Origin of the Palestinians

The study of the origins of the Palestinians, a population encompassing the Arab inhabitants of the former Mandatory Palestine and their descendants,[1] is a subject approached through an interdisciplinary lens, drawing from fields such as population genetics, demographic history, folklore, including oral traditions, linguistics, and other disciplines.

The demographic history of Palestine has been shaped by various historical events and migrations. Over time, it shifted from a Jewish majority in the early Roman period to a Christian majority in Late Roman and Byzantine times.[2] The Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 7th century initiated a process of Arabization and Islamization through the conversion and acculturation of locals, accompanied by Arab settlement. This led to a Muslim-majority population, though significantly smaller, in the Middle Ages.[3][4] The Muslim dominance persisted up until the 20th century, influenced by Muslim immigration from surrounding regions, including Egypt,[5][6] Transjordan,[7] Arabian Peninsula,[7] Kurdistan,[8] Syria,[9][10] Circassia,[6] Bosnia,[6] Chechnya[6] and the Maghreb.[6][11] [undue weight?discuss] These demographic shifts are also reflected in local traditions of ancestry. Many Palestinian villagers claim ancestral ties to Arab tribes from the Arabian Peninsula that settled in Palestine during or after the Arab conquest,[12] while others trace their roots to Turkish, North African[citation needed], Kurdish, Egyptian, and Turkman origins. Some Palestinian families, notably in the Hebron and Nablus regions, claim Jewish and Samaritan ancestry respectively, preserving associated cultural customs and traditions.[13][14][15]

Genetic studies indicate a genetic affinity between Palestinians and other Levantine populations, as well as other Arab and Semitic groups in the Middle East and North Africa.[16][17] Historical records and later genetic studies indicate that the Palestinian people descend mostly from from Ancient Levantines extending back to Bronze Age inhabitants of Levant.[18][19][20][21][22][23][24] They represent a highly homogeneous community who share one cultural and ethnic identity,[25][26][27][undue weight?discuss] speak Palestinian Arabic and share close religious, linguistic, and cultural practices and heritage with other Levantines (e.g Syrians, Lebanese, and Jordanians). According to Palestinian historian Nazmi Al-Ju'beh, like in other Arab nations, the Arab identity of Palestinians is largely based on linguistic and cultural affiliation and is not necessarily associated with the existence of any Arabian origins.[28]

The historical discourse regarding the origin of the Palestinians has been influenced by the ongoing effort of nation-building, including the attempt 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.[29]

  1. ^ "The A to Z of the Arab-Israeli conflict". The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2024-05-01. Palestinians - A population of around 14m people who trace their origins to British-ruled Palestine. Around 7m Palestinians live in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Another 7m are strewn across the Arab world and beyond. Nearly 6m are registered as refugees.
  2. ^ 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. Cambridge University Press. pp. 404–430. ISBN 978-0-521-77248-8.
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ Cohen, Amnon, and Bernard Lewis. Population and Revenue in the Towns of Palestine in the Sixteenth Century. Princeton University Press, 1978. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x196g. Accessed 11 Nov. 2023.
  5. ^ Grossman, D. (1986). "Oscillations in the Rural Settlement of Samaria and Judaea in the Ottoman Period". in Shomron studies. Dar, S., Safrai, S., (eds). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House. p. 314-317, 345-385
  6. ^ a b c d e 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.
  7. ^ a b Grossman, D. (1984-12-01). "Spatial analysis of historical migrations in Samaria". GeoJournal. 9 (4): 400, 403–404. Bibcode:1984GeoJo...9..393G. doi:10.1007/BF00171604. ISSN 1572-9893.
  8. ^ James, Boris (2019-07-03), "Constructing the Realm of the Kurds (al-Mamlaka al-Akradiyya): Kurdish In-betweenness and Mamluk Ethnic Engineering (1130-1340 CE)", Grounded Identities, Brill, pp. 17–45, doi:10.1163/9789004385337_003, ISBN 978-90-04-38533-7, S2CID 199158319, retrieved 2024-02-05
  9. ^ Taxel, I. (2018). Migration to and within Palestine in the early Islamic period: Two archaeological paradigms. In Migration and Migrant Identities in the Near East from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (pp. 222-243). Routledge.
  10. ^ Doumani, B. (1995). Rediscovering Palestine, Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900. University of California Press. Chapter: "The 1657 Campaign."
  11. ^ Abbasi, Mustafa (2013). "Samakh: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Arab Town on the Shores of the Sea of Galilee". Holy Land Studies. 12 (1): 92–93. doi:10.3366/hls.2013.0061. ISSN 1474-9475. In the middle of the 19th century, thousands of Muslim migrants came to Palestine from three peripheral regions of the Ottoman Empire: Algeria, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. Although the motives for the migration were identical in all three cases, and were due to the defeat of the Ottomans by European powers, each group of migrants had its own particular characteristics of size and influence in the regions of the country where they settled. The Algerian migrants were the largest of the three groups.
  12. ^ 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
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ 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. 11 (2). Ariel University Publishing: 188–204. doi:10.26351/IHD/11-2/3. S2CID 245363335.
  15. ^ Ben Zvi 1985, p. 8.
  16. ^ 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.
  17. ^ 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.
  18. ^ 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...
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  21. ^ 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.
  22. ^ 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.
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  28. ^ Nazmi Al-Ju'beh (26 May 2009). Palestinian Identity and Cultural Heritage. Contemporain publications. Presses de l’Ifpo. pp. 205–231. ISBN 978-2-35159-265-6. Archived from the original on 15 October 2023. Retrieved 14 October 2023.
  29. ^ 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.