Encyclopedia
- The term "Palestinian" has other usages, for which see definitions of Palestinian.
Palestinians are people with family origins mainly in
Palestine. Their religion is primarily
Islam, with
Christianity,
Judaism,
Druze, and other minorities. Today, they are mainly
Arabic-speaking.
Under the
British mandate period from 1918 to 1948, the term "Palestinian" referred to anyone native to Palestine, regardless of their religion;
Muslim, Christian,
Jew, or
Druze. Since the creation of
Israel, the application of "Palestinian" to native Palestinian Jews has lessened, and they are now simply identified as "
Israelis" and are not distinguished from the majority of
Israeli Jews resultant from the modern
Zionist migrations. While some also exclude
Israeli Arabs from today's definition of "Palestinians," others do not. Thus the term over the centuries has largely shifted from a regional to an ethnic and a political description.
The Palestinian National Covenant, as revised by the
Palestine Liberation Organization in 1968, defines Palestinians as those Arab citizens who were living normally in Palestine up to 1947, and all their descendants through the male line. For those who were
Jewish, the requirement was that they had resided in Palestine until the beginning of the
Zionist migrations. For this purpose, the Zionist migrations are considered to have begun in 1917.
The official designation of "
Palestinian refugee" refers to anyone who registered as a Palestinian
Refugee with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and any of those registrants' descendents in the male line. Under UNRWA's operational definition, Palestine refugees are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.
Palestinian demographics
While the largest single population of Palestinians is found in the lands which constituted
Mandate for Palestine, over half of Palestinians live elsewhere as
refugees and
emigrants. In the absence of actual censuses, counting large populations is very difficult. However, in 2001 the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs collated the estimates of world-wide distribution of Palestinians quoted in the table below.
| Country or region | Population |
|---|
| West Bank and Gaza Strip | 3,700,000 or 2,490,000 |
| Jordan | 2,598,000 |
| Israel | 1,213,000 |
| Syria | 395,000 |
| Lebanon | 388,000 |
| Saudi Arabia | 287,000 |
| The Americas | 216,000 |
| Egypt | 58,000 |
| Other Gulf states | 152,000 |
| Other Arab states | 113,000 |
| Other countries | 275,000 |
| TOTAL | 9,395,000 |
| Note: The Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza has been disputed in recent research - see Demographics of Palestine. |
In
Jordan today, there is no official census data about how many of the inhabitants of Jordan are Palestinians; estimates range from 50% to 80%. Some political researchers attribute this to the Jordanian policy of not further widening the gap between the two main population groups in Jordan: its original
Bedouin population that holds most of the administrative posts and the Palestinians who are predominant in the economy.
Many Palestinians have settled in the
United States, particularly in the Chicago area.
In
South America, around 600,000 people of Palestinian origin reside. Palestinian
emigration to South America took place largely, but not exclusively, for economic reasons before the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Many came from the
Bethlehem area. Those emigrating to South America were mainly Christian. Half of the Palestinian-origin people in South America are in
Chile and
El Salvador and
Honduras also have substantial Palestinian populations. These two countries have had presidents of Palestinian ancestry .
Belize, which has a smaller Palestinian population, has a Palestinian Minister — Said Musa.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics announced on October 20, 2004 that the number of Palestinians worldwide at the end of 2003 is 9.6 million, an increase of 800,000 since 2001.
However, in 2005, a comprehensive assessment of the PCBS figures and methodology was conducted by the American-Israel Demographic Research Group. In their critique, 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 . The errors claimed in their analysis included:
birth rate errors , immigration & emmigration errors , failure to account for migration to Israel , double-counting
Jerusalem Arabs , counting former residents now living abroad and other discrepancies . Their research was reported in several media outlets, including Ynet news, the online portal of Israeli newspaper
Yedioth Ahronoth and the newssite
Cybercast News Service . The results of their research was also presented before the
United States House of Representatives on March 8, 2006.
Palestinian Arabs
A
Palestinian Arab is an Arab of Palestine - either the historical
region of Palestine or any of the political divisions designated as "Palestine".
Journalists, historians and some
diplomats or government officials frequently refer to Palestianian Arabs as "Palestinians" for short.
According to the
PLO, the "homeland of Arab Palestinian people" is
Palestine, an "indivisible territorial unit" having "the boundaries it had during the British Mandate".
Refugees
- Main article: Palestinian refugees for more detail.
4,255,120 Palestinians are registered as
refugees with UNRWA; this number includes the descendants of refugees from the 1948 war, but excludes those who have emigrated to areas outside of the UNRWA's remit . Thus, if the estimates above are correct, almost half of all Palestinians are registered refugees.
Religions
The
British census of 1922 counted 752,048 in
Palestine, comprising 589,177
Muslims, 83,790
Jews, 71,464 Christians and 7,617 persons belonging to other groups .
