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A Palestinian Jew is a Jewish inhabitant of Palestine throughout certain periods of Middle East history. After the modern State of Israel was born, nearly all native Palestinian Jews became citizens of Israel, and the term "Palestinian Jews" largely fell into disuse. It is still used in contexts where it is necessary to distinguish from Muslim, Christian or Druze Palestinians who are together termed "Palestinian Arabs". (See also Arab Israelis). Jews from Arab lands are today typically not termed Arab Jews, so "Palestinian Arab" today also implies the exclusion of Palestinian Jews. The Palestinian National Covenant in 1968 defined a Jew as a Palestinian only if their family (through the male line) had resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist migrations (considered to have started in 1917). While a number of Jews fall into this category, virtually all tend to identify as Israelis. Palestinians themselves may be either Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Druze, or other.
Disputes over terminology Part of the difficulty of describing the Jews of Palestine is the wave of renaming over the past few decades. Some advocates want to blur or emphasize distinctions. Today Palestinians are regarded to fall into 2 groups that are for the most part assumed to be mutually exclusive: Jews and Arabs. Arabs, however, may be of any religion, including most numerously Arab Muslims, then Arab Christians, and various others, including Arab Jews. Likewise, Israelis are also regarded to fall into the same 2 categories. Israeli Jews who comprise the majority of the country, however, hail from dozens of countries around the world and may be of any of the many Jewish ethnic backgrounds, including German Jews, Palestinian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Yemenite Jews, Indian Jews, Chinese Jews, Ethiopian Jews. Only the minority of Israelis that are both Arab and non-Jewish are deemed Israeli Arabs. In the same fashion, many advocates wish the term "Palestinian" to be used exclusively for non-Jewish Palestinians, and then give Palestinian synonimity with Arab (that is, Arab as understood to the exclusion of Jews from Arab countries). This creates a dichotomy between "Israelis" (excluding Arabs, and the term "Arab" itself excluding Arab Jews) vs. "Palestinians" (excluding Palestinian Jews). The best known usage is the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict". See also | ||||||||
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