Palestinians

Palestinians
(الفلسطينيون al-Filasṭīniyyūn)

File:Palestinian infobox v2.jpg Row 1:Tawfiq Canaan • Mahmoud Darwish • George Habash • Edward Said Row 2:Riah Hanna Abu El-Assal • Queen Rania of Jordan • Riyad al-Maliki • Leila Khaled Row 3: Rashid Khalidi • Juliano Mer Khamis • Mitri Raheb • Mustafa Barghouthi Row 4: Yassir Arafat • Mohammad Bakri • Hanan Ashrawi • Nathalie Handal
Total population
c. 11,000,000
Regions with significant populations
Palestinian territories	4,019,433
– West Bank (inc. East Jerusalem)	2,515,845
– Gaza Strip	1,604,238
Jordan	3,000,000
Israel	1,650,000
Syria	630,000
Chile	500,000
Lebanon	402,582
Saudi Arabia	280,245
Egypt	270,245
United States	255,000
Honduras	250,000
United Arab Emirates	170,000
Mexico	120,000
Qatar	100,000
Germany	80,000
Kuwait	70,000
El Salvador	70,000
Brazil	59,000
Iraq	57,000
Yemen	55,000
Canada	50,975
Australia	45,000
Libya	44,000
United Kingdom	20,000
Peru	15,000
Colombia	12,000
Pakistan	10,500
Netherlands	9,000
Sweden	7,000
Guatemala	1,400
Languages
Palestinian territories: Palestinian Arabic, Hebrew, English, Neo-Aramaic, and Greek Israel Palestinian Arabic, Hebrew, English, Neo-Aramaic, and Greek Diaspora: Other varieties of Arabic, the vernacular languages of other countries in the Palestinian diaspora.
Religion
Majority: Sunni Islam Minority: Christian, Druze, Judaism
Related ethnic groups
Other Levantines, Mediterraneans, Canaanites, Sea Peoples, Middle Eastern: Semitic peoples: Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Mizrahim, Samaritans, Arabs, Assyrians

The Palestinian people, (Arabic: الشعب الفلسطيني, ash-sha‘b al-Filasṭīnī) also referred to as Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيون, al-Filasṭīniyyūn), are the modern descendants of the peoples who have lived in Palestine over the centuries, and who today are largely culturally and linguistically Arab due to Arabization of the region. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. In this combined area, as of 2004, Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants, encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.6 million), the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2.3 million versus close to 500,000 Jewish Israeli citizens which includes about 200,000 in East Jerusalem), and 16.5% of the population of Israel proper as Arab citizens of Israel. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip, three-quarters of a million in the West Bank, and about a quarter of a million in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half are stateless lacking citizenship in any country. About 2.6 million of the diaspora population live in neighboring Jordan where they make up approximately half the population, 1.5 million live between Syria and Lebanon, a quarter of a million in Saudi Arabia, with Chile's half a million representing the largest concentration outside the Arab world.

Genetic analysis suggests that a majority of the Muslims of Palestine, inclusive of Arab citizens of Israel, are descendants of Christians, Jews and other earlier inhabitants of the southern Levant whose core may reach back to prehistoric times. A study of high-resolution haplotypes demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Israeli Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool. Since the time of the Muslim conquests in the 7th century, religious conversions have resulted in Palestinians being predominantly Sunni Muslim by religious affiliation, though there is a significant Palestinian Christian minority of various Christian denominations, as well as Druze and a small Samaritan community. Though Palestinian Jews made up part of the population of Palestine prior to the creation of the State of Israel, few identify as "Palestinian" today. Acculturation, independent from conversion to Islam, resulted in Palestinians being linguistically and culturally Arab. The vernacular of Palestinians, irrespective of religion, is the Palestinian dialect of Arabic. Many Arab citizens of Israel including Palestinians are bilingual and fluent in Hebrew.

The history of a distinct Palestinian national identity is a disputed issue amongst scholars. Legal historian Assaf Likhovski states that the prevailing view is that Palestinian identity originated in the early decades of the twentieth century. "Palestinian" was used to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by the Arabs of Palestine in a limited way until World War I. The first demand for national independence of the Levant was issued by the Syrian–Palestinian Congress on 21 September 1921. After the creation of the State of Israel, the exodus of 1948, and more so after the exodus of 1967, the term came to signify not only a place of origin, but also the sense of a shared past and future in the form of a Palestinian state. According to Rashid Khalidi, the modern Palestinian people now understand their identity as encompassing the heritage of all ages from biblical times up to the Ottoman period.

Founded in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is an umbrella organization for groups that represent the Palestinian people before the international community. The Palestinian National Authority, officially established 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.

Etymology

See also: Timeline of the name Palestine

Historical Palestine as described by medieval Arab geographers showing the derived Arabic term Jund Filastin (meaning "Division of Palestine") as was used by Umayyad Caliphate 7th century AD

The Greek toponym Palaistínē (Παλαιστίνη), with which the Arabic Filastin (فلسطين) is cognate, first occurs in the work of the 5th. century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, where it denotes generally the coastal land from Phoenicia down to Egypt. Herodotus also employs the term as an ethnonym, as when he speaks of the 'Syrians of Palestine' or 'Palestinian-Syrians', an ethnically amorphous group he distinguishes from the Phoenicians). The Greek word bears comparison to a congeries of ancient ethnonyms and toponyms. In Ancient Egyptian Peleset/Purusati refers to one of the Sea Peoples. Among Semitic languages, Assyrian Palastu generally refers to southern Palestine. Old Hebrew's cognate word Plištim, usually translated Philistines, does not distinguish them and the other Sea Peoples, who settled in Palestine around 1100 BCE.

Syria Palestina continued to be used by historians and geographers and others to refer to the area between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river, as in the writings of Philo, Josephus and Pliny the Elder. After the Romans adopted the term as the official administrative name for the region in the 2nd century CE, "Palestine" as a stand alone term came into widespread use, printed on coins, in inscriptions and even in rabbinic texts. The Arabic word Filastin has been used to refer to the region since the time of the earliest medieval Arab geographers. It appears to have been used as an Arabic adjectival noun in the region since as early as the 7th century CE. The Arabic language newspaper Filasteen (est. 1911), published in Jaffa by Issa and Yusef al-Issa, addressed its readers as "Palestinians".

A Palestinian Family from Ramallah, 1905.

During the British Mandate of Palestine, the term "Palestinian" was used to refer to all people residing there, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and those granted citizenship by the Mandatory authorities were granted "Palestinian citizenship". Other examples include the use of the term Palestine Regiment to refer to the Jewish Infantry Brigade Group of the British Army during World War II, and the term "Palestinian Talmud", which is an alternative name of the Jerusalem Talmud, used mainly in academic sources.

Following the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel, the use and application of the terms "Palestine" and "Palestinian" by and to Palestinian Jews largely dropped from use. For example, the English-language newspaper The Palestine Post, founded by Jews in 1932, 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." Note that "Arab nationals" is not religious-specific, and it implicitly includes not only the Arabic-speaking Muslims of Palestine, but also the Arabic-speaking Christians of Palestine and other religious communities of Palestine who were at that time Arabic-speakers, such as the Samaritans and Druze. Thus, the Jews of Palestine were/are also included, although limited only to "the [Arabic-speaking] Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the [pre-state] Zionist invasion." The Charter also states that "Palestine with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit."

History

Palestinian history and nationalism

Main articles: History of the Palestinian people, History of Palestinian nationality, and Palestinian nationalism

Saladin's Falcon: Coat of Arms and Emblem of the Palestinian Authority

The timing and causes behind the emergence of a distinctively Palestinian national consciousness among the Arabs of Palestine are matters of scholarly disagreement. Some argue that it can be traced as far back as the 1834 Arab revolt in Palestine (or even as early as the 17th century), while others argue that it didn't emerge until after the Mandate Palestine period. According to legal historian Assaf Likhovski, the prevailing view is that Palestinian identity originated in the early decades of the twentieth century.

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. Noting that Palestinian identity has never been an exclusive one, with "Arabism, religion, and local loyalties" playing an important role, Khalidi cautions against the efforts of some Palestinian nationalists to "anachronistically" read back into history a nationalist consciousness that is in fact "relatively modern".

Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal consider the 1834 revolt of the Arabs in Palestine as constituting the first formative event of the Palestinian people. From 1516–1917, Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire save a brief period In the 1830s when an Egyptian vassal of the Ottomans, Muhammad Ali, and his son Ibrahim Pasha asserted their own rule over the area. The revolt by Palestine's Arabs was precipitated by popular resistance against heavy demands for conscripts, with the peasants well aware that conscription was little more than a death sentence. Starting in May 1834 the rebels took many cities, among them Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus and Ibrahim Pasha's army was deployed, defeating the last rebels on 4 August in Hebron. Benny Morris argues that the Arabs in Palestine nevertheless remained part of a larger pan-Islamist or pan-Arab national movement. Walid Khalidi argues otherwise, writing that Palestinians in Ottoman times were "[a]cutely aware of the distinctiveness of Palestinian history ..." and "[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."

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 that 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." Conversely, 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."

Muslims pray in Jerusalem, 1840. By David Roberts

David Seddon writes that "[t]he creation of Palestinian identity in its contemporary sense was formed essentially during the 1960s, with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization". He adds, however, that "the existence of a population with a recognizably similar name ('the Philistines') in Biblical times suggests a degree of continuity over a long historical period (much as 'the Israelites' of the Bible suggest a long historical continuity in the same region)."

Bernard Lewis argues it was not as a Palestinian nation that the Arabs of Ottoman Palestine objected to Zionists, since the very concept of such a nation was unknown to the Arabs of the area at the time and did not come into being until very much later. Even the concept of Arab nationalism in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, "had not reached significant proportions before the outbreak of World War I." Tamir Sorek, a sociologist, submits that, "Although a distinct Palestinian identity can be traced back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century (Kimmerling and Migdal 1993; Khalidi 1997b), or even to the seventeenth century (Gerber 1998), it was not until after World War I that a broad range of optional political affiliations became relevant for the Arabs of Palestine."

Whatever the differing viewpoints over the timing, causal mechanisms, and orientation of Palestinian nationalism, 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 Palestinian Territories, such as Al-Karmil (est. 1908) and Filasteen (est. 1911). Filasteen initially focused 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 (Arabic: فلاحين, fellahin), expressing growing concern over land dispossession and its implications for the society at large.

Arab market at Jaffa, 1877 painting

The first Palestinian nationalist organisations emerged at the end of the World War I. Two political factions emerged. al-Muntada al-Adabi, dominated by the Nashashibi family, militated for the promotion of the Arabic language and culture, for the defense of Islamic values and for an independent Syria and Palestine. In Damascus, al-Nadi al-Arabi, dominated by the Husayni family, defended the same values.

The historical record continued to reveal an interplay between "Arab" and "Palestinian" identities and nationalism. The idea of a unique Palestinian state separated out from its Arab neighbors was at first rejected by 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 Nabi Musa riots, the San Remo conference and the failure of Faisal to establish the Kingdom of Greater Syria, a distinctive form of Palestinian Arab nationalism took root between April and July 1920. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the French conquest of Syria, 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".

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.

Struggle for self-determination

See also: Palestinian cause

Palestinians have not exercised full sovereignty over the land in which they have lived during the modern era. Palestine was administered by the Ottoman Empire until World War I, and then overseen by the British Mandatory authorities. Israel was established in parts of Palestine in 1948, and in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were occupied by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip by Egypt, with both countries continuing to administer these areas until Israel occupied them in the Six-Day War. Historian Avi Shlaim states that the Palestinians' lack of sovereignty over the land has been used by Israelis to deny Palestinians their rights [to self-determination].

Today, the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination has been affirmed by the United Nations General Assembly, the International Court of Justice and several Israeli authorities. A total of 122 countries recognize Palestine as a state. However, Palestinian sovereignty over the areas claimed as part of the Palestinian state remains limited, and the boundaries of the state remain a point of contestation between Palestinians and Israelis.

Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni leader of the Army of the Holy War in 1948

British Mandate (1917–1948)

File:EzeldinQassam.jpg

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, Sunni Islamic preacher and founder of the Black Hand

Article 22 of The Covenant of the League of Nations conferred an international legal status upon the territories and people which had ceased to be under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire as part of a 'sacred trust of civilization'. Article 7 of the League of Nations Mandate required the establishment of a new, separate, Palestinian nationality for the inhabitants. This meant that Palestinians did not become British citizens, and that Palestine was not annexed into the British dominions. The Mandate document divided the population into Jewish and non-Jewish, and Britain, the Mandatory Power considered the Palestinian population to be comprisd of religious, not national, groups. Consequently government censuses in 1922 and 1931 would categorize Palestinians confessionally as Muslims, Christians and Jews, with the category of Arab absent.

After the British general, Louis Bols, read out the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in February 1920, some 1,500 Palestinians demonstrated in the streets of Jerusalem. A month later, during the 1920 Palestine riots, the protests against British rule and Jewish immigration became violent and Bols banned all demonstrations. In May 1921 however, further anti-Jewish riots broke out in Jaffa and dozens of Arabs and Jews were killed in the confrontations.

The articles of the Mandate mentioned the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine, but not their political status. At the San Remo conference it was decided to accept the text of those articles, while inserting in the minutes of the conference an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of any of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine. In 1922, the British authorities over Mandate Palestine proposed a draft constitution that would have granted the Palestinian Arabs representation in a Legislative Council on condition that they accept the terms of the mandate. 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. They further took 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.

After the killing of Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam by the British in 1935, his followers initiated the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, which began with a general strike in Jaffa and attacks on Jewish and British installations in Nablus. The Arab High Committee called for a nationwide general strike, non-payment of taxes, and the closure of municipal governments, and demanded an end to Jewish immigration and a ban of the sale of land to Jews. By the end of 1936, the movement had become a national revolt, and resistance grew during 1937 and 1938. In response, the British declared martial law, dissolved the Arab High Committee and arrested officials from the Supreme Muslim Council who were behind the revolt. By 1939, 5,000 Arabs had been killed in British attempts to quash the revolt; more than 15,000 were wounded.

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. Khalidi attributes this to the tramautic events of 1947-1949, which included the depopulation of over 400 towns and villages and the creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees. 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.

Israeli historian Efraim Karsh takes the view that the Palestinian identity did not develop until after the 1967 war because the Palestinian exodus had fractured society so greatly that it was impossible to piece together a national identity. Between 1948 and 1967, the Jordanians and other Arab countries hosting Arab refugees from Palestine/Israel silenced any expression of Palestinian identity and occupied their lands until Israel's conquests of 1967. The formal annexation of the West Bank by Jordan in 1950, and the subsequent granting of its Palestinian Arab residents Jordanian citizenship, further stunted the growth of a Palestinian national identity by integrating them into Jordanian society.

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 Palestinians for whom Arabism was already an important component of their identity—tended to obscure the identities of the separate Arab states it subsumed.

1967–present

Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, in a Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Lebanon, 1978

File:Palestine girl with flag-284x358.png

Palestinian girl with the Palestinian Flag

Since 1967, pan-Arabism has waned as an aspect of Palestinian identity. The Israeli capture of the Gaza Strip and West Bank triggered a second Palestinian exodus and fractured Palestinian political and militant groups, prompting them to give up residual hopes in pan-Arabism. They rallied increasingly around the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had been some years earlier, in 1964, and its nationalistic orientation under the leadership of Yasser Arafat. Mainstream secular Palestinian nationalism was grouped together under the umbrella of the PLO whose constituent organizations include Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, among other groups who at that time believed that political violence was the only way to liberate Palestine. These groups gave 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, particularly among Palestinians in exile. Concurrently, among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a new ideological theme, known as sumud, represented the Palestinian political strategy popularly adopted from 1967 onward. As a concept closely related to the land, agriculture and indigenousness, the ideal image of the Palestinian put forward at this time was that of the peasant (in Arabic, fellah) who stayed put on his land, refusing to leave. A strategy more passive than that adopted by the Palestinian fedayeen, sumud provided an important subtext to the narrative of the fighters, "in symbolizing continuity and connections with the land, with peasantry and a rural way of life."

In 1974, the PLO was recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people by the Arab nation-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 Yigal 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, endeavor to liquidate the State of Israel.'

In 1975 the United Nations established a subsidiary organ, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, to recommend a program of implementation to enable the Palestinian people to exercise national independence and their rights to self-determination without external interference, national independence and sovereignty, and to return to their homes and property.

UN stamp to commemorate the Palestinian struggle.

The First Intifada (1987–1993) was the first popular uprising against the Israeli occupation of 1967. Followed by the PLO's 1988 proclamation of a State of Palestine, these developments served to further reinforce the Palestinian national identity. At the end of the Gulf War, Kuwait expelled some 450,000 Palestinians from its territory, making it the second largest displacement of Palestinians after 1948 Palestine War. Kuwait's expulsion policy, which led to this exodus, was a response to alignment of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the PLO with Saddam Hussein, who had earlier invaded Kuwait. The 1991 Palestinian exodus took place during one week in March 1991, following Kuwait's liberation from Iraqi occupation. Prior to the exodus, Palestinians made up about 30% of Kuwait's population of 2.2 million. By 2006 only a few had returned to Kuwait.

The Oslo Accords, the first Israeli-Palestinian interim peace agreement, were signed in 1993. The process was envisioned to last five years, ending in June 1999, when the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area began. The expiration of this term without the recognition by Israel of the Palestinian State and without the effective termination of the occupation was followed by the Second Intifada in 2000. The second intifada was more violent than the first. The International Court of Justice observed that since the government of Israel had decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, their existence was no longer an issue. The court noted that the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of 28 September 1995 also referred a number of times to the Palestinian people and its "legitimate rights". The right of self-determination gives the Palestinians collectively an inalienable right to freely choose their political status, including the establishment of a sovereign and independent state. Israel, having recognized the Palestinians as a separate people, is obliged to promote and respect this right in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.

Contemporary writing

The Outline of History, by H.G.Wells (1920), notes the following about this geographic region and the turmoil of the times:

It was clearly a source of strength to them Turks, rather than weakness, that they were cut off altogether from their age-long ineffective conflict with the Arab. Syria, Mesopotamia, were entirely detached from Turkish rule. Palestine was made a separate state within the British sphere, earmarked as a national home for the Jews. A flood of poor Jewish immigrants poured into the promised land and was speedily involved in serious conflicts with the Arab population. The Arabs had been consolidated against the Turks and inspired with a conception of national unity through the exertions of a young Oxford scholar, Colonel Lawrence. His dream of an Arab kingdom with its capital at Damascus was speedily shattered by the hunger of the French and British for mandatory territory, and in the end his Arab kingdom shrank to the desert kingdom of the Hedjaz and various other small and insecure imamates, emirates and sultanates. If ever they are united, and struggle into civilization, it will not be under Western auspices.

Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Graffiti on the road toBethlehem in the West Bank stating "Ich bin ein Berliner" (English: "I am a Berliner")

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the ongoing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians that began in the early 20th century. The conflict is wide-ranging, and the term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between the Zionist yishuv and the Arab population living in Palestine under Ottoman and then British rule. It forms part of the wider Arab–Israeli conflict. The remaining key issues are: mutual recognition, borders, security, water rights, control of Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, Palestinian freedom of movement and finding a resolution to the refugee question. The violence resulting from the conflict has prompted international actions, as well as other security and human rights concerns, both within and between both sides, and internationally. In addition, the violence has curbed expansion of tourism in the region, which is full of historic and religious sites that are of interest to many people around the world.

Many attempts have been made to broker a two-state solution, involving the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside an independent Jewish state or next to the State of Israel (after Israel's establishment in 1948). In 2007 a majority of both Israelis and Palestinians, according to a number of polls, preferred the two-state solution over any other solution as a means of resolving the conflict. Moreover, a considerable majority of the Jewish public sees the Palestinians' demand for an independent state as just, and thinks Israel can agree to the establishment of such a state. A majority of Palestinians and Israelis view the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an acceptable location of the hypothetical Palestinian state in a two-state solution. However, there are significant areas of disagreement over the shape of any final agreement and also regarding the level of credibility each side sees in the other in upholding basic commitments.

Within Israeli and Palestinian society, the conflict generates a wide variety of views and opinions. This highlights the deep divisions which exist not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but also within each society. A hallmark of the conflict has been the level of violence witnessed for virtually its entire duration. Fighting has been conducted by regular armies, paramilitary groups, terror cells and individuals. Casualties have not been restricted to the military, with a large number of fatalities in civilian population on both sides. There are prominent international actors involved in the conflict.

Zionism

When Zionism began taking root among Jewish communities in Europe, many Jews emigrated to Palestine and established settlements there. When Palestinian Arabs concerned themselves with Zionists, they generally assumed the movement would fail. After the Young Turk revolution in 1908, Arab Nationalism grew rapidly in the area and most Arab Nationalists regarded Zionism as a threat, although a minority perceived Zionism as providing a path to modernity. Though there had already been Arab protests to the Ottoman authorities in the 1880s against land sales to foreign Jews, the most serious opposition began in the 1890s after the full scope of the Zionist enterprise became known. There was a general sense of threat. This sense was heightened in the early years of the 20th century by Zionist attempts to develop an economy from which Arab people were largely excluded, such as the "Hebrew labor" movement which campaigned against the employment of cheap Arab labour. The creation of Palestine in 1918 and the Balfour Declaration greatly increased Arab fears. Palestinian nationalism is the national movement of the Palestinian people. It has roots in Pan-Arabism, the rejection of colonialism and movements calling for national independence. Unlike pan-Arabism in general, Palestinian nationalism has emphasized Palestinian self-government and has rejected the historic non-domestic Arab rule by Egypt over the Gaza Strip and Jordan over the West Bank.

Palestinian nationalism

Palestinian nationalism is the national movement of the Palestinian people. It has roots in Pan-Arabism, the rejection of colonialism and movements calling for national independence. Unlike pan-Arabism in general, Palestinian nationalism has emphasized Palestinian self-government and has rejected the historic non-domestic Arab rule by Egypt over the Gaza Strip and Jordan over the West Bank. Before the development of modern nationalism, loyalty tended to focus on a city or a particular leader. The term "nationalismus", translated as nationalism, was coined by Johann Gottfried Herder in the late 1770s. Palestinian nationalism has been compared to other nationalist movements, such as Pan-Arabism and Zionism. Some nationalists argue that “the nation was always there, indeed it is part of the natural order, even when it was submerged in the hearts of its members.” In keeping with this philosophy, Al-Quds University states that although “Palestine was conquered in times past by ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Israel, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Muslim Arabs, Mamlukes, Ottomans, the British, the Zionists…the population remained constant-and is now still Palestinian.”

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, but derides the efforts of some Palestinian nationalists to attempt to "anachronistically" read back into history a nationalist consciousness that is in fact "relatively modern." Khalidi stresses that Palestinian identity has never been an exclusive one, with "Arabism, religion, and local loyalties" playing an important role. He 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 which sharpened following the demarcation of modern nation-state boundaries in the Middle East after World War I. He acknowledges that Zionism played a role in shaping this identity, though "it is a serious mistake to suggest that Palestinian identity emerged mainly as a response to Zionism." Khalidi describes the Arab population of British Mandatory Palestine as having "overlapping identities," with some or many expressing loyalties to villages, regions, a projected nation of Palestine, an alternative of inclusion in a Greater Syria, an Arab national project, as well as to Islam. He writes that,"local patriotism could not yet be described as nation-state nationalism."

Israeli historian Haim Gerber, a professor of Islamic History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, traces Arab nationalism back to a 17th century religious leader, Mufti Khayr al-Din al-Ramli (1585–1671) who lived in Ramla. He claims that Khayr al-Din al-Ramli's religious edicts (fatwa, plural fatawa), collected into final form in 1670 under the name al-Fatawa al-Khayriyah, attest to territorial awareness: "These fatawa are a contemporary record of the time, and also give a complex view of agrarian relations." Mufti Khayr al-Din al-Ramli's 1670 collection entitled al-Fatawa al-Khayriyah mentions the concepts Filastin, biladuna (our country), al-Sham (Syria), Misr (Egypt), and diyar (country), in senses that appear to go beyond objective geography. Gerber describes this as "embryonic territorial awareness, though the reference is to social awareness rather than to a political one."

Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal consider the 1834 Arab revolt in Palestine as the first formative event of the Palestinian people, whereas Benny Morris stest that the Arabs in Palestine remained part of a larger Pan-Islamist or Pan-Arab national movement.

In his book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, James L. Gelvin states that "Palestinian nationalism emerged during the interwar period in response to Zionist immigration and settlement." However, this does not make 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."

Bernard Lewis argues it was not as a Palestinian nation that the Palestinian Arabs of the Ottoman empire objected to Zionists, since the very concept of such a nation was unknown to the Arabs of the area at the time and did not come into being until later. Even the concept of Arab nationalism in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, "had not reached significant proportions before the outbreak of World War I."

Daniel Pipes asserts that “No 'Palestinian Arab people' existed at the start of 1920 but by December it took shape in a form recognizably similar to today's.” Pipes argues that with the carving of the British Mandate of Palestine out of Greater Syria the Arabs of the new Mandate were forced to make the best they could of their situation, and therefore began to define themselves as Palestinian.

Modern evolution of Palestine

1916–1922 various proposals: Three proposals for the post World War I administration of Palestine. The red line is the "International Administration" proposed in the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, the dashed blue line is the 1919 Zionist Organization proposal at the Paris Peace Conference, and the thin blue line refers to the final borders of the 1923–48 Mandatory Palestine.

1937 British proposal: The first official proposal for partition, published in 1937 by the Peel Commission. An ongoing British Mandate was proposed to keep "the sanctity of Jerusalem and Bethlehem", in the form of an enclave from Jerusalem to Jaffa, including Lydda and Ramle.

1947 UN proposal: Proposal per the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine (UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 1947), prior to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The proposal included a Corpus Separatum for Jerusalem, extraterritorial crossroads between the non-contiguous areas, and Jaffa as an Arab exclave.

1947 Jewish private land ownership: Jewish-owned lands in Mandatory Palestine as of 1947 in blue, constituting 7.4% of the total land area, of which more than half was held by the JNF and PICA. White is either public land or Palestinian-Arab-owned lands including related religious trusts.

1949 armistice lines: The Jordanian-annexed West Bank (light green) and Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip (dark green), after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, showing 1949 armistice lines.

1967 territorial changes: During the Six-Day War, Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, together with the Sinai Peninsula (later traded for peace after the Yom Kippur War). In 1980–81 Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Neither Israel's annexation nor the PLO claim over East Jerusalem gained international recognition.

1995 Oslo II Accord: Under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian National Authority was created to provide a Palestinian interim self-government in the West Bank and the interior of the Gaza Strip. Its second phase envisioned "Palestinian enclaves".

2005–present: After the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and clashes between the two main Palestinian parties following the Hamas electoral victory, two separate executive governments took control in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

Ethnic majority by settlement (present): The map indicates the ethnic majority of settlements (cities, villages and other communities).

Intifada

Israeli total	Palestinian total
Israeli breakdown	Palestinian breakdown

The chart is based on B'Tselem casualty numbers. It does not include the 577 Palestinians killed by Palestinians.

The First Intifada was Palestinianuprising against the Israeli occupation of the [[Palestinian Territorieslate 1987 until 1991-3, policies of deportation, confiscation of lands, and their settlement, and consisting of general strikes, civil disobedience and boycotts of Israeli institutions and products. Stone-throwing was widespread. Israel adopted a policy of "breaking Palestinians' bones" to put down the revolt. In the conflict an estimated 1,100 Palestinian, and 16 Israeli citizens were killed, while many more were injured. Infra-communal conflict among Palestinians over collaboration also led to several hundred death killings.

History

Further information: History of Palestinian nationality

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was accompanied by an increasing sense of Arab identity in the Empire's Arab provinces, most notably Syria, considered to include both northern Palestine and Lebanon. This development is often seen as connected to the wider reformist trend known as al-Nahda ("awakening", sometimes called "the Arab renaissance"), which in the late 19th century brought about a redefinition of Arab cultural and political identities with the unifying feature of Arabic.

Under the Ottomans, Palestine's Arab population mostly saw themselves as Ottoman subjects. In the 1830s however, Palestine was occupied by the Egyptian vassal of the Ottomans, Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha. The Palestinian Arab revolt was precipitated by popular resistance against heavy demands for conscripts, as peasants were well aware that conscription was little more than a death sentence. Starting in May 1834 the rebels took many cities, among them Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus. In response, Ibrahim Pasha sent in an army, finally defeating the last rebels on 4 August in Hebron.

While Arab nationalism, at least in an early form, and Syrian nationalism were the dominant tendencies along with continuing loyalty to the Ottoman state, Palestinian politics were marked by a reaction to foreign predominance and the growth of foreign immigration, particularly Zionist.

The Egyptian occupation of Palestine in the 1830s resulted in the destruction of Acre and thus, the political importance of Nablus increased. The Ottomans wrested back control of Palestine from the Egyptians in 1840-41. As a result, the Abd al-Hadi clan, who originated in Arrabah in the Sahl Arraba region in northern Samaria, rose to prominence. Loyal allies of Jezzar Pasha and the Tuqans, they gained the governorship of Jabal Nablus and other sanjaqs.

In 1887 the mutassariflik of Jerusalem was constituted as part of an Ottoman government policy dividing the vilayet of Greater Syria into smaller administrative units. The administration of the mutassariflik took on a distinctly local appearance.

Michelle Compos records that "Later, after the founding of Tel Aviv in 1909, conflicts over land grew in the direction of explicit national rivalry." Zionist ambitions were increasingly identified as a threat by Palestinian leaders, while cases of purchase of lands by Zionist settlers and the subsequent eviction of Palestinian peasants aggravated the issue. This anti-Zionist trend became linked to anti-British resistance, to form a nationalist movement quite particular and separate from the pan-Arab trend that was gaining strength in the Arab world, and would later be headed by Nasser, Ben Bella and other anticolonial leaders.

The programmes of four Palestinian nationalist societies jamyyat al-Ikha’ wal-‘Afaf (Brotherhood and Purity), al-jam’iyya al-Khayriyya al-Islamiyya, Shirkat al-Iqtissad alFalastini al-Arabi and Shirkat al-Tijara al-Wataniyya al-Iqtisadiyya were reported in the newspaper Falastin in June 1914 by letter from R. Abu al-Sal’ud. The four societies has similarities in function and ideals; the promotion of patriotism, educational aspirations and support for national industries.

Second Intifada

The Second Intifada,^{[note A]} also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the Oslo War, was the second Palestinian uprising – a period of intensified Palestinian–Israeliviolence, which began in late September 2000 and ended around 2005. The death toll, including both military and civilian, is estimated to be over 3,000 Palestinians and around 1,000 Israelis (Jews and Arabs), as well as 64 foreigners. B'Tselem's figures indicate that through April 30, 2008, 35.2% of the Palestinians who were killed directly took part in the hostilities,46.4% "did not take part in the hostilities", and 18.5% where it was not known if they were taking part in hostilities. Of the Israeli casualties, B'Tselem reports that 31.7% were security force personnel and 68.3% were civilians. A 2005 study conducted by Israel's International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) concluded that Palestinian fatalities have consisted of more combatants than noncombatants. Up to 2005, the ICT puts Israeli combatant casualties at 22% and civilian at 78%. The First Intifada was from December 1987 to 1993.

Palestinian leadership

Yasser Arafat Was a Palestinian leader

The Palestinian Arabs were led by two main camps. The Nashashibis, led by Raghib al-Nashashibi, who was Mayor of Jerusalem from 1920 to 1934, were moderates who sought dialogue with the British and the Jews. The Nashashibis were overshadowed by the al-Husaynis who came to dominate Palestinian-Arab politics in the years before 1948. The al-Husaynis, like most Arab Nationalists, denied that Jews had any national rights in Palestine.

The British granted the Palestinian Arabs a religious leadership, but they always kept it dependent. The office of Mufti of Jerusalem, traditionally limited in authority and geographical scope, was refashioned into that of Grand Mufti of Palestine. Furthermore a Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) was established and given various duties like the administration of religious endowments and the appointment of religious judges and local muftis. In Ottoman times these duties had been fulfilled by the bureaucracy in Istanbul.

In ruling the Palestinian Arabs the British preferred to deal with elites, rather than with political formations rooted in the middle or lower classes. For instance they ignored the Palestine Arab Congress. The British also tried to create divisions among these elites. For instance they chose Hajj Amin al-Husayni to become Grand Mufti, although he was young and had received the fewest votes from Jerusalem’s Islamic leaders. Hajj Amin was a distant cousin ofMusa Kazim al-Husainy, the leader of the Palestine Arab Congress. According to Khalidi, by appointing a younger relative, the British hoped to undermine the position of Musa Kazim. Indeed they stayed rivals until the death of Musa Kazim in 1934. Another of the mufti's rivals, Raghib Bey al-Nashashibi, had already been appointed mayor of Jerusalem in 1920, replacing Musa Kazim whom the British removed after the Nabi Musa riots of 1920, during which he exhorted the crowd to give their blood for Palestine. During the entire Mandate period, but especially during the latter half the rivalry between the mufti and al-Nashashibi dominated Palestinian politics.

Many notables were dependent on the British for their income. In return for their support of the notables the British required them to appease the population. According to Khalidi this worked admirably well until the mid-1930s, when the mufti was pushed into serious opposition by a popular explosion. After that the mufti became the deadly foe of the British and the Zionists.

According to Khalidi before the mid-1930s the notables from both the al-Husayni and the al-Nashashibi factions acted as though by simply continuing to negotiate with the British they could convince them to grant the Palestinians their political rights. The Arab population considered both factions as ineffective in their national struggle, and linked to and dependent on the British administration. Khalidi ascribes the failure of the Palestinian leaders to enroll mass support to their experience during the Ottoman period, when they were part of the ruling elite and were accostumed to command. The idea of mobilising the masses was thoroughly alien to them.

There had already been rioting and attacks on and massacres of Jews in 1921 and 1929. During the 1930s Palestinian Arab popular discontent with Jewish immigration and increasing Arab landlessness grew. In the late 1920s and early 1930s several factions of Palestinian society, especially from the younger generation, became impatient with the internecine divisions and ineffectiveness of the Palestinian elite and engaged in grass-roots anti-British and anti-Zionist activism organized by groups such as the Young Men's Muslim Association. There was also support for the growth in influence of the radical nationalist Independence Party (Hizb al-Istiqlal), which called for a boycott of the British in the manner of the Indian Congress Party. Some even took to the hills to fight the British and the Zionists. Most of these initiatives were contained and defeated by notables in the pay of the Mandatory Administration, particularly the mufti and his cousin Jamal al-Husayni. The younger generation also formed the backbone of the organisation of the six-month general strike of 1936, which marked the start of the great Palestinian Revolt. According to Khalidi this was a grass-roots uprising, which was eventually adopted by the old Palestinian leadership, whose 'inept leadership helped to doom these movements as well'.

Ancestral origins

Israelite Kingdom in the time of Saul c. 1020BC.

Map of Canaan.

"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."

Like the Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, Maghrebis, and most other people today commonly called Arabs, the Palestinians are an Arab people in linguistic and cultural affiliation. Since the Islamic conquest in the 7th century, Palestine, a then Hellenized location, came under the influence of an Arabic-speaking Kurdish Muslim dynasty known as the Ayyubids, whose culture and language through the process of Arabization was adopted by the people of Palestine. Genetic research studies suggests that some or perhaps most of the present-day Palestinians have roots that go back to before the 7th century, maybe even ancient inhabitants of the area.

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."

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..."

Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist, explains:

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-statres and elites, the Israelites and some disenfranchised Canaanites joined together 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."

