Palestinians

For other uses of "Palestinian", see Definitions of Palestine and Palestinian.

Template:Palestinian ethnicity Palestinian people (Template:Lang-ar, al-sha'ab il-filastini), Palestinians (Template:Lang-ar, al-filastiniyyin), or Palestinian Arabs (Template:Lang-ar, al-'arabi il-filastini) are terms used today to refer to a nation of predominantly Arabic-speaking people with family origins in Palestine.

The total Palestinian population worldwide is estimated to be between 9 and 11 million people. Palestinians are predominantly Sunni Muslims, though there is a significant Christian minority, whose presence in the Holy Land can be traced back to earliest days of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The first widespread endonymic use of "Palestinian" to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by the Arabs of Palestine began prior to the outbreak of World War I, and the first demand for national independence was issued by the Syrian-Palestinian Congress on 21 September, 1921.

Roughly half of all Palestinians continue to live in parts of British Mandate Palestine - an area today known as Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The other half, most of whom are refugees of the exodus of 1948 and exodus of 1967, are scattered elsewhere throughout the world. (See Palestinian diaspora.)

The Palestinian people as a whole are represented before the international community by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Palestinian National Authority, created as a result of the Oslo Accords is an interim administrative body nominally responsible for governance in Palestinian population centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Origins of Palestinian identity

Etymology

See also: Palestine

A map of Palestine as described by the medieval Arab geographers, with the junds of Jordan and Filastin highlighted in grey

Filastin (فلسطين), (Arabic for Palestine), has been used to refer to the region since the earliest medieval Arab geographers adopted the Greek name Palaestina (Παλαιστινη), in turn derived from the Philistines (Plishtim) mentioned in the Bible. Filastini (فلسطيني), also derived from the Latinized Greek term Palaestina (Παλαιστίνη), appears to have been used as an Arabic adjectival noun in the region since as early as the 7th century CE.

During the British Mandate of Palestine, the term "Palestinian" was used to refer to all people residing there, regardless of religion, and those granted citizenship by the Mandatory authorities were granted "Palestinian citizenship".

Following the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people, the use and application of the terms "Palestine" and "Palestinian" by and to Palestinian Jews largely dropped from use. The English-language newspaper The Palestine Post for example — which, since 1932, primarily served the Jewish community in the British Mandate of Palestine — changed its name in 1950 to The Jerusalem Post. Jews in Israel and the West Bank today generally identify as Israelis. Arab citizens of Israel identify themselves as Israeli and/or Palestinian and/or Arab.

The Palestinian National Charter, as amended by the PLO's Palestine National Council in July 1968, defined "Palestinians" as: "those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father — whether in Palestine or outside it — is also a Palestinian." This definition also extends to, "The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion." The Charter also states that "Palestine with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit."

Palestinian perceptions of identity

In his 1997 book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, historian Rashid Khalidi notes that the archaeological strata that denote the history of Palestine - encompassing the Biblical, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods - form part of the identity of the modern-day Palestinian people, as they have come to understand it over the last century. Khalidi stresses that Palestinian identity has never been an exclusive one, with "Arabism, religion, and local loyalties" continuing to play an important role.

Echoing this view, Walid Khalidi writes that Palestinians in Ottoman times were "[a]cutely aware of the distinctiveness of Palestinian history ..." and that "[a]lthough proud of their Arab heritage and ancestry, 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, including the ancient Hebrews and the Canaanites before them.".

Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist, explains how identity is "a discursive narrative that validates the present by selecting events, characters, and moments in time as formative beginnings." Qleibo critiques Muslim historiography for assigning the beginning of Palestinian cultural identity to the advent of Islam in the seventh century. In describing the effect of such a historiography, he writes: "Pagan origins are disavowed. As such the peoples that populated Palestine throughout history have discursively rescinded their own history and religion as they adopted the religion, language, and culture of Islam."

According to Salim Tamari, 'nativist' ethnographies produced by Tawfiq Canaan and other Palestinian writers and published in The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society (1920-1948), were driven by the concern that the "native culture of Palestine", and in particular peasant society, was being undermined by the forces of modernity. Tamari continues: "Implicit in their scholarship (and made explicit by Canaan himself) was another theme, namely that the peasants of Palestine represent - through their folk norms ... the living heritage of all the accumulated ancient cultures that had appeared in Palestine (principally the Canaanite, Philistine, Hebraic, Nabatean, Syrio-Aramaic and Arab)."

