Origin of the Palestinians

[8][9] Historical records and later genetic studies indicate that the Palestinian people descend mostly from Ancient Levantines extending back to Bronze Age inhabitants of Levant.

[29] According to a study published in June 2017 by Ranajit Das, Paul Wexler, Mehdi Pirooznia, and Eran Elhaik in Frontiers in Genetics, in a principal component analysis, Natufians, together with a Neolithic Levantine sample, "clustered predominantly with modern-day Palestinians and Bedouins" and that Palestinians have a "predominant" ancient Levantine origin (58%) and residual Iranian origin (18%), with some Eastern Hunter-Gatherer and smaller amounts of Anatolian admixture.

Results show that a significant European component was added to the region since the Bronze Age (on average ~8.7%), seemingly related to the Sea Peoples, excluding Ashkenazi and Moroccan Jews who harbour ~ 41% and 31% European-related ancestry respectively, both populations having a history in Europe.

Admixture analysis in the same study inferred that the Palestinian and Jordanian DNA largely resembled the mixture of Syrians, Lebanese, Druze and Samaritans.

[41] A 2010 study by Atzmon and Harry Ostrer concluded that the Palestinians were, together with Bedouins, Druze and southern European groups, the closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish populations.

[43] the study concluded 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".

[38] As noted previously a 2020 study found common ancestry for modern Levantine Arabic-speaking peoples and Ashkenazi populations, but with the latter harbouring a much higher (41%) European-related component.

[31] A study found that the Palestinians, like Jordanians, Lebanese, and Syrians, have what appears to be female-mediated gene flow in the form of maternal DNA haplogroups from Sub-Saharan Africa.

[78][67] Some of these local Arab tribes and Bedouin fought as allies of Byzantium in resisting the invasion, which the archaeological evidence indicates was a 'peaceful conquest',[dubious – discuss] and the newcomers were allowed to settle in the old urban areas.

[80][81][82] During the early Islamic period, there was a significant movement of local populations, particularly Christians, from coastal areas to inland settlements and destinations across the Mediterranean.

[84] After the 630s most of the urban centers declined, which caused local ecclesiastical administrations to weaken or disappear altogether, leaving Christians most susceptible to conversion.

[90][page needed] When the Crusaders arrived in Palestine during the 11th century, they made no distinction between Christians who for the Latin rite were considered heretics, Jews and Muslims, slaughtering all indiscriminately.

Stricter regulations to control Christian communities ensued, theological enmities grew, and the process of Arabization and Islamicization strengthened, abetted with the inflow of nomadic Bedouin tribes in the 13th and 14th centuries.

This influx was driven by employment prospects generated by the construction of a deep-water port and the expansion of maritime economic activities under British auspices.

[109] The Sharon plain also attracted Arab migration during the Mandatory period, driven by Jewish settlement and government development initiatives that eradicated malaria, enhanced healthcare services, extended life expectancy, and generated job opportunities in the area.

"[114] Early Jewish advocates of Canaanism in the 1940s, including founder Yonatan Ratosh, claimed Palestinians were the descendants of Canaanites and encouraged Israeli irredentism.

Palestinians anthropologist Ali Qleibo and sociologist Samih Farsoun both argue:Throughout history a great diversity of peoples has moved into the region and made Palestine their homeland: Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines from Crete, Anatolian and Hellenic Greeks, Hebrews, Amorites, Edomites, Nabataeans, Arameans, Romans, Arabs, and Western European Crusaders, to name a few.

[123]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.

This was particularly true in Palestine, where the population was transformed by such events as the Jewish rebellion against Rome and its suppression, the Arab conquest, the coming and going of the Crusaders, the devastation and resettlement of the coastlands by the Mamluk and Turkish regimes, and, from the nineteenth century, by extensive migrations from both within and from outside the region.

Some of them, like the Arab al-Sakhr south of Lake Kinneret trace their origins to the Hejaz or Najd in the Arabian Peninsula, while the Ghazawiyya's ancestry is said to go back to the Hauran's Misl al-Jizel tribes.

[citation needed] Turks in Palestine are a known group amongst Palestinians to this day, many of them pride on their Ottoman roots and are openly discussing their arrival to the Southern Levant.

[146] Kurdish-descended Palestinians inhabit various locales, among them Ar-Rihiya (originally founded by Kurdish shepherds), Beit Hanoun, and the now depopulated Bayt Nuba.

[citation needed] Throughout the Roman and Byzantine eras, Aramaic emerged as the dominant language in Palestine, supplanting Hebrew, which ceased to be spoken around the 2nd century.

Aref al-Aref, in an effort to undermine Jerusalem's Jewish history and emphasize its Arab identity, linked the founding of the city to the "Arab" Jebusites, despite Hebrew Bible being the only extant ancient document that uses the name "Jebusite" to describe the pre-Israelite residents of Jerusalem[161][162] The claim of kinship with the Israelites, according to Bernard Lewis, allows to "assert a historical claim antedating the biblical promise and possession put forward by the Jews.

In his book he claimed that the blend of the Canaanites and the Philistines, who migrated from the Greek islands around 1500 BCE, eventually formed the nucleus of the current Palestinian Arab population.

Litvak notes that Palestinians felt compelled to engage in historiography to counter Jewish claims, aiming to demonstrate Palestine's enduring Arab identity throughout history, from ancient times to the present day.

[21] A number of pre-Mandatory Zionists, from Ahad Ha'am and Ber Borochov to David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi believed that the Palestinian peasant population as descended from the ancient biblical Hebrews, but this belief was disowned when its ideological implications became problematic.

[166] They also claimed that these peasants and their mode of life were living historical testimonies to ancient Israelite practices described in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.

[168] 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.

Notable among them was Joan Peters, who in 1984 published From Time Immemorial, in which she argued through the flawed use of statistics,[174] that Palestinians were largely descended from economic migrants from other Arabic-speaking countries who arrived in Palestine the late 19th and 20th centuries.