Politicized lineages

File:Palestinian girl eats.jpg

Palestinian girl eats

A Palestinian girl in Qalqiliya

File:Palestinian women with hijab.jpg

Palestinian women with hijab

Salim Tamari notes the paradoxes produced by the search for "nativist" roots among Zionist figures and the so-called Canaanite followers of Yonatan Ratosh. For example, Ber Borochov, one of the key ideological architects of Socialist Zionism, claimed as early as 1905 that, "The Fellahin in Eretz-Israel are the descendants of remnants of the Hebrew agricultural community," believing them to be descendants of the ancient Hebrew and Canaanite residents 'together with a small admixture of Arab blood'". 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. Other founding fathers of Zionism believed that the Palestinian people were descended from the biblical ancient Hebrews. David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later becoming Israel's first Prime Minister and second President, respectively, 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."

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." Israel Belkind, the founder of the Bilu movement also asserted that the Palestinian Arabs were the blood brothers of the Jews. 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. 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. 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) are descended from the Jewish Israelite peasantry that remained on the land, after the others, mostly city dwellers, were exiled or left.

File:Ahed Tamimi.jpg

Ahed Tamimi Palestinian activist

Claims emanating from certain circles within Palestinian society and their supporters, proposing that Palestinians have direct ancestral connections to the ancient Canaanites, without an intermediate Israelite link, has been an issue of contention within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Bernard Lewis wrote 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."

Some Palestinian scholars, like Zakariyya Muhammad, have criticized pro-Palestinian 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." 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..."

DNA and genetic studies

Main article: History of the Palestinian people

The Modern Levant

A Rabbi in Palestine, circa 1930

Villagers in Halhul at an open air cinema screening c. 1940

In recent years, many genetic studies have demonstrated 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 or European Jews to non-Jewish Europeans.

One DNA study by Nebel found genetic evidence in support of historical records 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". They also found substantial genetic overlap between Muslim Palestinians and Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, though with some significant differences that might be explainable by the geographical isolation of the Jews and by immigration of Arab tribes in the first millennium.

HLA genetic studies relate Palestinians with other Middle East populations, like Jews.

In genetic genealogy studies, Negev Bedouins have the highest rates of Haplogroup J1 (Y-DNA) among all populations tested (62.5%) followed by the Palestinian Arab 38.4%, Ashkenazi Jew 14.6%, and Sephardi Jew 11.9% according to Semino and colleagues. Semitic populations, including Jews, usually possess an excess of J1 Y chromosomes compared to other populations harboring Y-haplogroup J. The haplogroup J1, associated with marker M267, originates south of the Levant and was first disseminated from there into Ethiopia and Europe in Neolithic times. In Jewish populations J1 has a rate of around 15%, with haplogroup J2 (M172) (of eight sub-Haplogroups) being almost twice as common as J1 among Jews (<29%). J1 is most common in the southern Levant, 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.

Haplogroup J1 (Y-DNA) includes the modal haplotype of the Galilee Arabs and of Moroccan Arabs and the sister Modal Haplotype of the Cohanim, the "Cohan Modale Haplotype", representing the descendents of the priestly caste Aaron. J2 is known to be related to the ancient Greek movements and is found mainly in Europe and the central Mediterranean (Italy, the Balkans, Greece).

According to a 2010 study by Behar at al titled "The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people," Palestinians cluster genetically close to Bedouins and Saudi Arabians which could indicate a common ancestry or some recent ancestral influx from the Arabian peninsula.

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. Of individuals tested, 1-15% carried 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 as a result of miscegenation and manumission.

According to a 2002 study by Nebel and colleagues the highest frequency of Eu10 (i.e. J1) (30%–62.5%) has been observed so far in various Muslim Arab populations in the Middle East. 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 2013 study of Haber and 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 authors also reconstructed the genetic structure of pre-Islamic Levant and found that "it was more genetically similar to Europeans than to Middle Easterners."

Arabian origins of local Bedouin

Bedouin woman 1898–1914, American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Dept.

The local Bedouins of Palestine are said to be ancestrally descended from Arabians, and not just culturally and linguistically Arabized peoples. Their dialects and pronunciation of qaaf as gaaf group them with other Bedouin across the Arab world. Arabic onomastic elements began to appear in Edomite inscriptions starting in the 6th century BC and the inscriptions of the Nabataeans who arrived in today’s Jordan in the 4th-3rd centuries BC.

A few Bedouin are found as far north as Galilee; however, these seem to be much later arrival, rather than descendants of the Arabs that Sargon II settled in Samaria in 720 BC. 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).

Following the Muslim conquest of Syria by Arabians, the formerly dominant languages of the area, Aramaic and Greek, were replaced by the Arabic language introduced by the new conquering administrative minority. 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.

Samaritan descent in Nablus

Much of the local Palestinian population in Nablus is believed to be descended from Samaritans who converted to Islam. Even today, certain Nabulsi surnames including Muslimani, Yaish, and Shakshir among others, are associated with a Samaritan origin.

Demographics

See also: Demographics of Palestine and Demographics of the Palestinian territories

Country or region	Population
West Bank and Gaza Strip	3,761,000
Jordan	2,700,000
Israel	1,318,000
Chile	500,000 (largest community outside the Arab world)
Syria	434,896
Lebanon	405,425
Saudi Arabia	327,000
The Americas	225,000
Egypt	44,200
Kuwait	(approx) 40,000
Other Gulf states	159,000
Other Arab states	153,000
Other countries	308,000
TOTAL	10,574,521

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. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) announced on 20 October 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 (AIDRG). 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 8 March 2006.

The study was criticised by Sergio DellaPergola, a demographer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. DellaPergola accused the authors of the AIDRG report of misunderstanding basic principles of demography on account of their lack of expertise in the subject, but he also acknowledged that he did not take into account the emigration of Palestinians and thinks it has to be examined, as well as the birth and mortality statistics of the Palestinian Authority. He also accused AIDRG of selective use of data and multiple systematic errors in their analysis, claiming that the authors assumed the Palestinian Electoral registry to be complete even though registration is voluntary, and they used an unrealistically low Total Fertility Ratio (a statistical abstraction of births per woman) to reanalyse that data in a "typical circular mistake." DellaPergola 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.

In Jordan, there is no official census data for how many inhabitants are Palestinians, but estimates by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics cite a population range of 50% to 55%. In 2009, at the request of the PLO, "Jordan revoked the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians to keep them from remaining permanently in the country."

Many 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. 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 Palestinian populations. These two countries have had presidents of Palestinian ancestry (in El Salvador Antonio Saca, currently serving; in Honduras Carlos Roberto Flores). 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.

Refugees

Palestinian refugees in 1948

Internally Displaced Palestinians in Balata refugee camp, 2002

In 2006, there were 4,255,120 Palestinians registered as refugees with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This number includes the descendants of refugees who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war, but excludes those who have since then 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 now located within the borders of Israel, are included in these figures.

UNRWA figures do not include some 274,000 people, or 1 in 5.5 of all Arab residents of Israel, who are internally displaced Palestinian refugees.

Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank are organized according to a refugee family's village or place of origin. Among the first things that children born in the camps learn is the name of their village of origin. David McDowall writes that, "[...] a yearning for Palestine permeates the whole refugee community and is most ardently espoused by the younger refugees, for whom home exists only in the imagination."

Israeli policy to prevent the refugees returning to their homes was initially formulated by David Ben Gurion and Joseph Weitz and formally adopted by the Israeli cabinet in June 1948. In December of that year the UN adopted resolution 194, which resolved "that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible." Despite much of the international community, including the US President Harry Truman, insisting that the repatriation of Palestinian refugees was essential, Israel refused to accept the principle. In the intervening years Israel has consistently refused to change its position and has introduced further legislation to hinder Palestinians refugees from returning and reclaiming their land and confiscated property.

In keeping with an Arab League resolution in 1965, most Arab countries have refused to grant citizenship to Palestinians, arguing that it would be a threat to their right of return to their homes in Palestine. In 2012, Egypt deviated from this practice by granting citizenship to 50,000 Palestinians, mostly from the Gaza Strip.

Palestinians living in Lebanon are deprived of basic civil rights. They cannot own homes or land, and are barred from becoming lawyers, engineers and doctors.

Religion

Palestinians attending prayers at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem

Palestinian Christian Scouts on Christmas Eve in front of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem (2006)

Cave of the Patriarchs in ,Hebron

Jews in 'Ben Zakai' house of prayer, Jerusalem, 1893.

Jethro shrine and temple of Druze,Hittin,northern Palestine

Palestinians are predominantly Muslims, the vast majority of whom are followers of the Sunni branch of Islam. Palestinian Christians represent a significant minority, followed by much smaller religious communities, including Druze and Samaritans. Palestinian Jews – considered Palestinian by the Palestinian National Charter adopted by the PLO which defined them as those "Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion" – today identify as Israelis (with the exception of a very few individuals). Palestinian Jews almost universally abandoned any such identity after the establishment of Israel and their incorporation into the Israeli Jewish population, largely composed of Jewish immigrants from around the world.

Until the end of the 19th century, most Palestinian Muslim villagers in the countryside did not have local mosques. Cross-cultural syncretism between Christian and Islamic symbols and figures in religious practice was common. Popular feast days, like Thursday of the Dead, were celebrated by both Muslims and Christians and shared prophets and saints include Jonah, who is worshipped in Halhul as both a Biblical and Islamic prophet, and St. George, who is known in Arabic as el Khader. 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 660,641 Palestinian Arabs (Christian and Muslim Arabs), 83,790 Palestinian Jews, and 7,617 persons belonging to other groups. The corresponding percentage breakdown is 87% Christian and Muslim Arab and 11% Jewish. Bedouin were not counted in the census, but a 1930 British study estimated their number at 70,860.

Palestinian girls in Nablus

Bernard Sabella of Bethlehem University estimates that 6% of the Palestinian population worldwide is Christian and that 56% of them live outside of historic Palestine. 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.

The Druze became Israeli citizens and Druze males serve in the Israel Defense Forces, though some individuals identify as "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 carry Palestinian identity cards and live in the West Bank while a roughly equal number live in Holon and carry Israeli citizenship. Those who live in the West Bank also are represented in the legislature for the Palestinian National Authority. They are commonly referred to among Palestinians as the "Jews of Palestine," and maintain their own unique cultural identity.

Jews who identify as Palestinian Jews are few, but include Israeli Jews who are part of the Neturei Karta group, and Uri Davis, an Israeli citizen and self-described Palestinian Jew (who converted to Islam in 2008 in order to marry Miyassar Abu Ali) who serves as an observer member in the Palestine National Council.

Bahá'u'lláh, founder of the Baha'i Faith, wasn't a Palestinian or a Jew but only happened to end his life living in the land, was on his way to imprisonment in `Akká after several banishments and it was his eventual 24-year confinement in the prison city of `Akka in Palestine (present-day Israel and Palestine), where he died. He had a growing amount of followers but because of a lack of census in Palestinian territories, it is hard to get exact figures of the amount of Palestinian Baha'is.

Development

Rashid Khalidi made a comparison between the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, and the Palestinian Arabs on the one hand, and between the Palestinian Arabs and other Arabs on the other hand. From 1922 to 1947 the annual growth rate of the Jewish sector of the economy was 13.2%, mainly due to immigration and foreign capital, while that of the Arab was 6.5%. Per capita these figures were 4.8% and 3.6% respectively. By 1936 the Jewish sector had eclipsed the Arab one, and Jewish individuals earned 2.6 times as much as Arabs. Compared to other Arab countries the Palestinian Arab individuals earned slightly better. In terms of human capital there was a huge difference. For instance the literacy rates in 1932 were 86% for the Jews against 22% for the Palestinian Arabs, but Arab literacy was steadily increasing. In this respect the Palestinian Arabs compared favorably to Egypt and Turkey, but unfavorably to Lebanon. On the scale of the UN Human Development Index determined for around 1939, of 36 countries, Palestinian Jews were placed 15th, Palestinian Arabs 30th, Egypt 33rd and Turkey 35th. The Jews in Palestine were mainly urban, 76.2% in 1942, while the Arabs were mainly rural, 68,3% in 1942. Overall Khalidi concludes that the Palestinian Arab society, while being overmatched by the Yishuv, was as advanced as any other Arab society in the region and considerably more as several.