The folklorist revival among Palestinian intellectuals such as Nimr Sirhan, Musa Allush, Salim Mubayyid, and the Palestinian Folklore Society of the 1970s, highlighted pre-Islamic (and pre-Hebraic) cultural roots, re-constructing Palestinian identity with a focus on Canaanite and Jebusite cultures. These efforts seems to have borne fruit as evidenced in the organization of celebrations like the Qabatiya Canaanite festival and the annual Music Festival of Yabus by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. Nonetheless, some Palestinians, like Zakariyya Muhammad, have criticized the "Canaanite ideology" as an "intellectual fad, divorced from the concerns of ordinary people."

Emergent nationalism(s)

The timing and causes behind the emergence of a distinctively Palestinian national consciousness among the Arabs of Palestine are matters of scholarly disagreement. Rashid Khalidi argues that the modern national identity of Palestinians has its roots in nationalist discourses that emerged among the peoples of the Ottoman empire in the late 19th century, and which sharpened following the demarcation of modern nation-state boundaries in the Middle East after World War I. Khalidi also states that although the challenge posed by Zionism played a role in shaping this identity, that "it is a serious mistake to suggest that Palestinian identity emerged mainly as a response to Zionism."

In contrast, historian James L. Gelvin argues that Palestinian nationalism was a direct reaction to Zionism. In his book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War he states that “Palestinian nationalism emerged during the interwar period in response to Zionist immigration and settlement.” Gelvin argues that this fact does not make the Palestinian identity any less legitimate:

The fact that Palestinian nationalism developed later than Zionism and indeed in response to it does not in any way diminish the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or make it less valid than Zionism. All nationalisms arise in opposition to some "other." Why else would there be the need to specify who you are? And all nationalisms are defined by what they oppose.

Whatever the causal mechanism, by the early 20th century strong opposition to Zionism and evidence of a burgeoning nationalistic Palestinian identity is found in the content of Arabic-language newspapers in Palestine, such as Al-Karmil (est. 1908) and Filasteen (est. 1911). Filasteen, published in Jaffa by Issa and Yusef al-Issa, addressed its readers as "Palestinians", first focusing its critique of Zionism around the failure of the Ottoman administration to control Jewish immigration and the large influx of foreigners, later exploring the impact of Zionist land-purchases on Palestinian peasants (fellaheen), expressing growing concern over land dispossession and its implications for the society at large.

The historical record also reveals an interplay between "Arab" and "Palestinian" identities and nationalisms. The idea of a unique Palestinian state separated out from its Arab neighbors was at first rejected by some Palestinian representatives. The First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations (in Jerusalem, February 1919), which met for the purpose of selecting a Palestinian Arab representative for the Paris Peace Conference, adopted the following resolution: "We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds." After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the French conquest of Syria, however, the notion took on greater appeal. In 1920, for instance, the formerly pan-Syrianist mayor of Jerusalem, Musa Qasim Pasha al-Husayni, said "Now, after the recent events in Damascus, we have to effect a complete change in our plans here. Southern Syria no longer exists. We must defend Palestine".

In 1922, the British authorities over Mandate Palestine proposed a draft constitution which would have granted the Palestinian Arabs representation in a Legislative Council. The Palestine Arab delegation rejected the proposal as "wholly unsatisfactory," noting that "the People of Palestine" could not accept the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration in the constitution's preamble, as the basis for discussions, and further taking issue with the designation of Palestine as a British "colony of the lowest order." The Arabs tried to get the British to offer an Arab legal establishment again roughly ten years later, but to no avail.

Conflict between Palestinian nationalists and various types of pan-Arabists continued during the British Mandate, but the latter became increasingly marginalized. Two prominent leaders of the Palestinian nationalists were Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,appointed by the British, and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. Followers of Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, who was killed by the British in 1935, initiated the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine which began with a general strike and attacks on Jewish and British installations in Nablus. The call for a general strike, non-payment of taxes, and the closure of municipal governments was met and by the end of 1936, the movement had become a national revolt, often credited as marking the birth of the "Arab Palestinian identity".

The "lost years" (1948 - 1967)

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the accompanying Palestinian exodus, known to Palestinians as Al Nakba (the "catastrophe"), there was a hiatus in Palestinian political activity which Khalidi partially attributes to "the fact that Palestinian society had been devastated between November 1947 and mid-May 1948 as a result of a series of overwhelming military defeats of the disorganized Palestinians by the armed forces of the Zionist movement." Those parts of British Mandate Palestine which did not become part of the newly declared Israeli state were occupied by Egypt and Jordan. During what Khalidi terms the "lost years" that followed, Palestinians lacked a center of gravity, divided as they were between these countries and others such as Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

In the 1950s, a new generation of Palestinian nationalist groups and movements began to organize clandestinely, stepping out onto the public stage in the 1960s. The traditional Palestinian elite who had dominated negotiations with the British and the Zionists in the Mandate, and who were largely held responsible for the loss of Palestine, were replaced by these new movements whose recruits generally came from poor to middle class backgrounds and were often students or recent graduates of universities in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus. The potency of the pan-Arabist ideology put forward by Gamel Abdel Nasser - popular among Palestinian for whom Arabism was already an important component of their identity - tended to obscure the identities of the separate Arab nation-states it subsumed.

