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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 (UNRWA) 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
Palestinian Arabs A Palestinian Arab (or Arab Palestinian) 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 (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 *. 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 are considered to be among the first to live in cities in Palestine. **. Some of the Canaanites are believed to have migrated in the 3rd millenium BC from the inner Arabian Peninsula ,Additionally, Israelites, Philistines, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and other people have all settled in the region and some intermarried **. Some 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. 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, (and in some cases other Levantines) are genetically closer to each other than either is to the Arabs (of Arabia) or non-Jewish Europeans. * * * *(* 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 parentsthe 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 originan investigation * of a Y-chromosome polymorphism found Lebanese, Palestinian, and Sephardic populations to be particularly closely relateda 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. (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 *, whereas others support the scientific content as valid - for more information on the controversy*, *, *, *.) 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*. The origins of Palestinian identity
Politics 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 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 (Israeli parliament). The Israeli government asserts that non-Jewish citizens of Israel have the same rights and obligations as Jewish Israelis, which includes Palestinian Jews. See also Further reading | ||||||||||||
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