Palestinian population

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Percentage Distribution of Palestinian Population by Country of Residence, End year 2005

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Percentage Distribution of Population in The Palestinian Territory by Governorate End year 2005

Demographic issue in the Palestinian Territory gain importance at the political, social and economic levels, the population dimension is one of the main determinants of Palestinian choices toward sustainable development, as the limited natural resources and political choices. Population policies is of agreed importance for the Palestinian case, where it is the main dimension of reducing choices and trends of development in relation to demographic dimension. PCBS realize the importance of presenting demographic information that support efforts of rational toward bringing up a national population policy. This report provides the official statistics on the Palestinian all over the world. The report covers the main demographic indicators, data is based on primary and secondary data sources related to demographic issues such as surveys, researches and administrative records. In addition to main demographic indicators, the report provides up-to-date estimates on the Palestinian population in Diaspora, Israel, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians in The Worldwide:

The estimated number of Palestinians all over World by the end of 2005 is 10.1 million distributed as follows: 3.8 million in the Palestinian Territory (37.9%) of the total Palestinians all over World; 1.1 million (11.2%) live in Israel; 3.0 million (29.4%) in Jordan; on the other hand, 462 thousands Palestinians (4.6%) live in Syria. In The light of all given data its probably expected to doubling in number of Palestinian Population after 23 years. The population of the Palestinian Territory is estimated to 3.8 million at the end of 2005 thereof 2.4 million (63.0%) in West Bank and 1.4 million (37.0%) in Gaza Strip. According to the distribution of population by Governorates, Hebron Governorate has the highest rate of population at 13.9% of the total population, followed by Gaza Governorate 13.0%; Jerusalem Governorate comes third with 10.6%. On the other hand, Jericho and Al Aghwar Governorate has the lowest rate of population at the end of 2005 at 1.1%.

The Data showed that 42.5% of the population in the Palestinian Territory are refugees. According to the most recent estimates, 45.8% of the population in the Palestinian Territory are under 15 years, and the percentage of Palestinians who are above 65 years in the Palestinian Territory is 3.1%. and the median age for in the Palestinian Territory is 16.7 years, the crude birth rate in the Palestinian Territory to reach 37.3 in 2005, while the fertility rate in the Palestinian Territory in 2003 declined to 4.6 births, and life expectancy reach 71.7 years for males and 73.0 years for females in 2005. Palestinians in Israel

According to the 2004 data about Palestinians living in Israel, 41.1% of the Palestinian population are under 15 years and 3.1% of them are 65 years and over. The average household size is 5.0 persons. Infant mortality rate in 2004 was 8.3 per 1,000 live births. The total fertility rate of the Palestinian population in Israel in 2003 is 3.7 births per woman and the crude birth rate is 30.9 births per 1000 population in 2004. In the light of all given data its probably expected doubling in number of Palestinian Population after 23 years.

Palestinians in Jordan

According to the 2000 data about Palestinians living in Jordan, 41.7% of the Palestinian population in Jordan are under 15 years, and 4.2% of them are 65 years and over. The average household size of the Palestinian population living in Jordan is 6.2 persons, and about 87.0% of them are registered refugees at UNRWA and live in refugee camps. Infant mortality rate and under five years child mortality rate of Palestinians living in Jordan were 24.9 and 27.4 per 1,000 live births respectively. on the other hand, the total fertility rate of Palestinian population living in Jordan was 4.6 births per woman. In The light of all given data its probably expected doubling in number of Palestinian Population in Jordan after 24 years.

Palestinians in Syria

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Projected Population for Palestinians and Jewish Population in Historic Palestine Selected Years

According to the 2002 data about Palestinians living in Syria, 36.7% of the Palestinian population are under 15 years, and 3.9% of them are 65 years and over. The average household size of the Palestinian population in Syria is 5.5 persons, and about 95.6% of them are registered refugees at UNRWA and live in refugee camps. Infant mortality rate and under five years child mortality rate of the Palestinian population in Syria in (1996-2000) period were 23.5 and 26.5 per 1,000 live births respectively. and the total fertility rate of the Palestinian population in Syria in 2001 is 3.5 births per woman and the crude birth rate is 28.3 births per 1000 population. In The light of all given data its probably expected doubling in number of Palestinian Population in Syria after 27 years.

Palestinians in Lebanon

The data of 2005 about Palestinians living in Lebanon showed that 36.0% of them are under 15 years, and 4.4% are 65 years and over. The average household size of the Palestinian population in Lebanon is 4.9 persons. Infant mortality rate and under five years child mortality rate of the Palestinian population in Lebanon in 2000 were 38 and 48.5 per 1,000 live births respectively. The total fertility rate of the Palestinian population in Lebanon is 3.0 births per woman and the crude birth rate is 29.3 births per 1000 population.

Demographic Balance between Palestinian and Jewish Between The river and The sea

The estimated number of the Palestinian population in historic Palestine was 4.9 million at end of 2005. On the other hand, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the Jewish population was 5.3 million. According to our estimates, the Palestinian population will reach 5.3 million at end 2007, while Israeli estimates revealed that the Jewish population will reach 5.5 million in the same period. Both populations will be equal in 2010 (demographical dichotomy); however, the Palestinian population will increase to 5.7 million in 2010 whereas the Jewish population will become 5.7 million.

Palestinian diaspora

The Palestinian diaspora is the emigration or exile of Palestinians out of historic Palestine - an area today known as Israel and the Palestinian territories or the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Of the total Palestinian population worldwide, estimated at between 9 to 11 million people, roughly half live outside of theirhomeland.

Large-scale emigration of Christians began in the mid-19th century as a response to the oppression of Christians by the Ottoman Empire.

Since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Palestinians have experienced several waves of exile and lived in different host countries around the world. In addition to the Palestinian refugees of 1948, hundreds of thousands were also displaced in the 1967 war. Together, these refugees make up the majority of the Palestinian diaspora. Besides those displaced by war, others have emigrated overseas for various reasons such as work opportunity, education, religious persecution and persecution from Israeli authorities. In the decade following the 1967 war, for example, an average of 21,000 Palestinians per year were forced out of Israeli-controlled areas. The pattern of Palestinian flight continued during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s In the absence of a comprehensive census including all Palestinian diaspora populations and those that remained within the area once known as British Mandate Palestine, exact population figures are difficult to determine. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the number of Palestinians worldwide at the end of 2003 was 9.6 million, an increase of 800,000 since 2001.

Palestinians living outside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (2000)

Robin Cohen in his book Global Diasporas (1997), explains that for Palestinians, and others like Armenians,Jews, and some African populations, the term 'diaspora' has "acquired a more sinister and brutal meaning", signifying "a collective trauma, a banishment, where one dreamed of home but lived in exile."

The issue of the Palestinian right of return has been of central importance to Palestinians and more broadly the Arab World since 1948. It is the dream of many in the Palestinian diaspora, and is present most strongly in Palestinian refugee camps. In the largest such camp in Lebanon, Ain al-Hilweh, neighborhoods are named for the Galilee towns and villages from which the original refugees came, such as Az-Zeeb,Safsaf and Hittin. Even though 97% of the camp's inhabitants have never seen the towns and villages their parents and grandparents left behind, most insist that the right of return is an inalienable right and one that they will never renounce.

Nakba Day

Nakba Day , meaning "Day of the Catastrophe") is generally commemorated on 15 May, the day after the Gregorian calendar date for Israeli Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzmaut). For the Palestinians it is an annual day of commemoration of the displacement that followed the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.

Palestinian girl in a protest on Nakba Day 2010 in Hebron, West Bank. Her sign says "Surely we will return, Palestine." Most of the Palestinian refugees in the West Bank are descendants of people whose families hail from areas that were incorporated into Israel in 1948.

Commemoration of the Nakba by Arab citizens of Israel who are internally displaced persons as a result of the 1948 war has been practiced for decades, but until the early 1990s was relatively weak. Initially, the memory of the catastrophe of 1948 was personal and communal in character and families or members of a given village would use the day to gather at the site of their former villages. Small scale commemorations of the tenth anniversary in the form of silent vigils were held by Arab students at a few schools in Israel in 1958, despite attempts by the Israeli authorities to thwart them. Visits to the sites of former villages became increasingly visible after the events of Land Day in 1976. In the wake up of the failure of the 1991 Madrid Conference to broach the subject of refugees, the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced in Israel was founded to organize a March of Return to the site of a different village every year on 15 May so as to place the issue on the Israeli public agenda.

By the early 1990s, annual commemorations of the day by Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel held a prominent place in the community's public discourse.

Meron Benvenisti writes that it was "…Israeli Arabs who taught the residents of the territories to commemorate Nakba Day." Palestinians in the occupied territories were called upon to commemorate May 15 as a day of national mourning by the Palestine Liberation Organization's United National Command of the Uprising during the First Intifada in 1988. The day was inaugurated byYasser Arafat in 1998.

The event is often marked by speeches and rallies by Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, in Palestinian refugee camps in Arab states, and in other places around the world. Protests at times develop into clashes between Palestinians and the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 2003 and 2004, there were demonstrations in London and New York City. In 2002,Zochrot was established to organize events raising the awareness of the Nakba in Hebrew so as to bring Palestinians and Israelis closer to a true reconciliation. The name is the Hebrew feminine plural form of "remember".

On Nakba Day 2011, Palestinians and other Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria marched towards their respective borders, or ceasefire lines and checkpoints in Israeli-occupied territories, to mark the event. At least twelve Palestinians and supporters were killed and hundreds wounded as a result of shootings by the Israeli Army. The Israeli army opened fire after thousands of Syrian protesters tried to forcibly enter the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights resulting in what AFP described as one of the worst incidents of violence there since the 1974 truce accord. The IDF said troops "fired selectively" towards "hundreds of Syrian rioters" injuring an unspecified number in response to them crossing onto the Israeli side. According to the BBC, the 2011 Nakba Day demonstrations were given impetus by the Arab Spring. During the 2012 commemoration, thousands of Palestinian demonstrators protested in cities and towns across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Protesters threw stones at Israeli soldiers guarding checkpoints inEast Jerusalem who then fired rubber bullets and tear gas in response.

Land Day

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Land Day poster

Land Day March 30, is an annual day of commemoration for Palestinians of the events of that date in 1976. In response to the Israeli government's announcement of a plan to expropriate thousands of dunams of land for security and settlement purposes, a general strike and marches were organized in Arab towns from the Galilee to the Negev. In the ensuing confrontations with the Israeli army and police, six Arab citizens were killed, about one hundred were wounded, and hundreds of others arrested.

Scholarship on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict recognizes Land Day as a pivotal event in the struggle over land and in the relationship of Arab citizens to the Israeli state and body politic. It is significant in that it was the first time since 1948 that Arabs in Israel organized a response to Israeli policies as a Palestinian national collective. An important annual day of commemoration in the Palestinian national political calendar ever since, it is marked not only by Arab citizens of Israel, but also by Palestinians all over the world.

Background

See also: Arab–Israeli conflict and Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Fellahat from Battir taking produce to market (1910)

The Arabs of Palestine were a largely agrarian people, 75% of whom made their living off the land before the establishment of the Israeli state. After the Palestinian exodus and the effects of the 1948 Arab-Israel war, land continued to play an important role in the lives of the 156,000 Palestinian Arabs who remained inside what became the state of Israel, serving as the source of communal identity, honor, and purpose.

The Israeli government adopted in 1950 the Law of Return to facilitate Jewish immigration to Israel and the absorption of Jewish refugees. Israel's Absentees' Property Law of March 1950 transferred the property rights of absentee owners to a government-appointed Custodian of Absentee Property, effectively legalizing the confiscation of lands belonging to the Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from the area that became Israel in 1948. It was also used to confiscate the lands of Arab citizens of Israel who "are present inside the state, yet classified in law as 'absent'." The number of "present-absentees" or internally displaced Palestinians from among the 1.2 million Arab citizens of Israel is estimated (in 2001) to be 200,000, or some 20% of the total Palestinian Arab population in Israel. Salman Abu-Sitta estimates that between 1948 and 2003 more than 1,000 square kilometers (390 sq mi) of land was expropriated from Arab citizens of Israel (present-absentees and otherwise).