Recent developments in Palestinian identity (1967 - present)

Since 1967, pan-Arabism has diminished as an aspect of Palestinian identity. The Israeli capture of the Gaza Strip and West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War prompted fractured Palestinian political and militant groups to give up any remaining hope they had placed in pan-Arabism. Instead, they rallied around the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its nationalistic orientation. Mainstream secular Palestinian nationalism was grouped together under the umbrella of the PLO whose constituent organizations include Fateh and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, among others. These groups have also given voice to a tradition that emerged in 1960s that argues Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots, with extreme advocates reading a Palestinian nationalist consciousness and identity back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, when such a consciousness is in fact relatively modern.

The Battle of Karameh and the events of Black September in Jordan contributed to growing Palestinian support for these groups. In 1974, the PLO was recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people by the Arab states and was granted observer status as a national liberation movement by the United Nations that same year. Israel rejected the resolution, calling it "shameful". In a speech to the Knesset, Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Allon outlined the government's view that : "No one can expect us to recognize the terrorist organization called the PLO as representing the Palestinians - because it does not. No one can expect us to negotiate with the heads of terror-gangs, who through their ideology and actions, endeavour to liquidate the State of Israel."

The identity of Palestinians has been a point of contestation with Israel. From 1948 through until the 1980’s, according to Eli Podeh, professor at Hebrew University, the textbooks used in Israeli schools tried to disavow a unique Palestinian identity, referring to "the Arabs of the land of Israel" instead of "Palestinians." Israeli textbooks now widely use the term 'Palestinians.' Podeh believes that Palestinian textbooks of today resemble those from the early years of the Israeli state.

Various declarations, such as the PLO's 1988 proclamation of a State of Palestine, have further served to reinforce the Palestinian national identity. Today, most Palestinian organizations conceive of their struggle as either Palestinian-nationalist or Islamic in nature, and these themes predominate even more today. Within Israel itself, there are political movements, such as Abnaa el-Balad that assert their Palestinian identity, to the exclusion of their Israeli one.

Demographics

Palestinians living outside the West Bank and Gaza Strip

In the absence of a comprehensive census including all Palestinian diaspora populations, and those that have remained within what was British Mandate Palestine, exact population figures are difficult to determine.

Country or region	Population
West Bank and Gaza Strip	3,900,000
Jordan	3,000,000
Israel	1,318,000
Syria	434,896
Lebanon	405,425
Chile	300,000
Saudi Arabia	327,000
The Americas	225,000
Egypt	44,200
Other Gulf states	159,000
Other Arab states	153,000
Other countries	308,000
TOTAL	10,574,521

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) announced on October 20, 2004 that the number of Palestinians worldwide at the end of 2003 was 9.6 million, an increase of 800,000 since 2001.

In 2005, a critical review of the PCBS figures and methodology was conducted by the American-Israel Demographic Research Group. In their report, they claimed that several errors in the PCBS methodology and assumptions artificially inflated the numbers by a total of 1.3 million. The PCBS numbers were cross-checked against a variety of other sources (e.g., asserted birth rates based on fertility rate assumptions for a given year were checked against Palestinian Ministry of Health figures as well as Ministry of Education school enrollment figures six years later; immigration numbers were checked against numbers collected at border crossings, etc.). The errors claimed in their analysis included: birth rate errors (308,000), immigration & emigration errors (310,000), failure to account for migration to Israel (105,000), double-counting Jerusalem Arabs (210,000), counting former residents now living abroad (325,000) and other discrepancies (82,000). The results of their research was also presented before the United States House of Representatives on March 8, 2006.

The study was criticised by Sergio DellaPergola, a demographer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. DellaPergola accused the authors of misunderstanding basic principles of demography on account of their lack of expertise in the subject. He also accused them of selective use of data and multiple systematic errors in their analysis. For example, DellaPergola claimed that the authors assumed the Palestinian Electoral registry to be complete even though registration is voluntary and good evidence exists of incomplete registration, and similarly that they used an unrealistically low Total Fertility Ratio (a statistical abstraction of births per woman) incorrectly derived from data and then used to reanalyse that data in a "typical circular mistake".

