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. 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.

Palestinian villagers and notable families alike generally trace the origins of their clan (hamula) to Arab nomad tribes from the Arabian peninsula who settled in the region before or after the Islamic conquest. A small number of Palestinian families follow oral traditions that trace their roots to Jewish and Samaritan origins.

Palestinian national identity is relatively recent, and according to the prevailing theory, it emerged in the first decades of the 20th century. The historical discourse regarding the origins of Palestinians has been significantly impacted by the an attempt of Palestinian nationalism to establish itself as the dominant framework of identity among Palestinians, and to use origin ideas to counter Zionist arguments. As part of this effort, academic standards for the use of historical evidence are rarely adhered to, and evidence that is opposed to the cause of the country is either ignored or brushed aside as untrue or hostile; This has resulted in the portrayal of various ancient regional populations, including the Canaanites and Jebusites, as Arabs, and the denial of the connection between contemporary Jews and the ancient Hebrews and Israelites.

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, Semitic-speaking peoples. 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 toAssyrian and Babylonian conquests was accompanied by forced exile. 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. The Jewish-Roman Wars, however, resulted in the death, displacement or slavery of many Jews, and as a result, the Jewish population in Judea declined significantly. 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. A Christian majority eventually formed under Byzantine rule as a result of Christian immigration, Jewish departure, wars such as the Samaritan revolts, and the conversion of locals.

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. 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. As time passed, many of the existing population converted to Islam and adopted Arab culture and language. Arab settlement both before and after the Muslim conquest is thought to had hastened the pace of Islamization. Much of the local Palestinian population in the area of Nablus is believed to be descended from Samaritans who converted to Islam.

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. Alternatively, it has been argued that the process of mass Islamization occurred much later, perhaps during the Mamluk period.

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. Palestine's population dropped and hovered between 150,000 and 250,000 people for several decades under the Ottoman Empire; it wasn't until the 19th century that the country's population started to expand rapidly.

In oral traditions

Palestinian villagers generally trace the origins of their clan (hamula) to the Arabian peninsula. Many avow oral traditions of descent from nomadic Arab tribes that migrated to Palestine during or shortly after the Islamic conquest. Those traditions are also noted among Palestinian families of the notable class (a'yan), including the Nusaybah family of Jerusalem, the Tamimi family of Nabi Salih, and the Barghouti family of Bani Zeid. The Shawish, al-Husayni, and Al-Zayadina clans trace their heritage to Muhammad through his grandsons, Husayn ibn Ali and Hassan ibn Ali. Other Palestinians have specifically linked their ancestors' entry into Palestine to their participation in Saladin's army, which is revered not only as a hero of Islam but also as a national hero, downplaying his Kurdish roots.

A small number of 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. Traditions of Samaritan origins were recorded in Nablus and villages in its vicinity, including Hajjah. 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. He further asserted that these families elders and priests had kept written records attesting to their Samaritan lineage.

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.

Canaanism

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 ancient 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. 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."

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 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.

Denial of Jewish history

While non-Palestinian Arab writes 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.

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. 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.

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, Turks, 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.

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..." 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."

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. Semitic-speaking populations usually possess an excess of J1 Y chromosomes compared to other populations harboring Y-haplogroup J. 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.

A Palestinian girl in Qalqilya.

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."

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.

Between the Jews and Palestinians

See also: Genetic studies on Jews

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

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". 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.

Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim in Sevilla, 2002

One DNA study by Nebel found substantial genetic overlap among Israeli/Palestinian Arabs and Jews. 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".

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, 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. 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.