According to Oren Yiftachel, public protest against state policies and practices from among the Palestinian Arabs in Israel was rare prior to the mid-1970s, owing to a combination of factors including military rule over their localities, poverty, isolation, fragmentation, and their periphal position in the new Israeli state. Those protests that did take place against land expropriations and the restrictions Arab citizens were subject to under military rule (1948-1966) are described by Shany Payes as "sporadic" and "limited", due to restrictions on rights to freedom of movement, expression and assembly characteristic of that period. While the political movement Al-Ard ("The Land") was active for about a decade, it was declared illegal in 1964, and the most notable antigovernment occasions otherwise were the May Day protests staged annually by the Communist party.

Catalyzing events

A view of Arraba from the road leading to its northern limit

The government of Israel declared its intention to expropriate lands in the Galilee for official use, affecting some 20,000 dunams of land between the Arab villages of Sakhnin and Arraba, of which 6,300 dunams was Arab-owned. On March 11, 1976, the government published the expropriation plan.

Yiftachel writes that the land confiscations and expansion of Jewish settlements in the northern Galilee formed part of the government's continuing strategy aimed at the Judaization of the Galilee which itself constituted both a response to and catalyst for Palestinian resistance, culminating in the events of Land Day. According to Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the land was to be used to construct "[...] eight Jewish industrial villages, in implementation of the so-called Galilee Development Plan of 1975. In hailing this plan, the Ministry of Agriculture openly declared that its primary purpose was to alter the demographic nature of Galilee in order to create a Jewish majority in the area." Ori Nir writes in Ha'aretz that only 31 percent of the land in question, or less than one-third, was actually Arab-owned and that some of the expropriated land was to be used to expand the Arab village of Makar near Acre and to build public buildings in Arab towns. Orly Halpern of The Jerusalem Post writes that the lands were confiscated by the government for security purposes, and that they were subsequently used to build a military training camp, as well as new Jewish settlements.

Yifat Holzman-Gazit places the 1976 announcement within the framework of a larger plan devised in 1975. Some 1900 dunams of privately owned Arab land were to be expropriated to expand the Jewish town of Carmiel. Additionally, the plan envisaged the establishment between 1977 and 1981 of 50 new Jewish settlements known as mitzpim (singular: mitzpe) which would consist of fewer than 20 families each. The plan called for these to be located between clusters of Arab villages in the central Galilee affecting some 20,000 dunams (30% of which were to be expropriated from Arabs, 15% from Jews, with the remainder constituting state-owned land). David McDowall identifies the resumption of land seizures in the Galilee and the acceleration of land expropriations in the West Bank in the mid-1970s as the immediate catalyst for both the Land Day demonstration and similar demonstrations that were taking place contemporaneously in the West Bank. He writes: "Nothing served to bring the two Palestinian communities together politically more than the question of land."

Current demographics

See also: Demographics of Israel, Israelis, Demographics of the Palestinian territories, Palestinian people § Demographics, and Demographics of Jordan

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Israel / Palestine: Arab / Jewish Population (1914-2005)

According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, as of May 2006, of Israel's 7 million people, 77% were Jews, 18.5% Arabs, and 4.3% "others". Among Jews, 68% were Sabras (Israeli-born), mostly second- or third-generation Israelis, and the rest are olim — 22% from Europe and the Americas, and 10% from Asia and Africa, including the Arab countries. According to Palestinian evaluations, The West Bank is inhabited by approximately 2.4 million Palestinians and the Gaza Stripby another 1.4 million. According to a study presented at The Sixth Herzliya Conference on The Balance of Israel's National Security there are 1.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank. This study was criticised by demographer Sergio DellaPergola, who estimated 3.33 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip combined at the end of 2005.

According to these Israeli and Palestinian estimates, the population in Israel and the Palestinian Territories stands at 9.8–10.8 million.

Jordan has a population of around 6 million (2007 estimate). Palestinians constitute approximately half of this number.

Language

Main article: Palestinian Arabic

Arabic calligraphy in Jerusalem

Palestinian Arabic is a subgroup of the broader Levantine Arabic dialect. Prior to the 7th century Islamic Conquest and Arabization of the Levant, the primary languages spoken in Palestine, among the predominately Christian and Jewish communities, were Aramaic, Greek, and Syriac. Arabic was also spoken in some areas. Palestinian Arabic, like other variations of the Levantine dialect, exhibits substantial influences in lexicon from Aramaic.

Palestinian Arabic has three primary sub-variations, Rural, Urban, and Bedouin, with the pronunciation of the Qāf serving as a shibboleth to distinguish between the three main Palestinian sub-dialects: The urban variety notes a [Q] sound, while the rural variety (spoken in the villages around major cities) have a [K] for the [Q]. The Bedouin variety of Palestine (spoken mainly in the southern region and along the Jordan valley) use a [G] instead of [Q].

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 that were documented by the American archaeologist Edward Robinson in the early 20th century.

Palestinians who live or work in Israel generally can also speak Modern Hebrew, as do some who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Culture

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Palestinian woman, Nasr Eleyan

Main article: Culture of Palestine

Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist, has critiqued Muslim historiography for assigning the beginning of Palestinian cultural identity to the advent of Islam in the 7th century. In describing the effect of such a historiography, he writes:

Pagan origins are disavowed. As such the peoples who populated Palestine throughout history have discursively rescinded their own history and religion as they adopted the religion, language, and culture of Islam.

That the peasant culture of the large fellahin class showed features of cultures other than Islam was a conclusion arrived at by some Western scholars and explorers who mapped and surveyed Palestine during the latter half of the 19th century, and these ideas were to influence 20th century debates on Palestinian identity by local and international ethnographers. The contributions of the '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. Salim Tamari writes that:

"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)."

Palestinian culture is closely related to those of the nearby Levantine countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, and the Arab World. Cultural contributions to the fields of art, literature, music, costume and cuisine express the characteristics of the Palestinian experience and show signs of common origin despite the geographical separation between the Palestinian territories, Israel and the diaspora.

Al-Quds Capital of Arab Culture is an initiative undertaken by UNESCO under the Cultural Capitals Program to promote Arab culture and encourage cooperation in the Arab region. The opening event was launched in March 2009.

Art

Main article: Palestinian art

Mosaic plate at Khirbat Al-Mafja rnear Jericho c. 735 CE

Dome of the Rock mosaic art

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Palestinian bride waiting for her groom beside his horse

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A Circassian chevalier bidding his loved damsel farewell

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The Harvest, 1979

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Grey and Pink, Samia Halaby

Palestinian art is a term used to refer to paintings, posters, installation art and other visual media produced by Palestinian artists.

While the term has also been used to refer to ancient art produced in the geographical region of Palestine, in its modern usage it generally refers to work of contemporary Palestinian artists.

Similar to the structure of Palestinian society, the Palestinian art field extends over four main geographic centers: the West Bank and Gaza Strip; Israel; the Palestinian diaspora in the Arab world, 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 Nakba of 1948, nationalistic themes have predominated as Palestinian artists use diverse media to express and explore their connection to identity and land.

Before 1948, most Palestinian artists were self-taught, painting landscapes and religious scenes in imitation of the European style. Art exhibitions were almost unheard of. Notable artists of this era include Khalil Halaby, Nahil Bishara and Faddoul Odeh. Jamal Badran (1909–1999) was a leading artist in the Islamic style.Sophie Halaby studied in France and Italy before returning to teach at the Schmidt Girls College in 1935-1955.

One of the earliest artists to add a political dimension to his works was Nicola Saig (1863-1942). While most of the art in his day explored religious themes and non-controversial issues, Saig's work ventured into politics. Caliph Umar at Jerusalem Gates c. 1920, for example, seems to recount a popular religious legend about Umar bloodlessly taking over Jerusalem and ushering centuries of peace between the local Christian and Jewish populations. However, upon closer look, the Christ-like stature given to the Caliph jab at what many Palestinians saw as divisive policies of the British during the Mandate Period which attempted to create friction between Muslims and Christian Arabs.

After 1948, Ismail Shammout, Naji al-ali, Mustafa al-Hallaj and Paul Guiragossian tackled the painful memories of the Nabka showing massacres, refugees and clear political themes. Others such as Sophia Halaby, Ibrahim Ghannam, and Juliana Seraphim focused more subtly on questions of identity including Palestinian cultural traditions, physical geography, and a surrealistic look at memories of childhood reverie.

According to Tal Ben Zvi, Palestinian artists after 1948 reside in four geographical territories and have no art colleges. Thus unlike sovereign nation-states where art is based on "national borders, national museums and institutes of learning, he claims Palestinian art is based chiefly on artists operating within the frame of Palestinian identity.

Palestinian artist and art historian Kamal Boullata describes "place" as one of the major thematic components of Palestinian art throughout its history. Proximity and distance from the historical Palestinian homeland and the relationship between the artist and his current place of residence is the key element moving Palestinian art. For example, in art produced during the first decades following 1948, works created by Palestinian artists living in Israel are largely figurative, whereas those created by artists living outside the country are largely abstract. Before 1948, Jerusalem was an important theme. After 1948, memory of place and distance from homeland became a central theme. Even Palestinian artists born and raised in Israel explore alienation and a sense of growing up as foreigners in the land of their ancestors. The question of cultural memory and belonging is a recurrent theme.

Key iconic symbols are keys and doors. Likewise the cactus tree plays a prominent role. According to Palestinian artist and art historian Samia Halaby, "Liberation Art," or the art that resulted from the revolutionary period of Palestinian resistance that began in the late 1960s and continued through the First Intifada, "is symbolist, using images of things known to popular Palestinian culture – things that anyone experiencing Palestinian life could identify. The horse came to mean revolution. The flute came to mean the tune of the ongoing resistance. The wedding came to mean the entire Palestinian cause. The key came to mean the right of return. The sun came to mean freedom. The gun with a dove came to mean that peace would come after the struggle for liberation. Artists used the colors of the flag, patterns from embroidery, chains, etc. Village scenes, village dress, the prisoner, prison bars. There were special themes regarding the martyr. First there were generalized pictures of the martyr as well as pictures of specific individuals who had been killed by the Israelis. The second form was based on a popular practice of framing a collage of symbols representing the deceased’s life then hanging it at their home or grave."

The Cactus has been a motif in Palestinian art since the birth of Israel. For Zionists, the indigenous plant became a national symbol of their attachment to the land, while Palestinians saw it as an incarnation of their national dispossession (see, for example, the Arabic version of Sahar Khalifa's Wild Thorns, the Arabic title of which translates literally as Cactus). The plant served the practical function to designate territorial borders in peasant villages. In summer, the prickly pear was a common fruit eaten by people in the region. During the 1920s, the thorny tree was incorporated as a symbol of Israeli identity.Nicolas Saig painted the prickly pear as one of the pleasures of the era. The cactus has also become a symbol of Palestinian defiance and sumud. Villagers incorporated it into a dance song protesting the 1917 Balfour Declaration with the phrase "Ya'ayn kuni subbara - O eye, be a cactus tree!".

Cuisine

Main article: Palestinian cuisine

A Palestinian youth serving Falafel in Ramallah

A plate of Kibbeh balls with a garnishing of mint leaves

Kanafeh in a pan

A siniyyeh ofMansaf

Musakhan; The Palestinian National dish

Maqluba withlamb

Palestine's history of rule by many different empires is reflected in Palestinian cuisine, which has benefited from various cultural contributions and exchanges. Generally-speaking, modern Syrian-Palestinian dishes have been influenced by the rule of three major Islamic groups: the Arabs, the Persian-influenced Arabs and the Turks. The Arabs who conquered Syria and Palestine had simple culinary traditions primarily based on the use of rice, lamb and yogurt, as well as dates.

The cuisine of the Ottoman Empire — which incorporated Palestine as one of its provinces in 1512-14 — was partially made up of what had become, by then a "rich" Arab cuisine. After the Crimean War, in 1855, many other communities including Bosnians, Greeks, French and Italians began settling in the area especially in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Bethlehem. The cuisine of these communities, particularly those of the Balkans, contributed to the character of Palestinian cuisine. Nonetheless, until around the 1950s-60s, the staple diet for many rural Palestinian families revolved around olive oil, oregano (za'atar) and bread, baked in a simple oven called a taboon.