DellaPergola himself estimated the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza at the end of 2005 as 3.33 million, or 3.57 million if East Jerusalem is included. These figures are only slightly lower than the official Palestinian figures.

Palestinian children in Jenin, 2002

In Jordan today, there is no official census data that outlines how many of the inhabitants of Jordan are Palestinians, but estimates by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics cite a population range of 50% to 55%.

Many Arab Palestinians have settled in the United States, particularly in the Chicago area.

In total, an estimated 600,000 Palestinians are thought to reside in the Americas. Arab Palestinian emigration to South America began for economic reasons that pre-dated the Arab-Israeli conflict, but continued to grow thereafter. Many emigrants were from the Bethlehem area. Those emigrating to Latin America were mainly Christian. Half of those of Palestinian origin in Latin America live in Chile. El Salvador and Honduras also have substantial Arab Palestinian populations. These two countries have had presidents of Palestinian ancestry (in El Salvador Antonio Saca, currently serving; in Honduras Carlos Roberto Flores Facusse). Belize, which has a smaller Palestinian population, has a Palestinian minister — Said Musa. Schafik Jorge Handal, Salvadoran politician and former guerrilla leader, was the son of Palestinian immigrants.[6]

Refugees

Main article: Palestinian refugees

Palestinian refugees in 1948

There are 4,255,120 Palestinians registered as refugees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This number includes the descendants of refugees from the 1948 war, but excludes those who have emigrated to areas outside of UNRWA's remit. Based on these figures, almost half of all Palestinians are registered refugees. The 993,818 Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip and 705,207 Palestinian refugees in the West Bank who hail from towns and villages that now located in Israel are included in these UNRWA figures. UNRWA figures do not include some 274,000 people, or 1 in 4 of all Arab citizens of Israel, who are internally displaced Palestinian refugees.

Religion

Background

Until the end of the nineteenth century, most villages in the countryside did not have local mosques. Cross-cultural syncretism between Biblical and Islamic symbols and figures in religious practice was common. Villagers would pay tribute to local patron saints at a maqam - a domed single room often placed in the shadow of an ancient carob or oak tree. Saints, taboo by the standards of orthodox Islam, mediated between man and Allah, and shrines to saints and holy men dotted the Palestinian landscape. Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist, states that this built evidence constitutes "an architectural testimony to Christian/Moslem Palestinian religious sensibility and its roots in ancient Semitic religions."

Religion as constitutive of individual identity was accorded a minor role within Palestinian tribal social structure until the latter half of the 19th century. Jean Moretain, a priest writing in 1848, wrote that a Christian in Palestine was "distinguished only by the fact that he belonged to a particular clan. If a certain tribe was Christian, then an individual would be Christian, but without knowledge of what distinguished his faith from that of a Muslim."

The concessions granted to France and other Western powers by the Ottoman Sultanate in the aftermath of the Crimean War had a significant impact on contemporary Palestinian religious cultural identity. Religion was transformed into an element "constituting the individual/collective identity in conformity with orthodox precepts", and formed a major building block in the political development of Palestinian nationalism.

The British census of 1922 registered 752,048 inhabitants in Palestine, consisting of 589,177 Palestinian Muslims, 83,790 Palestinian Jews, 71,464 Palestinian Christians (including Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and others) and 7,617 persons belonging to other groups. The corresponding percentage breakdown is 78% Muslim, 11% Jewish, and 9% Christian. Palestinian Bedouin were not counted in the census, but a 1930 British study estimated their number at 70,860.

Today

Currently, no comprehensive data on religious affiliation among the worldwide Palestinian population is available. Bernard Sabella of Bethlehem University estimates that 6% of the Palestinian population is Christian. According to the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is 97% Muslim and 3% Christian.

All of the Druze living in what was then British Mandate Palestine became Israeli citizens, though some individuals self-identify "Palestinian Druze". According to Salih al-Shaykh, most Druze do not consider themselves to be Palestinian: "their Arab identity emanates in the main from the common language and their socio-cultural background, but is detached from any national political conception. It is not directed at Arab countries or Arab nationality or the Palestinian people, and does not express sharing any fate with them. From this point of view, their identity is Israel, and this identity is stronger than their Arab identity".

There are also about 350 Samaritans who are Palestinian citizens and live in the West Bank.

Jews that identify as Palestinian Jews are rare, but include Israeli Jews who are part of the Neturei Karta group, and Uri Davis, an Israeli citizen and self-described Palestinian Jew who serves as an observer member in the Palestine National Council.

Culture

Palestinians celebrating in Nahr al-Bared, Lebanon, 2005.