Bedouin were not counted, but a British study estimated their number at 70,860 in 1930 .
Currently, no reliable data are available for the worldwide Palestinian population; Bernard Sabella of Bethlehem University estimates it as 6% Christian. However, within the
West Bank and
Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, the Palestinian population is 97%
Muslim and 3% Christian; there are also about 300
Samaritans and a few thousand Jews from the
Neturei Karta group who consider themselves Palestinian. Within Israel, 68% of the non-Jewish population is
Muslim, 9% Christian, 7%
Druze, and 15% "other".
The ancestry of the Palestinians
Canaanites, believed to have migrated in the 3rd millenium from the inner
Arabian Peninsula, are considered to be among the first to live in cities in Palestine. . Additionally,
Israelites,
Philistines,
Romans, Arabs,
Crusaders, and other people have all settled in the region and intermarried . Many of their descendants converted to
Christianity and later to
Islam, and spoke different languages depending on the
lingua franca of the time. For the most part, the
Arabization of Palestine began in Umayyad times. Increasing conversions to Islam among the local population, together with the immigration of Arabs from Arabia and inland Syria, led to the replacement of
Aramaic by
Arabic as the area's dominant language. Among the cultural survivals from pre-Arab times are the significant Palestinian Christian community as well as Aramaic loanwords in the local dialect. A distinguishing characteristic of Palestinians is their dialect; unusually among Arabic speakers, speakers of rural Palestinian dialects pronounce the letter
qaaf as
k . Palestinians, like most other Arabic speakers, thus combine pre-Arab and Arab ancestry; the precise mixture is a matter of debate, on which genetic evidence has begun to shed some light, apparently confirming
Ibn Khaldun's widely accepted argument that most Arabic speakers descend mainly from acculturated non-Arabs.
According to
Sir James Frazer, the majority of Palestinian Arabs are descendants of the ancient Jebusites and Canaanites. In 1902, he wrote in his book
The Golden Bough:
"The Arabic-speaking peasants of Palestine are the progeny of the tribes which settled in the country before the Israelite invasion. They are still adhering to the land. They never left it and were never uprooted from it."
The genetic profile of the Palestinians which has been studied in supports
Sir James Frazer claims:
"Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian and Anatolian peoples in ancient times."
The Palestinian
Bedouin, however, are much more securely known to be Arab by ancestry as well as by culture; their distinctively conservative dialects and pronunciation of
qaaf as
gaaf group them with other
Bedouin across the Arab world and confirm their separate history.
Arabic onomastic elements began to appear in Edomite inscriptions starting in the 6th century BC, and are nearly universal in the inscriptions of the
Nabataeans, who arrived there in the 4th-3rd centuries BC. It has thus been suggested that the present day Bedouins of the region may have their origins as early as this period. A few Bedouin are found as far north as
Galilee; however, these seem to be much later arrivals, rather than descendants of the Arabs that
Sargon II settled in Samaria in 720 BC.
As genetic techniques have advanced, it has become possible to look directly into the question of the ancestry of the Palestinians. In recent years, many genetic surveys have suggested that — at least paternally — the various Jewish ethnic divisions and Palestinians, are genetically closer to each other than either is to the Arabs or non-Jewish Europeans.
. These studies look at the prevalence of specific inherited genetic differences among populations, which then allow the relatedness of these populations to be determined, and their ancestry to be traced back . These differences can be the cause of genetic disease or be completely neutral ; they can be inherited maternally , paternally , or as a
mixture from both parents ; the results obtained may vary from polymorphism to polymorphism. One study on congenital deafness identified an allele only found in Palestinian and
Ashkenazi communities, suggesting a common origin ; an investigation of a Y-
chromosome polymorphism found
Lebanese, Palestinian, and Sephardic populations to be particularly closely related ; a third study , looking at Human leukocyte antigen differences among a broad range of populations, found Palestinians to be particularly closely related to
Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews, as well as Middle-Eastern and
Mediterranean populations.
One point in which the two populations appear to contrast is in the proportion of sub-Saharan African genes which have entered their gene pools. One study found that Middle Eastern Arabs , unlike other Middle Eastern populations , had what appears to be a substantial gene flow from
sub-Saharan Africa within the past three millennia, possibly due to the
slave trade.
The origins of Palestinian identity
In Arabic,
Filasteen has been the name of the region since the earliest
medieval Arab
geographers , and
Filasteeni was always a common adjectival noun adopted by natives of the region, starting as early as the
first century after the Hijra
Whereas European
colonialism and to a lesser extent Turkish
nationalism in the
Ottoman Empire was the main spur in forming national identities and borders elsewhere, the main force in reaction to which Palestinian nationalism developed was
Zionism. One of the earliest Palestinian newspapers,
Filastin founded in
Jaffa in 1911 by Issa al-Issa, addressed its readers as "Palestinians".
