918. S2CID 8136092. According to historical records part, or perhaps the majority, of the Muslim Arabs in this country descended from local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD (Shaban 1971; Mc Graw Donner 1981). These local inhabitants, in turn, were descendants of the core population that had lived in the area for several centuries, some even since prehistorical times (Gil 1992)... Thus, our findings are in good agreement with the historical record...
  97. Nebel A, Filon D, Weiss DA, Weale M, Faerman M, Oppenheim A, Thomas MG (December 2000). "High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews". Human Genetics. 107 (6): 630–41. doi:10.1007/s004390000426. PMID 11153918. S2CID 8136092.
  98. Atzmon G, Hao L, Pe'er I, Velez C, Pearlman A, Palamara PF, Morrow B, Friedman E, Oddoux C, Burns E, Ostrer H (June 2010). "Abraham's children in the genome era: major Jewish diaspora populations comprise distinct genetic clusters with shared Middle Eastern Ancestry". American Journal of Human Genetics. 86 (6): 850–9. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2010.04.015. PMC 3032072. PMID 20560205.
  99. Ostrer H, Skorecki K (February 2013). "The population genetics of the Jewish people". Human Genetics. 132 (2): 119–27. doi:10.1007/s00439-012-1235-6. PMC 3543766. PMID 23052947.
  100. Doron M. Behar; Bayazit Yunusbayev; Mait Metspalu; Ene Metspalu; Saharon Rosset; Jüri Parik; Siiri Rootsi; Gyaneshwer Chaubey; Ildus Kutuev; Guennady Yudkovsky; Elza K. Khusnutdinova; Oleg Balanovsky; Olga Balaganskaya; Ornella Semino; Luisa Pereira; David Comas; David Gurwitz; Batsheva Bonne-Tamir; Tudor Parfitt; Michael F. Hammer; Karl Skorecki; Richard Villems (July 2010). "The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people". Nature. 466 (7303): 238–42. Bibcode:2010Natur.466..238B. doi:10.1038/nature09103. PMID 20531471. S2CID 4307824.
  101. Atzmon, G; et al. (2010). "Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry". American Journal of Human Genetics. 86 (6): 850–859. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2010.04.015. PMC 3032072. PMID 20560205.
  102. Nebel (2000), quote: By the fifth century AD, the majority of non-Jews and Jews had become Christians by conversion (Bachi 1974). The first millennium AD was marked by the immigration of Arab tribes, reaching its climax with the Moslem conquest from the Arabian Peninsula (633–640 AD). This was followed by a slow process of Islamization of the local population, both of Christians and Jews (Shaban 1971; Mc Graw Donner 1981). Additional minor demographic changes might have been caused by subsequent invasions of the Seljuks, Crusaders, Mongols, Mamelukes and Ottoman Turks. Recent gene-flow from various geographic origins is reflected, for example, in the heterogeneous spectrum of globin mutations among Israeli Arabs (Filon et al. 1994). Israeli and Palestinian Arabs share a similar linguistic and geographic background with Jews. (p.631) According to historical records part, or perhaps the majority, of the Moslem Arabs in this country descended from local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD (Shaban 1971; Mc Graw Donner 1981). These local inhabitants, in turn, were descendants of the core population that had lived in the area for several centuries, some even since prehistorical times (Gil 1992). On the other hand, the ancestors of the great majority of present-day Jews lived outside this region for almost two millennia. Thus, our findings are in good agreement with historical evidence and suggest genetic continuity in both populations despite their long separation and the wide geographic dispersal of Jews.(p.637)
  103. Lawler, Andrew (28 September 2020). "DNA from the Bible's Canaanites lives on in modern Arabs and Jews". National Geographic. Retrieved 28 May 2020.
  104. Agranat-Tamir L, Waldman S, Martin MS, Gokhman D, Mishol N, Eshel T, Cheronet O, Rohland N, Mallick S, Adamski N, Lawson AM, Mah M, Michel MM, Oppenheimer J, Stewardson K, Candilio F, Keating D, Gamarra B, Tzur S, Novak M, Kalisher R, Bechar S, Eshed V, Kennett DJ, Faerman M, Yahalom-Mack N, Monge JM, Govrin Y, Erel Y, Yakir B, Pinhasi R, Carmi S, Finkelstein I, Reich D (May 2020). "The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant". Cell. 181 (5): 1153–1154. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.024. PMC 10212583. PMID 32470400.
  105. Likhovski, Assaf (2006). Law and identity in mandate Palestine. The University of North Carolina Press. p. 174. ISBN 978-0-8078-3017-8.
  106. Tamir Sorek (2004). "The Orange and the Cross in the Crescent" (PDF). Nations and Nationalism. 10 (3): 269–291. doi:10.1111/j.1354-5078.2004.00167.x.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.