Palestinian culture is most closely related to the cultures of the nearby Levantine countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan and of the Arab World. It includes unique art, literature, music, costume and cuisine. Though separated geographically, Palestinian culture continues to survive and flourish in the Palestinian territories, Israel and the Diaspora.

Language

Main article: Palestinian Arabic

Palestinian Arabic is a subgroup of the broader Levantine Arabic dialect spoken by Palestinians. It has three primary sub-variations with the pronunciation of the qāf serving as a shibboleth to distinguish between the three main Palestinian dialects: In most cities, it is a glottal stop; in smaller villages and the countryside, it is a pharyngealized k; and in the far south, it is a g, as among Bedouin speakers. In a number of villages in the Galilee (e.g. Maghār), and particularly, though not exclusively among the Druze, the qāf is actually pronounced qāf as in Classical Arabic.

Barbara McKean Parmenter has noted that the Arabs of Palestine have been credited with the preservation of the indigenous Semitic place names for many sites mentioned in the Bible which were documented by the American archaeologist Edward Robinson in the early 20th century.

Literature

Main article: Palestinian literature

The long history of the Arabic language and its rich written and oral tradition form part of the Palestinian literary tradition as it has developed over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Poetry

Poetry, using classical pre-Islamic forms, remains an extremely popular art form, often attracting Palestinian audiences in the thousands. Until 20 years ago, local folk bards reciting traditional verses were a feature of every Palestinian town.

After the 1948 Palestinian exodus, poetry was transformed into a vehicle for political activism. From among those Palestinians who became Arab citizens of Israel after the passage of the Citizenship Law in 1952, a school of resistance poetry was born that included poets like Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Tawfiq Zayyad.

The work of these poets was largely unknown to the wider Arab world for years because of the lack of diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab governments. The situation changed after Ghassan Kanafani, another Palestinian writer in exile in Lebanon published an anthology of their work in 1966.

Palestinian poets often write about the common theme of a strong affection and sense of loss and longing for a lost homeland.

Folk tales

Traditional storytelling among Palestinians is prefaced with an invitation to the listeners to give blessings to God and the Prophet Mohammed or the Virgin Mary as the case may be, and includes the traditional opening: "There was, or there was not, in the oldness of time ..."

Formulaic elements of the stories share much in common with the wider Arab world, though the rhyming scheme is distinct. There are a cast of supernatural characters: djinns who can cross the Seven Seas in an instant, giants, and ghouls with eyes of ember and teeth of brass. Stories invariably have a happy ending, and the storyteller will usually finish off with a rhyme like: "The bird has taken flight, God bless you tonight," or "Tutu, tutu, finished is my haduttu (story)."

Intellectuals

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, Palestinian intellectuals were integral parts of wider Arab intellectual circles, as represented by individuals such as May Ziade and Khalil Beidas.

Diaspora figures like Edward Said and Ghada Karmi, Arab citizens of Israel like Emile Habibi, refugee camp residents like Ibrahim Nasrallah have made contributions to a number of fields, exemplifying the diversity of experience and thought among Palestinians.

Music

Main article: Palestinian music

Palestinian music is well-known and respected throughout the Arab world. A new wave of performers emerged with distinctively Palestinian themes following the 1948 Palestinian exodus, relating to the dreams of statehood and the burgeoning nationalist sentiments. A traditional folk dance, the dabke, is still danced at Palestinian weddings.

Cuisine

Main article: Palestinian cuisine

File:Bethlehengirlsintraditionaldresspre1918.JPG

Girls in Bethlehem costume pre-1918, Bonfils Portrait

Palestinian cuisine is divided into two groups: In the Galilee and northern West Bank the cuisine is similar to that of Lebanon and Syria while other parts of the West Bank, such as the Jerusalem, and the Hebron region, locals have a heavy cooking style of their own. Gaza is more likely to be piquant, incorporating fresh green or dried red hot peppers, reflecting the culinary influences of Egypt.

Mezze describes an assortment of dishes laid out on the table for a meal that takes place over several hours, a characteristic common to Mediterranean cultures. Some common mezze dishes are hummus, tabouleh, baba ghanoush, labaneh, and zate u zaatar which is the pita bread dipping of olive oil and ground thyme and sesame seeds. Kebbiyeh or kubbeh is another popular dish made of minced meat enclosed in a case of burghul (cracked wheat) and deep fried.

Famous entrées in Palestine are waraq al-'inib - boiled grape leaves wrapped around cooked rice and lamb pieces. One of the most distinctive Palestinian dishes, said to originate in the Northern West Bank, near Jenin and Tulkarem, is musakhan - roasted chicken smothered in fried onions, pine nuts, and sumac (a dark red, lemony flavored spice), and laid over taboon.