Palestinian cuisine is divided into three regional groups: the Galilee, West Bank and Gaza area. Cuisine in the Galilee region shares much in common with Lebanese cuisine, due to extensive communication between the two regions before the establishment of Israel. Galilee inhabitants specialize in producing a number of meals based on the combination of bulgur, spices and meat, known as kibbee by Arabs. Kibbee has several variations including it being served raw, fried or baked. Musakhan is a common main dish that originated in the Jenin and Tulkarm area in the northern West Bank. It consists of a roasted chicken over a taboon bread that has been topped with pieces of fried sweet onions, sumac, allspice and pine nuts. Other meals common to the area are maqluba and mansaf, the latter originating from the Bedouin population of Jordan.

The cuisine of the Gaza Strip is influenced both by neighboring Egypt and its location on the Mediterranean coast. The staple food for the majority of the inhabitants in the area is fish. Gaza has a major fishing industry and fish is often served either grilled or fried after being stuffed with cilantro, garlic, red peppers and cumin and marinated in a mix of coriander, red peppers, cumin, and chopped lemons. The Egyptian culinary influence is also seen by the frequent use of hot peppers, garlic and chard to flavor many of Gaza's meals. A dish native to the Gaza area is Sumaghiyyeh, which consists of water-soaked ground sumac mixed with tahina and then, added to sliced chard and pieces of stewed beef and garbanzo beans.

There are several foods native to Palestine that are well known in the Arab world, such as, kinafe Nabulsi, Nabulsi cheese (cheese of Nablus), Ackawi cheese (cheese of Acre) and musakhan. Kinafe originated in Nablus, as well as the sweetened Nabulsi cheese used to fill it. Baqlawa, a pastry introduced at the time of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, is also an integral part of Palestinian cuisine.

Chick-pea based falafel, which substituted for the fava beans used in the original Egyptian recipe and added Indian peppers introduced after the Mongol invasions opened new trade routes, are a favorite staple in Mediterranean cuisine, since adopted as part of Israeli cuisine.

Entrées that are eaten throughout the Palestinian Territories, include waraq al-'inib — boiled grape leaves wrapped around cooked rice and ground lamb. Mahashi is an assortment of stuffed vegetables such as, zucchinis, potatoes, cabbage and in Gaza, chard.

cinema

Main article: Palestinian cinema

The Alhamra Cinema, Jaffa, 1937, bombed December 1947,

Villagers of Halhul waiting for an open-air film show, around 1940

Palestinian cinema is relatively young compared to Arab cinema overall and many Palestinian movies are made with European and Israeli support. Palestinian films are not exclusively produced in Arabic; some are made in English, French or Hebrew. More than 800 films have been produced about Palestinians, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and other related topics, examples include Divine Intervention and Paradise Now.

The first period: The beginning, 1935–48

The first Palestinian film to be made is generally believed to be a documentary on King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia´s visit in 1935 to Palestine, made by Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan, based in Jaffa(also spelled Ibrahim Hasan Serhan.) Sirhan followed the King and around Palestine, "from Lod to Jaffa and from Jaffa to Tel Aviv". The result was a silent movie that was presented at the Nabi Rubin festivals. Following this documentary, Sirhan joined Jamal al-Asphar to produce a 45-minute film called The Realized Dreams, aiming to "promote the orphans´cause". Sirhan and al-Asphar also produced a documentary about Ahmad Hilmi Pasha, a member of the Higher Arab Commission. In 1945 Sirhan established the "Arab Film Company" production studio together with Ahmad Hilmi al-Kilani. The company launched the feature film Holiday Eve, which was followed by preparations for the next film A Storm at Home. The films themselves were lost in 1948, when Sirhan had to flee Jaffa after the town was bombarded.

The second period: The epoch of silence, 1948–67

The Naqba of 1948 had a devastating effect on the Palestinian society, including its nascent film industry. Cinematic endeavours, requiring infrastructure, professional crews, and finance, nearly ceased for two decades. Individual Palestinian participated in the film-production of neighbouring countries. It is reported that Sirhan was involved with the production of the first Jordanian feature film, The Struggle in Jarash, (1957), and another Palestinian, Abdallah Ka´wash, directed the second Jordanian feature film, My Homeland, My Love, in 1964.

The third period: Cinema in exile, 1968–82

After 1967 Palestinian cinema was founded under the auspices of the PLO, funded by Fatah and other Palestinian organisations like PFLP and DFLP. More than 60 films were made in this period, mostly documentaries. The first film festival dedicated to Palestinian films was held in Baghdad in 1973, and Baghdad also hosted the next two Palestinian film festivals, in 1976 and 1980. Mustafa Abu Ali was one of the early Palestinian film directors, and he helped found the Palestinian Cinema Association in Beirut in 1973. Only one dramatic movie was made during the period, namely The return to Haifa in 1982, an adaptation of a short novel by Ghassan Kanafani.

The film archives disappearance, 1982

The different organisations set up archives for Palestinian films. The largest such archive was run by PLO's Film Foundation/Palestinian Film Unit. In 1982, when the PLO was forced out of Beirut, the archive was in storage (in the Red Crescenty Hospital), from where it "disappeared" under circumstances which are still unclear.

The fourth period: The return home, from 1980 to the present

The 1996 drama/comedy Chronicle of a Disappearance received international critical acclaim, and it became the first Palestinian movie to receive national release in the United States. A break-out film for its genre, it won a "New Director's Prize" at the Seattle International Film Festival and a "Luigi De Laurentiis Award" at the Venice Film Festival. Notable film directors in this period are especially:

Handicrafts

Main article: Palestinian handicrafts

Illustration of Palestinian Christian home in Jerusalem, ca 1850. By W. H. Bartlett

A wide variety of handicrafts, many of which have been produced by Palestinians for hundreds of years, continue to be produced today. Palestinian handicrafts include embroidery and weaving, pottery-making, soap-making, glass-making, and olive-wood and Mother of Pearl carvings, among others.

Education

Palestinian intellectuals, among them May Ziade and Khalil Beidas, were an integral part of the Arab intelligentsia. Educational levels among Palestinians have traditionally been high. In the 1960s the West Bank had a higher percentage of its adolescent population enrolled in high school education than did Lebanon. Claude Cheysson, France’s Minister for Foreign Affairs under the first Mitterrand Presidency, held in the mid eighties that, ‘even thirty years ago, (Palestinians) probably already had the largest educated elite of all the Arab peoples.’

Contributions to Palestinian culture have been made by Diaspora figures like Edward Said and Ghada Karmi, Arab citizens of Israel like Emile Habibi, and Jordanians like Ibrahim Nasrallah.

Literature

Main article: Palestinian literature

File:,Palestinian literature Nassar Ibrahim.jpeg

Palestinian literature with author Nassar Ibrahim

Palestinian literature forms part of the wider genre of Arabic literature. unlike its Arabic counterparts, Palestinian literature is defined by national affiliation rather than territorially. Thus Egyptian literature is that literature produced in Egypt. This too was the case for Palestinian literature up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but following the Palestinian Exodus of 1948 it has become a "a literature written by Palestinians" regardless of their residential status.

Contemporary Palestinian literature is often characterized by its heightened sense of irony and the exploration of existential themes and issues of identity. References to the subjects of resistance to occupation, exile, loss, and love and longing for homeland are also common. Palestinian literature can be intensely political, as underlined by writers like Salma Khadra Jayyusi and novelist Liana Badr, who have mentioned the need to give expression to the Palestinian "collective identity" and the "just case" of their struggle. There is also resistance to this school of thought, whereby Palestinian artists have "rebelled" against the demand that their art be "committed". Poet Mourid Barghouti for example, has often said that "poetry is not a civil servant, it's not a soldier, it's in nobody's employ." Rula Jebreal's novel Miral tells the story of Hind Husseini's effort to establish an orphanage in Jerusalem after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Deir Yassin Massacre, and the establishment of the state of Israel.

Since 1967, most critics have theorized the existence of three "branches" of Palestinian literature, loosely divided by geographic location: 1) from inside Israel, 2) from the occupied territories, 3) from among the Palestinian diaspora throughout the Middle East.

Hannah Amit-Kochavi recognizes only two branches: that written by Palestinians from inside the State of Israel as distinct from that written outside (ibid., p. 11). She also posits a temporal distinction between literature produced before 1948 and that produced thereafter. In a 2003 article published in the Studies in the Humanities journal, Steven Salaita posits a fourth branch made up of English language works, particularly those written by Palestinians in the United States, which he defines as "writing rooted in diasporic countries but focused in theme and content on Palestine."

Poetry

File:Mahmoud Darwish, a famous Palestinian poet.jpg

Mahmoud Darwish, a famous Palestinian poet

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.

Folklore

File:The Palestinian Folklore Dress.jpg

Palestinian Women wearing uniforms Palestinian

Palestinian folklore is the body of expressive culture, including tales, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs, and comprising the traditions (including oral traditions) of Palestinian culture. The folklorist revival among Palestinian intellectuals such as Nimr Sirhan, Musa Allush, Salim Mubayyid, and the Palestinian Folklore Society of the 1970s, emphasized pre-Islamic (and pre-Hebraic) cultural roots, re-constructing Palestinian identity with a focus on Canaanite and Jebusite cultures. Such efforts seem 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.

• 
  Ba'al, the ancient Canaanite storm and rain god.
• Palestinian Women is baked in Taboon
  Palestinian Women is baked in Taboon
• Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe (El Funoun)
  Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe (El Funoun)
• Palestinian thobe with Shawl
  Palestinian thobe with Shawl
• Palestinian women with Palestine Sunbird
  Palestinian women with Palestine Sunbird

Costumes

Girls in Bethlehem costume pre-1885

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 robe-like dress or "thoub" in Arabic.

New styles began to appear the 1960s. For example the "six-branched dress" named after the six wide bands of embroidery running down from the waist. These styles came from the refugee camps, particularly after 1967. Individual village styles were lost and replaced by an identifiable "Palestinian" style. The shawal, a style popular in the West Bank and Jordan before the First Intifada, probably evolved from one of the many welfare embroidery projects in the refugee camps. It was a shorter and narrower fashion, with a western cut.

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  Palestinian Family from Ramallah wearing typical Palestinian Ottoman Era clothing, c. 1905.
• 
  A woman from Bethlehem, c. 1940s.
• 
  Young woman of Ramallah wearing dowry headdress, c. 1898–1914
• 
  Ramallah woman, c. 1920, Library of Congress
• 
  A Traditional Women's Dress in Ramallah, c. 1920.

Dance

Palestinian Dabke folk dance as performed by men

The Dabke dance is marked by synchronized jumping, stamping, and movement, similar to tap dancing. One version is performed by men, another by women.

Palestinian Hikaye

File:Grandmother tells the Hekaya.jpg

Grandmother tells the Hekaya of her grandchildren

Hakaya members chose this name in 1994 to represent themselves as a Palestinian folk dancing and singing group. Through movement and song stories are told. These stories represent the Palestinian’s life style from an ancient time until now.

Dabka is the traditional dancing style of Palestinians people, danced at celebrations and festivals. From the early beginning at Ghirass Cultural Center, Hakaya group was established, the focus has been on Palestinian folklore. The costumes, songs, music and movements come from the Palestinian heritage that Ghirass works hard to preserve and teach it to its members. This focus is due to Ghirass’s belief that folklore is important in the process of the Palestinian nation-building. Traditional Palestinian folk (singing and dancing) is used for both amateur social settings and stage performance. Students learn the steps by name, the corresponding rhythms, the leadership roles and the attitudes to Palestinian Culture.

hirass Center had been interested since its inception in the Palestinian heritage and folklore. It has been working to establish a Hekaya band for Palestinian Dabka, and a Hekaya band for singing. And it began to hold sessions to teach the Palestinian popular Dabke. The product of this work is attention to the emergence of Palestinian heritage and the rise to prominence of the Hekaya band with high-level offers of folkloric paintings reflecting the heritage inherent in Palestine and keeping it through education from generation to generation. In addition, this heritage has been disseminated globally through a series of annual presentations by the band in different countries of the world such as Norway, Britain and France as well as to participate in the revival of national events.

