The study of the origins of the Palestinians, a population encompassing the Arab inhabitants of the former Mandatory Palestine and their descendants,[1] is a subject approached through an interdisciplinary lens, drawing from fields such as population genetics, demographic history, folklore, including oral traditions, linguistics, and other disciplines.
The demographic history of Palestine has been shaped by various historical events and migrations. Over time, it shifted from a Jewish majority in the early Roman period to a Christian majority in Late Roman and Byzantine times.[2] The Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 7th century initiated a process of Arabization and Islamization through the conversion and acculturation of locals, accompanied by Arab settlement. This led to a Muslim-majority population, though significantly smaller, in the Middle Ages.[3][4] The Muslim dominance persisted up until the 20th century, influenced by Muslim immigration from surrounding regions, including Egypt,[5][6] Transjordan,[7] Arabian Peninsula,[7] Kurdistan,[8] Syria,[9][10] and the Maghreb.[6] These demographic shifts are also reflected in local traditions of ancestry. Many Palestinian villagers claim ancestral ties to Arab tribes from the Arabian Peninsula that settled in Palestine during or after the Arab conquest,[11] while others trace their roots to Turkish, North African, Kurdish, Egyptian, and Turkman origins. Some Palestinian families, notably in the Hebron and Nablus regions, claim Jewish and Samaritan ancestry respectively, preserving associated cultural customs and traditions.[12][13][14]
Genetic studies indicate a genetic affinity between Palestinians and other Levantine populations, as well as other Arab and Semitic groups in the Middle East and North Africa.[15][16] Genetic studies have also shown a close genetic relationship between Palestinians and Jews,[17][18][19] suggesting a shared ancestral heritage.[17] Recent research suggests a genetic continuity between several modern Levantine groups, including Palestinians, and ancient Levantine populations, evidenced by their clustering with the Bronze-Age population of Canaan.[20] Variations have been noted between Muslim and Christian Palestinians.[21] Additionally, there are indications within Palestinian populations of maternal gene flow from Sub-Saharan Africa, possibly linked to historical migrations or the Arab slave trade.[22]
The historical discourse regarding the origin of the Palestinians has been influenced by the ongoing effort of nation-building, including the attempt to solidify Palestinian national consciousness as the primary framework of identity, as opposed to other identities dominant among Palestinians, including primordial clannish, tribal, local, and Islamist identities.[23]
Palestinians - A population of around 14m people who trace their origins to British-ruled Palestine. Around 7m Palestinians live in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Another 7m are strewn across the Arab world and beyond. Nearly 6m are registered as refugees.
They came from Circassia and Chechnya, and were refugees from territories annexed by Russia in 1864, and the Bosnian Muslims, whose province was lost to Serbia in 1878. Belonging to this category were the Algerians (Mughrabis), who arrived in Syria and Palestine in several waves after 1850 in the wake of France's conquest of their country and the waves of Egyptian migration to Palestine and Syria during the rule of Muhammad Ali and his son, Ibrahim Pasha. [...] In most cases the Egyptian army dropouts and the other Egyptian settlers preferred to settle in existing localities, rather than to establish new villages. In the southern coastal plain and Ramla zones there were at least nineteen villages which had families of Egyptian origin, and in the northern part of Samaria, including the 'Ara Valley, there are a number of villages with substantial population of Egyptian stock.
These primordialist claims regarding the Palestinians' primeval and prior roots in the land operated at the level of the collective. When it came to an individual's own family, however, Arab-Islamic discourse took precedence over archaeological justifications. I ran across no Palestinian villager (or urbanite) who claimed personal descent from the Canaanites. Villagers typically traced their family or their hamila's origins back to a more recent past in the Arabian peninsula. Many avowed descent from some nomadic tribe that had migrated from Arabia to Palestine either during or shortly after the Arab-Islamic conquests. By such a claim they inserted their family's history into the narrative of Arab and Islamic civilization and connected themselves to a genealogy that possessed greater local and contemporary prestige than did ancient or pre-Islamic descent. Several men specifically connected their forefathers' date of entry into Palestine to their participation in the army of Salih al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), a historical figure whose significance has been retrospectively enlarged by nationalist discourse such that he is now regarded not merely as a hero of "Islamic" civilization but as a "national" luminary as well.+ (Modern nationalist discourse tends to downplay Salah al-Din's Kurdish origins.) Palestinians of all political stripes viewed Salah al-Din's wars against the Crusaders as a forerunner of the current combats against foreign intruders. Many considered Salah al-Din's victory over the Crusaders at Hittin (A.D. 1187) as a historical precedent that offered hope for their own eventual triumph even if, like the Crusader wars, the current struggle with Israel was destined to last more than two centuries. Family histories affiliated to earlier "patriotic" struggles against European aggression tied interviewees to a continuous narrative of national resistance. Villagers claiming descent from Arabs who entered Palestine during the Arab-Islamic conquest equally viewed these origins as establishing their historical precedence over the Jews
Khaybar's Jews appear in Arab folklore as well. [...] The Muḥamara family of the Arab village of Yutta, near Hebron, trace their descent to the Jews of Khaybar. Families in other nearby villages tell of similar lineages.
According to historical records part, or perhaps the majority, of the Muslim Arabs in this country descended from local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD (Shaban 1971; Mc Graw Donner 1981). These local inhabitants, in turn, were descendants of the core population that had lived in the area for several centuries, some even since prehistorical times (Gil 1992)... Thus, our findings are in good agreement with the historical record...