Art

Main article: Palestinian art

Similar to the structure of Palestinian society, the Palestinian art field extends over four main geographic centers: 1) the West Bank and Gaza Strip 2) Israel 3) the Palestinian diaspora in the Arab world, and 4) the Palestinian diaspora in Europe and the United States.

Contemporary Palestinian art finds its roots in folk art and traditional Christian and Islamic painting popular in Palestine over the ages. After the 1948 Palestinian exodus, nationalistic themes have predominated as Palestinian artists use diverse media to express and explore their connection to identity and land.

Pottery

Main article: Palestinian pottery

Palestinian pottery shows a remarkable continuity throughout the ages. Modern Palestinian pots, bowls, jugs and cups, particularly those produced prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948, are similar in shape, fabric and decoration to their ancient equivalents. Cooking pots, jugs, mugs and plates that are still hand-made and fired in open, charcoal-fuelled kilns as in ancient times in historic villages like al-Jib (Gibeon), Beitin (Bethel) and Senjel.

Costume and embroidery

Main article: Palestinian costumes

Foreign travelers to Palestine in late 19th and early 20th centuries often commented on the rich variety of costumes among the Palestinian people, and particularly among the fellaheen or village women.

Until the 1940s, a woman's economic status, whether married or single, and the town or area they were from could be deciphered by most Palestinian women by the type of cloth, colors, cut, and embroidery motifs, or lack thereof, used for the dress.

Though such local and regional variations largely disappeared after the 1948 Palestinian exodus, Palestinian embroidery and costume continue to be produced in new forms and worn alongside Islamic and Western fashions.

Film

Main article: Palestinian cinema

Palestinian cinema is relatively young in comparison to Arab cinema as a whole, many Palestinian movies are made with European and Israeli funding and support.[7] Palestinian movies are not exclusively produced in Arabic and some are made in English, French and Hebrew.[8]

It is believed that there have been over 800 films produced about Palestinians, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and other related topics.[9]

Ancestry of the Palestinians

See also: Palestine

See also: History of Palestine

The Palestinian "Ayoub" family of Ghassanid ancestry from Ramallah AKA 1905

Palestinians, like most other Arabic-speakers, combine ancestries from those who have come to settle the region throughout history, a matter on which genetic evidence (see below) has begun to shed some light. Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist writes:

"Throughout history a great diversity of peoples has moved into Palestine as their homeland: Jebusites, Canaanites, Philistines from Crete, Anatolian and Lydian Greeks, Hebrews, Amorites, Edomites, Nabateans, Arameans, Romans, Arabs, and 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 Mongols, 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."

Bernard Lewis, an American historian 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..."

Semitic tribes from the Arabian peninsula began migrating into Palestine as early as the 3rd millennium BCE, and among these migrants were the Arabs, such that the region was Arabized centuries before the Islamic era began. Aramaic and Greek were replaced by Arabic as the area's dominant language. Among the cultural survivals from pre-Islamic times are the significant Palestinian Christian community, and smaller Jewish and Samaritan ones, as well as an Aramaic and possibly Hebrew sub-stratum in the local Palestinian Arabic dialect.

The Bedouins of Palestine are said to be more securely known to be Arab ancestrally as well as by culture; their distinctively conservative dialects and pronunciation of qaaf as gaaf group them with other Bedouin across the Arab world and confirm their separate history. Arabic onomastic elements began to appear in Edomite inscriptions starting in the 6th century BC, and are nearly universal in the inscriptions of the Nabataeans, who arrived in today’s Jordan in the 4th-3rd centuries BC. It has thus been suggested that the present day Bedouins of the region may have their origins as early as this period. A few Bedouin are found as far north as Galilee; however, these seem to be much later arrivals, rather than descendants of the Arabs that Sargon II settled in Samaria in 720 BC.

Canaanite claims

The claim that Palestinians are direct descendants of the region's earliest inhabitants, the Canaanites, has been put forward by some authors. Marcia Kunstel and Joseph Albright, author-journalists, for example put forward this claim in their 1990 book Their Promised Land: Arab and Jew in History's Cauldron-One Valley in the Jerusalem Hills. Kathleen Christison notes in her review of the work that Kunstel and Albright are "those rare historians who give credence to the Palestinians' claim that their 'origins and early attachment to the land' derive from the Canaanites five millennia ago, and that they are an amalgamation of every people who has ever lived in Palestine."

Adel Yahya, a Palestinian archaeologist, also claims that modern-day Palestinians are the direct descendants of the Philistines and that they might be descendants of the ancient Canaanites. Sandra Scham, an American archaeologist at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem and author of Archaeology of the Disenfranchised dismissed such conclusions as falling into the realm of 'popular imagination and folklore.'