The Palestinian Hikaye is a narratiave expression practised by women.The fictitious tales, which have evolved over the centuries, deal with current concerns of Middle Eastern Arab society and family issues.The Hikaye offers a critique of society from the women’s perspective and draws a portrait of the social structure that directly pertains to the lives of women. Many tales describe women torn between duty and desire.

The Hikaye is usually narrated at home during winter evenings, at spontaneous and convivial events attended by small groups of women and children. Men rarely attend, as this is considered inappropriate. The expressive power of the narration lies in the use of language, emphasis, speech rhythms and vocal inflections as well as in the ability to capture the attention of the listeners and successfully transport them into a world of imagination and fantasy.The technique and style of narration follows linguistic and literary conventions that set it apart from other folk narrative genres. The tales are narrated in Palestinian dialect, either in rural fallahi or in urban madani. Almost every Palestinian woman over the age of 70 is a Hikaye teller, and the tradition is primarily carried on by elderly women. It is not unusual for girls and young boys to tell tales to one another for practice or pleasure.

However, the Hikaye is in decline due to the influence of mass media, which often induce people to regard their native

Nabi Musa

Maqamu Musa, Jerico, Jerusalam

Nabi Musa 2008

Nabi Musa festival, Jerusalem, 1920

Interior Nabi Musa

Nabi Musa meaning the "Prophet Moses",also transliterated Nebi Musa) is the name of a site in the Palestinen desert that popular Palestinian folklore associates withMoses. It is also the name of a seven-day long religious festival that was celebrated annually by PalestinianMuslims, beginning on the Friday before Good Friday in the old Orthodox Greek calendar. Considered "the most important Muslim pilgrimage in Palestine," the festival centered around a collective pilgrimage from Jerusalem to what was understood to be the Tomb of Moses, near Jericho.

A Palestinian village with the same name lies close to the site. In 2007 it had a residential population of 309 according the census by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics(PCBS).

The Jerusalem-Jericho road was one of the primary routes used by Mediterranean Arabs to make a pilgrimage toMecca. The great, many-domed building which marks the Mausoleum of Moses was located at what would be have marked the end of the first day's march in that direction. Originally, it was simply a point from which pilgrims could look across the Jordan Valley and catch a glimpse of Mount Nebo where (as suggested by the Bible) the tomb of Moses was thought to be located. It appears to have become a fixed point in the local Muslim calendar from the time of Saladin. In 1269 theMamluk sultan Baibars al-Bunduqdari built a small shrine here, as part of a general policy he adopted after conquering towns and rural areas from Lebanon down to Hebron from the Crusaders. The shrines were mostly dedicated to biblical prophets and the companions of Mohammed, and their maintenance was funded by an awqaf, an endowment from properties that formerly belonged to the Latin Church. In the case of Nabi Musa, the waqf fund was secured from ecclesiastical assets expropriated in nearby Jericho.

Baibars al-Bunduqdari's constructive piety set a precedent for others. Over the late medieval period, hostels for travellers were built on adjacent to the shrine, and the hospice in its present form was completed in the decade between 1470 and 1480. Gradually, the lookout point for Moses' distant gravesite beyond the Jordan was confused with Moses' tomb itself, laying the ground for the cultic importance Nabi Musa was to acquire in the Palestinian worship of saints (walis).

Ottoman Turks, around 1820, restored the buildings, which had, over the previous centuries, fallen into a state of dilapidated disrepair. In addition, they promoted a festive pilgrimage to the shrine that would always coincide with the Christiancelebration of Easter, giving Muslims a way to celebrate during the time that their Christian neighbors were celebrating. This 'invention of tradition', as such imaginative constructs are called, made the pageantry of the Nabi Musa pilgrimage a potent symbol of both political and religious identity among Muslims from the outset of the modern period.

Over the 19th century, thousands of Muslims would assemble in Jerusalem, trek to Nabi Musa, and pass three days in feasting, prayer, games and visits to the large tomb two kilometres south, identified as that of Moses' shepherd, Hasan er-Rai, They were then entertained, as guests of the waqf, before returning on the seventh day triumphantly back to Jerusalem.

In the late 19th century, the Ottomans appointed the al-Husayni clan as official custodians of the shrine and hosts of the festival, though their connection with the cult may date back to the previous century. According to Yehoshua Ben-Aryeh, the governor of Jerusalem Rauf Pasha (1876–1888), was the first to attempt to exploit the festival to incite Muslims against Christians. Ilan Pappé offers a different view:

'It is more likely, however, that the governor and his government were rather apprehensive of such an anti-Christian uprising as it could stir instability and disorder at a time when the central government was trying to pacify the Empire. This had been indeed the impression of the engineer (seconded to the Palestine Exploration Fund) Claude Conder. The Hebrew paper,Ha-havazelet, at the time blessed the Ottoman government for imposing law and order in the Nabi Musa affair. The travelogues ofFrancis Newton testify as well to a peaceful execution of the ceremonies. Indeed, the Turkish government must have acted here against popular feelings, shared by the Husaynis as the masters of the ceremony that Nabi Musa was celebrated in the most unfavourable conditions for the Muslims. It was the iron fist imposed by the Turks that prevented the situation from deteriorating into an all out riot.'

File:Grave,Nabi Musa.jpg

Grave,Nabi Musa

The procession moved off from Jerusalem under a distinctive Nabi Musa banner which the Husaynis conserved for the annual occasion in their Dar al-Kabira. On arriving at the shrine, the al-Husaynis and another rising Jerusalem family of notables (A'ayan), the Yunis clan, were required to provide two meals a day over the week for all worshippers. Once their vows were taken, or vows previously taken were renewed, they were offered to the festival. The priestly family conducting events would provide about twelve lambs, together with rice, bread, and Arab butter, for a communal mealevery day.

Writing in the early 20th century, Samuel Curtiss recorded that an estimated 15,000 people from all over the country attended the Nabi Musa festival every year.For some years from 1919, pilgrims made their trek back from Jericho to Jerusalem to the sound of English military music. The festival was suppressed when Jordan assumed administration over the West Bank in the aftermath of 1948 Arab-Israeli war, because of its symbolic value as a vehicle for potential expressions of political protest. Since 1995, control over the tomb of Nabi Musa has been allocated to the Palestinian National Authority.

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)."

Music

Kamanjeh performer in Jerusalem, 1859.

Palestinian music is well known throughout the Arab world. After 1948, a new wave of performers emerged with distinctively Palestinian themes relating to dreams of statehood and burgeoning nationalist sentiments. In addition to zajal and ataaba, traditional Palestinian songs include: Bein Al-dawai, Al-Rozana, Zarif – Al-Toul, and Al-Maijana, Dal'ona, Sahja/Saamir, Zaghareet. Over three decades, the Palestinian National Music and Dance Troupe (El Funoun) and Mohsen Subhi have reinterpreted and rearranged traditional wedding songs such as Mish'al (1986), Marj Ibn 'Amer(1989) and Zaghareed (1997). Ataaba is a form of folk singing that consists of 4 verses, following a specific form and meter. The distinguishing feature of ataaba is that the first three verses end with the same word meaning three different things, and the fourth verse serves as a conclusion. It is usually followed by a dalouna.

Palestinian hip hop

File:Shadia Mansour Singer.jpg

Shadia Mansour is a Palestinian singer and MC who sings and raps in Arabic and English

Palestinian hip hop allegedly started in 1998 with Tamer Nafar's group DAM. These Palestinian youth forged the new Palestinian musical sub-genre, which blends Arabic melodies and hip hop beats. Lyrics are often sung in Arabic, Hebrew, English, and sometimes French. Since then, the new Palestinian musical sub-genre has grown to include artists in the Palestinian territories, Israel, Great Britain, the United States and Canada.

Borrowing from traditional rap music that first emerged in New York in the 1970s, "young Palestinian musicians have tailored the style to express their own grievances with the social and political climate in which they live and work." Palestinian hip hop works to challenge stereotypes and instigate dialogue about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Palestinian hip hop artists have been strongly influenced by the messages of American rappers. Tamar Nafar says “when I heard Tupac sing “It’s a White Man’s World” I decided to take hip hop seriously”. In addition to the influences from American hip hop, it also includes musical elements from Palestinian and Arabic music including “zajal, mawwal, and saj” which can be likened to Arabic spoken word, as well as including the percussiveness and lyricism of Arabic music.

Historically, music has served as an integral accompaniment to various social and religious rituals and ceremonies in Palestinian society (Al-Taee 47). Much of the Middle-Eastern and Arabic string instruments utilized in classical Palestinian music are sampled over Hip-hop beats in both Israeli and Palestinian hip-hop as part of a joint process of localization. Just as the percussiveness of the Hebrew language is emphasized in Israeli Hip-hop, Palestinian music has always revolved around the rhythmic specificity and smooth melodic tone of Arabic. “Musically speaking, Palestinian songs are usually pure melody performed monophonically with complex vocal ornamentations and strong percussive rhythm beats”. The presence of a hand-drum in classical Palestinian music indicates a cultural esthetic conducive to the vocal, verbal and instrumental percussion which serve as the foundational elements of Hip-hop. This hip hop is joining a “longer tradition of revolutionary, underground, Arabic music and political songs that have supported Palestinian Resistance”. This sub genre has served as a way to politicize the Palestinian issue through music.

See also

• List of Palestinians
• History of the Palestinian people
• Arab citizens of Israel
• Palestine
• State of Palestine
• Palestinian territories
• Palestinian National Authority
• West bank
• Gaza Strip
• Jerusalem
• East Jerusalem

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• Khalidi, Walid (1984). Before Their Diaspora. Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington D.C.
• Kimmerling, Baruch and Joseph S. Migdal (2003). The Palestinian People: A History. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01129-5. ISBN 978-0-674-01129-8.
• Kish, George (1978). A Source Book in Geography (Reissue, illustrated ed.). Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-82270-6, 9780674822702. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Kunstel, Marcia and Joseph Albright (1990). Their Promised Land: Arab and Jew in History's Cauldron-One Valley in the Jerusalem Hills. Crown. ISBN 0-517-57231-1
• Lewis, Bernard (1999). Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-31839-7
• Lewis, Bernard (2002). The Arabs in History. Oxford University Press, USA, 6th ed. [20]
• Lybarger, Loren (2007). Identity and religion in Palestine: the struggle between Islamism and secularism in the occupied territories. Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-12729-3
• Lynd, S., Bahour, S. and Lynd, A. (editors) Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians. New York: Olive Branch Press. ISBN 1-56656-132-9
• McCarthy, Justin (1990). "The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate". Columbia University Press, ISBAN: 0231071108
• McDowall, David (1989). The Uprising and Beyond. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 1-85043-289-9
• Muhawi, Ibrahim (1989). Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-06292-4
• Parkes, James (1970). Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine.
• Parmenter, Barbara McKean (1994). Giving Voice to Stones Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature University of Texas Press
• 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.
• Shahin, Mariam (2005). Palestine: A Guide. Interlink Books.
• Schulz, Helena Lindholm; Hammer, Juliane (2003). The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26820-6. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |unused_data= (help)
• Whitelam, Keith (1997). The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-10759-8, ISBN 978-0-415-10759-4
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• Semino et al. (2004) Origin, Diffusion, and Differentiation of Y-Chromosome Haplogroups E and J:Inferences on the Neolithization of Europe and Later Migratory Events in the Mediterranean Area. American Journal of Human Genetics May; 74(5): 1023–1034.
• Ateek, Naim (1992) Jerusalem in Islam and For Palestinian Christians.

External links

• Christians in Palestine antique prints collection
• Sounds of Folksongs
• Voice of Palestinian Folklore, Free Songs Download
• Traditional Palestinian Clothes
• The Art of Palestinian Embroidery
• Sands of Sorrow – Film on refugees
• United Nations Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People
• The Ottoman Palestine Download Palestinian Pictures in Ottoman Palestine.