Palestinian people

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The term "Palestinian" has other usages, for which see definitions of Palestinian.

Template:Ethnic group |popplace=See Demographics |langs=Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic |rels=Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Druze, Samaritanism |related=Arabs, Jews, Kurds }} Palestinians are people with family origins mainly in Palestine. Their religion is primarily Muslim, with Christian, Jewish, Druze, and other minorities. Today, they are mainly Arabic-speaking.

Some authorities consider all residents of Palestine to be "Palestinians", while others consider the term to apply only to Palestinian Arabs (see Definitions of Palestine and Palestinians). Under the British mandate period from 1918 to 1948, the term "Palestinian" referred to anyone native to Palestine, whatever their religion; Muslim, Christian, Jew, or Druze. [1] 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, devised 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 is considered as having started in 1917.

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Palestinian demographics

Image:Palestine occupation25.jpg

While the largest single population of Palestinians is found in the lands which constituted British Mandate of 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
Israel 1,213,000
Jordan 2,598,000
Lebanon 388,000
Syria 395,000
Saudi Arabia 287,000
Gulf states 152,000
Egypt 58,000
Other Arab states 113,000
The Americas 216,000
Other countries 275,000
TOTAL 9,395,000
Note: The Palestinian population in East Jerusalem, numbering around 200,000, may have been counted as part of "West Bank and Gaza Strip" as well as "Israel", thus creating a duplication.

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. The issue is further complicated by the fact that Jordan was created by the British out of 80% of Palestine. That is, 80% of Palestine was given independence and renamed, "Jordan." However, the government was given over to the foreign Hashemite family, allies of the British.

Many Palestinians have settled in the United States, particularly in the Chicago area[2][3].

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. El Salvador [4] and Honduras [5] also have substantial Palestinian populations. These two countries have had presidents of Palestinian origin (in El Savador Antonio Saca, currently serving; in Honduras Carlos Roberto Flores). Belize, which has a smaller Palestinian population, has a Palestinian Prime Minister[6] — 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. [7]

Some researchers doubt the PCBS numbers: [8], [9].

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Refugees

See 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 [10]. Thus, if the estimates above are correct, almost half of all Palestinians are registered refugees.

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Religions

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

Currently, no reliable data are available for the worldwide Palestinian population; Bernard Sabella of Bethlehem University estimates it as 6% Christian[12]. 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".

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The ancestry of the Palestinians

Jews, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and other people have all settled in the region and intermarried [13][14]. 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 (and smaller Jewish and Samaritan ones) 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 (Arabic kaaf). 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 (see below) has begun to shed some light, apparently confirming Ibn Khaldun's widely accepted argument that most Arabic speakers descend mainly from acculturated non-Arabs.

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[15]. 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, (and in some cases other Levantines) are genetically closer to each other than either is to the Arabs (of Arabia) or non-Jewish Europeans. [16] [17] [18] [19]([20] contains more links to genetic studies of Jewish and Middle Eastern populations). These studies look at the prevalence of specific inherited genetic differences (polymorphism) among populations, which then allow the relatedness of these populations to be determined, and their ancestry to be traced back (see population genetics). These differences can be the cause of genetic disease or be completely neutral (see Single nucleotide polymorphism) ; they can be inherited maternally (mitochondrial DNA), paternally (Y chromosome), or as a mixture from both parents ; the results obtained may vary from polymorphism to polymorphism. One study [21]on congenital deafness identified an allele only found in Palestinian and Ashkenazi communities, suggesting a common origin ; an investigation [22] of a Y-chromosome polymorphism found Lebanese, Palestinian, and Sephardic populations to be particularly closely related ; a third study [23], 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. (The latter study by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena has been the subject of intense controversy, it was retracted by the journal and removed from its website, leading to further controversy; the main accusations made were that the authors used their scientific findings to justify making one-sided political proclamations in the paper; that the retraction followed lobbyist pressure because the results contradicted certain political beliefs; some suggested that the broad scientific interpretation was based on too narrow data [24], whereas others support the scientific content as valid - for more information on the controversy : [25], [26], [27], [28].) If this close relatedness is true, it would confirm both Jews' and Palestinians' historical claims, suggesting a common Northwest Semitic ancestry. However, the results are complex, much work remains to be carried out, and partial results can be interpreted to suit diverse political agendas.

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 (specifically Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Bedouin), unlike other Middle Eastern populations (specifically Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, and Near Eastern Jews), had what appears to be a substantial gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa (amounting to 10-15% of lineages) within the past three millennia, possibly due to the slave trade[29].

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The origins of Palestinian identity

Image:Medieval Arab Palestine.jpg

In Arabic, Filasteen (فلسطين) has been the name of the region since the earliest medieval Arab geographers (adopted from the then-current Greek term Palaestina (Παλαιστινη), first used by Herodotus, itself derived ultimately from the name of the Philistines), and Filasteeni (فلسطسيني) was always a common adjectival noun (see Arabic grammar) adopted by natives of the region, starting as early as the first century after the Hijra (eg `Abdallah b. Muhayriz al-Jumahi al-Filastini[30], an ascetic who died in the early 700's.)

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"[31].

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."[32] The idea of a specifically Palestinian state, however, was at first rejected by most Palestinians; 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." (Yehoshua Porath, Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion: 1929-1939, vol. 2, London: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1977, pp. 81-82.) 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 (December 1920), 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 (the Istiqlal party) promoted political absorption into a greater Arab nation as its main agenda.

Image:Yasser-arafat-1999.jpg

The idea of an independent nationality for Palestinian Arabs was greatly boosted by the 1967 Six Day War; instead of being ruled by different Arab states encouraging them to think of themselves as Jordanians or Egyptians, they 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 (as opposed to a regional one) - 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." (Sunday Times, 15 June 1969) (see History of Palestine). Today the existence of a unique Palestinian nationality/identity is generally recognized. ([33]).

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-nationist 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. <ref>United Nations General Assembly. International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, The United Nations. Accessed March 27, 2006.</ref>

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Politics

Image:Pna logo.jpg

The Arab summit meeting in Rabat, Morocco in October 1974 stated that the PLO is the "sole legitimate representation of the Palestinian people" (i.e., of Palestinian Arabs). 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 timeTemplate:Fact.

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 often acknowledged this authority.

Following the November 2004 death of long-time PLO leader and PA chairman Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas was elected as Palestinian Authority Chairman.

In January of 2006, the political party Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament in free elections.

In Israel, Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of in Israel (see Israeli Arabs) are represented politically by the Israeli parliament (see Knesset).Israeli government claims that Aran Israelis have nearly all the same rights and obligations as Jewish Israelis, but there independent sources accuse Israelis of ethnic and racial prejudice.Even the Jews who speak Arabic (Mizerahi) claim suppression and discrimination from Ashkenazi Jews.

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See also

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References

<references/>

  • Argov Z et al. "Hereditary inclusion body myopathy: the Middle Eastern genetic cluster," Neurology May 13, 2003;60(9):1519-23.
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Further reading

de:Palästinenser fi:Palestiinalaiset fr:Palestiniens he:פלסטינים nl:Palestijnen nn:Palestinarar no:Palestinere pl:Palestyńczycy sl:Palestinci tr:Filistinli

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