In an article in the journal Science, it was reported that "most Palestinian archaeologists were quick to distance themselves from these ideas," with the reasons cited by those interviewed centering around the view that the issue of who was in Palestine first constitutes an ideological issue that lies outside of the realm of archaeological study. Bernard Lewis writes that, "The rewriting of the past is usually undertaken to achieve specific political aims... in bypassing the biblical Israelites and claiming kinship with the Canaanites, the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Palestine, it is possible to assert a historical claim antedating the biblical promise and possession put forward by the Jews."

Zakariyya Mohammed also assigns the search for Canaanite roots to a desire to predate Jewish national claims. Describing 'Canaanism' as a "losing ideology when used to manage our conflict with the Zionist movement," he writes that, "'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..."

Salim Tamari posits that the Canaanite revivalist writings following the war of 1948 were a reaction to Zionist attempts at establishing their own claims to Israelite and biblical motifs. Like Mohammed, Tamari also criticized this tendency for giving up "any attempt to relocate (or even relate) modern Palestinian cultural affinities to biblical roots. They seem to have abandoned this patrimony of biblical representation to Jewish nationalist discourse, in a paradoxical manner, reinforcing the claims of their protagonists. [Tawfiq] Canaan and his group, by contrast, were not Canaanites. They contested Zionist claims to biblical patrimonies by stressing present day continuities between the biblical heritage (and occasionally pre-biblical roots) and Palestinian popular beliefs and practices."

Tamari further notes the paradoxes that emerged in the a parallel search for nativist roots among Zionists and the so-called Canaanite (anti-Zionist) followers of Yonatan Ratosh. He cites the example of Ber Borochov who claimed that the lack of a crystallized national consciousness among Palestinian Arabs would result in their likely assimilation into the new Hebrew nationalism, basing this on the belief that: "the fellahin are considered in this context as the descendants of the ancient Hebrew and Canaanite residents 'together with a small admixture of Arab blood'". Ahad Ha'am also shared the belief 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." Even David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi tried to establish in a 1918 paper written in Yiddish that Palestinian peasants and their mode of life were living historical testimonies to Israelite practices in the biblical period. Tamari notes that "the ideological implications of this claim became very problematic and were soon withdrawn from circulation."

DNA clues

Results of a DNA study by geneticist Ariella Oppenheim matched historical accounts that "some Moslem Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in the southern Levant, a region that includes Israel and the Sinai. They were descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times."

In genetic genealogy studies, Palestinian Arabs were found to have the second-highest rate of Haplogroup J1 (Y-DNA) among Arab groups, behind Bedouins, at 38.4%. The haplogroup, associated with marker M267, originates in the Levant and was first disseminated from there into Ethiopia and Europe in Neolithic times; a second diffusion of the marker took place in the 7th century CE when Arabs brought it to North Africa. (See also J1 Haplogroup frequencies:[10]) The haplogroup subclade is most common in the southern Levant, as well as Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and Arabia, while it sharply drops at the border of non-Arab areas like Turkey and Iran. While it is also found in Jewish populations, the related haplogroup J2 (M172) is more than twice as common in Jews. Th frequency of both J1-M267 and J2-M172 decrease with distance from the Levant in all directions, reinforcing this region as the most probable origin of its dispersions (Semino et al. 1996; Rosser et al. 2000; Quintana-Murci et al. 2001).

According to a study in the European Journal of Human Genetics, "Arab and other Semitic populations usually possess an excess of J1 Y chromosomes compared to other populations harboring Y-haplogroup J". According to Semino et al. (2004), J-M267 (ie. J1) shows its highest frequencies in the Middle East. It is also found Northeast Africa and Europe, having spread in late Neolithic times; and during a second-wave in the southern part of the Middle East and in Northwest Africa.

Haplogroup J1 (Y-DNA) includes the modal haplotype of the Galilee Arabs (Nebel et al. 2000) and of Moroccan Arabs (Bosch et al. 2001). According to a 2002 study by Nebel et al., on Genetic evidence for the expansion of Arabian tribes, the highest frequency of Eu10 (i.e. J1) (30%–62.5%) has been observed so far in various Moslem Arab populations in the Middle East. (Semino et al. 2000; Nebel et al. 2001). The most frequent Eu10 microsatellite haplotype in NW Africans is identical to a modal haplotype of Moslem Arabs who live in a small area in the north of Israel, the Galilee. (Nebel et al. 2000) termed the modal haplotype of the Galilee (MH Galilee). Interestingly, this modal haplotype is also the most frequent haplotype in the population from the town of Sena, in Yemen (Thomas et al. 2000). Its single-step neighbor is the most common haplotype of the Yemeni Hadramaut sample (Thomas et al. 2000). The presence of this particular modal haplotype at a significant frequency in three separate geographic locales makes independent genetic-drift events unlikely. The term “Arab,” as well as the presence of Arabs in the Syrian desert and the Fertile Crescent, is first seen in the Assyrian sources from the 9th century bce (Eph'al 1984).