Even before the end of Ottoman administration, Palestine, rather than the Ottoman Empire, was considered by some Palestinians to be their country. On 25 July 1913, for instance, the Palestinian newspaper al-Karmel wrote: "This team possessed tremendous power; not to ignore that Palestine, their country, was part of the Ottoman Empire." The idea of a specifically Palestinian state, however, was at first rejected by most Palestinians; the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations , 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." However, particularly after the fall of the
Ottoman Empire and the French conquest of
Syria, the notion took on greater appeal; in 1920, for instance, the formerly pan-Syrianist mayor of Jerusalem,
Musa Qasim Pasha al-Husayni, said "Now, after the recent events in
Damascus, we have to effect a complete change in our plans here. Southern Syria no longer exists. We must defend Palestine". Similarly, the Second Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations , passed a resolution calling for an independent Palestine; they then wrote a long letter to the
League of Nations about "Palestine, land of Miracles and the supernatural, and the cradle of religions", demanding, amongst other things, that a "National Government be created which shall be responsible to a
Parliament elected by the Palestinian People, who existed in Palestine before the war."
Conflict between Palestinian nationalists and various types of
pan-Arabists continued during the British Mandate, but the latter became increasingly marginalised. By 1937, only one of the many Arab political parties in Palestine promoted political absorption into a greater Arab nation as its main agenda. However, the
1948 Arab-Israeli War resulted in those parts of Palestine which were not part of Israel being occupied by Egypt and Jordan.
The idea of an independent nationality for Palestinian Arabs was greatly boosted by the
1967 Six Day War in which these lands were conquered by Israel; instead of being ruled by different Arab states encouraging them to think of themselves as Jordanians or Egyptians, those in the West Bank and Gaza were now ruled by a state with no desire to make them think of themselves as Israelis, and an active interest in discouraging them from regarding themselves as Egyptians, Jordanians, or Syrians. Moreover, the natives of the
West Bank and the
Gaza Strip now shared many interests and problems in common with each other that they did not share with the neighboring countries.
Because of the gradualness of the creation of an Palestinian national identity - and, many allege, for reasons of political convenience - many Israelis did not accept the existence of an independent Palestinian people, as in
Golda Meir's statement: "There was no such thing as Palestinians. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist."
. Today the existence of a unique Palestinian nationality/identity is generally recognized. .
During the few decades after the State of
Israel came into existence, Palestinian expressions of
pan-Arabism could be heard from time to time but usually under outside influence. This was especially true in
Syria under the influence of the
Baath party. For example, Zuhayr Muhsin, the leader of the Syrian-funded as-Sa'iqa Palestinian faction and its representative on the PLO Executive Committee, told a
Dutch newspaper in 1977 that "There is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. It is for political reasons only that we carefully emphasize our Palestinian identity." Such opinions also existed in
Jordan, where government policy was to de-emphasize the difference between Palestinians and Jordanians for domestic reasons. However, most in the Palestinian organizations saw the struggle as either Palestinian-nationalist or Islamic in nature and these themes predominate even more today.
In 1977, the
United Nations General Assembly created the "International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People", an annual observance on November 29th.
Politics
The Arab summit meeting in
Rabat,
Morocco in October 1974 stated that the
PLO is the "sole legitimate representation of the Palestinian people" . However, Israel, and to a lesser extent the United States and parts of Europe, preferred to deal with what it regarded as more moderate groups for a long period of time.
The
Palestinian Authority administers large sections of the
West Bank and
Gaza Strip, although it lacks actual sovereignty. In recent years, its authority has in practice been challenged by groups such as
Hamas; however, most such groups continue to recognize its legitimacy in principle.
Israel has publicly acknowledged this authority, but in practice taken actions which paralyse it.
Following the November, 2004 death of long-time
Fatah party PLO leader and PA chairman
Yasser Arafat, Fatah member
Mahmoud Abbas was elected as
Palestinian Authority Chairman.
In January, 2006, the List of
Change and Reform, the political wing of
Hamas, won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament in
free elections, garnering a 44% plurality of votes cast. This result, a surprise to all parties, was widely interpreted as a protest against Fatah corruption, but was as much a cause of concern for supporters of the
peace process as Ariel Sharon's rise to power, as Hamas' militant wing is actively involved in the resistance against the occupation and remains steadfast in its refusal to recognise Israel under the current circumstances.
Palestinian citizens of Israel have political representation in the
Knesset . The Israeli government asserts that non-Jewish citizens of Israel have nearly all the same rights and obligations as Jewish Israelis , but there are important differences and restrictions amounting to an implicit apartheid.
See also
References
- Argov Z et al. "Hereditary inclusion body myopathy: the Middle Eastern genetic cluster," Neurology May 13, 2003;60:1519-23.
Further reading
- Gottheil, Fred M. , Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2003, Volume X:1