A coffee house in Palestine, ca 1900

In recent years, many genetic surveys have suggested that, at least paternally, most of the various Jewish ethnic divisions and the Palestinians — and in some cases other Levantines — are genetically closer to each other than the Palestinians to the original Arabs of Arabia or [European] Jews to non-Jewish Europeans. Nebel et al. (2001) report that their "recent study of high-resolution microsatellite haplotypes demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool (Nebel et al. 2000)."[11]

These studies look at the prevalence of specific inherited genetic differences among populations, which then allow the relatedness of these populations to be determined, and their ancestry to be traced back through population genetics. These differences can be the cause of genetic disease or be completely neutral (Single nucleotide polymorphism). They can be inherited maternally (mitochondrial DNA), paternally (Y chromosome), or as a mixture from both parents; the results obtained may vary from polymorphism to polymorphism.

One study on congenital deafness identified an allele only found in Palestinian and Ashkenazi communities, suggesting a common origin. An investigation of a Y-chromosome polymorphism found Lebanese, Palestinian, and Sephardic populations to be particularly closely related; a third study [12], looking at Human leukocyte antigen differences among a broad range of populations, found Palestinians to be particularly closely related to Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews, as well as Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean populations.

One point in which Palestinians and Ashkenazi Jews and most Near Eastern Jewish communities appear to contrast is in the proportion of sub-Saharan African gene types which have entered their gene pools. One study found that Palestinians and some other Arabic-speaking populations — Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Bedouins — have what appears to be substantial gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa, amounting to 10-15% of lineages within the past three millennia. In a context of contrast with other Arab populations not mentioned, the African gene types are rarely shared, except among Yemenites, where the average is actually higher at 35%. Yemenite Jews, being a mixture of local Yemenite and Israelite ancestries, are also included in the findings for Yemenites, though they average a quarter of the frequency of the non-Jewish Yemenite sample. Other Middle Eastern populations, particularly non-Arabic speakers — Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Azeris, and Georgians — have few or no such lineages. The findings suggest that gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa has been specifically into Arabic-speaking populations (including at least one Arabic-speaking Jewish population, as indicated in Yemenite Jews), possibly due to the Arab slave trade. Other Near Eastern Jewish groups (whose Arabic-speaking heritage was not indicated by the study) almost entirely lack haplogroups L1–L3A, as is the case with Ashkenazi Jews. The sub-Saharan African genetic component of Ethiopian Jews and other African Jewish groups were not contrasted in the study, however, independent studies have shown those Jewish groups to be principally indigenous African in origin.

See also

• List of Palestinians
• Arab diaspora

References

• Boyle, Kevin and Sheen, Juliet (1997). Freedom of Religion and Belief: A World Report. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415159776
• Cohen, Robin (1995). The Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521444055
• Drummond, Dorothy Weitz (2004). Holy Land, Whose Land?: Modern Dilemma, Ancient Roots. Fairhurst Press. ISBN 0974823325
• Farsoun, Samih K. (2004). Culture and Customs Of The Palestinians. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313320519
• Guzmán, Roberto Marín (2000). A Century of Palestinian Immigration Into Central America. Editorial Universidad de C.R. ISBN 9977675872
• Healey, John F. (2001). The Religion of the Nabataeans: A Conspectus. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 9004107541
• Howell, Mark (2007). What Did We Do to Deserve This? Palestinian Life under Occupation in the West Bank, Garnet Publishing. ISBN 1859641954
• Khalidi, Rashid (1997). Identity:The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231105142. OCLC 35637858. LCCN 96-0 – 0.
• Khalidi, Rashid (2006). The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-8070-0308-5
• Porath, Yehoshua (1974). The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement 1918-1929. London: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd. ISBN 0-7146-2939-1
• Porath, Yehoshua (1977). Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion: 1929-1939, vol. 2, London: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd.

External links

• BBC: Israel and the Palestinians
• Save the Children: life in a refugee camp
• Guardian Special Report: Israel and the Middle East
• United Nations Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People
• al-Jazeera: Palestine, the People and the Land
• The Palestine National Charter
• Palestine: Contemporary Art - online magazine articles