What evidence do you have for the claim that Palestinians are descendants of ancient Israelites?
The historical record of Nablus, Jenin, Jericho, and Jerusalem being continuously occupied by an indigenous population for the past 3,000-6,000 years or so, and the records of the various religious communities within them growing, shrinking, and changing over time are evidence. There's also the DNA evidence of close family connections between Palestinian Jews and their Christian and Muslim neighbors, and the families own oral histories of Jewish ancestors.
I have posted links to multiple genetic studies over the years. I don't have time right now to dig them all up again but you can find them if you look.
Here's a sample:
Jews break down into three genetic groups, all of which have Middle Eastern origins – which are shared with the Palestinians and Druze.
“The closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish groups were the Palestinians, Israeli Bedouins, and Druze in addition to the Southern Europeans, including Cypriots,” as Ostrer and Skorecki wrote in a review of their findings that they co-authored in the journal Human Genetics in October 2012...
... Both groups of Jews shared ancestry with contemporary Middle Eastern and Southern European populations. The closest genetic relatives of the Middle Eastern Jews are Druze, Bedouin and Palestinians. The closest genetic relatives of the European group of Jews are Northern Italians, followed by Sardinians and French...
... Further evidence for the Middle Eastern origins of Ashjenazi Jews came from a study published in 2014: In that research, which appeared in Nature Communications, a team led by Shai Carmi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sequenced the complete genomes of 128 people of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Their analysis revealed that the Ashkenazi Jewish population is “an even mix” of European and Middle Eastern ancestral populations—suggesting, as Carmi writes on the web site of The Ashkenazi Genome Consortium (TAGC), “a sex-biased process, where, say, Middle-Eastern Jewish men married European non-Jewish women.”
As far as I know, they are genetically indistinguishable from other Arabs. There was also a lot of Arab immigration into "historic Palestine" during the early 20th century, same time there was a lot of Jewish immigration too.
That's a claim backed up by nothing. Even UNRWA requires only a two year residence before creation of Israel to call people "Palestinian refugees".
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples includes a definition of 'indigenous peoples'. That is the definition I'm using.
The Right of Return is based on the ancestral claim, but the Palestinians have a stronger ancestral claim to Palestine than nearly every Jew of the diaspora.
BS. Are you subscribing to the antisemitic theories that deny that modern Jews have any connection with the Land of Israel?
Not at all. The DNA evidence and historical records are clear on that point. European Jews are descended from the Semitic people of Palestine, although most have European ancestors, too.
I have consistently argued against their having an
exclusive ancestral claim, and against the absurd proposition that Jerusalem means more to Jews in the diaspora than it does to the people who actually live there.
And besides: before the 1948, there were also Jews who had to flee their homes in places like Gaza (zero Jews live there now). Unlike Palestinians, they have not been kept in refugee camps for 70 years but are fully integrated into Israeli society. Same should happen to so-called "Palestinian refugees".
Only if they want it to. But if they want to go back to the homes they were driven out of at gunpoint, then that's what should happen. Same for the Jews driven from their homes, and the Rohingya driven from theirs, and the Bosnian Muslims and the Albanians and the Yazidis and the Tutsi and every other ethnic/religious/racial group that suffered that same violation of human rights.
All this Zionist apologist hand waving can't obscure the fact that people whose every ancestor for the past 1000 years have lived in or near Jerusalem have a stronger connection to it than people whose ancestors were European or American for as far back as anyone remembers.
If an Arab family moved to Jerusalem or Jaffa or Bethsheeba from Cairo or Baghdad or Damascus on May 31st 1946, their descendants in perpetuity are counted as "Palestinian refugees" that now demand "right of return". No 1000 years required.
Interesting.
Do Europeans who illegally immigrated to Jerusalem on May 31st 1946 count as Israelis? Because if so, I wonder what point you're trying to make.
You are incorrect.
Pan-Arabism was popular at the beginning of the 20th century but it was by no means universally accepted among the Arabic and Semitic peoples.
It only became popular after the Arab lands were divided into different countries based on World War I powers carving out protectorates from previously Ottoman territory.
True, that whole
'united we stand, divided we fall' philosophy was popular in North Africa and the Middle East as it was quite obvious European nations were conspiring to screw them out of wealth, power, and resources. But it was not universally accepted, and it certainly didn't erase the religious, ethnic, and cultural differences. The Druze of Lebanon didn't see themselves as the same as the Sunni and Shiite Lebanese, much less the Egyptian Coptics and North African Berbers.
Before than, there was no need for the concept really. And how do you explain PLO leaders stating that they invented Palestinian identity?
That's a good question and the answer is actually pretty interesting.
Traditional Palestinian society was clan based. The Ottoman millet system of rule was very supportive of tribes, clans, and faith based communities. Every tribal, clan and faith community was under it's own rule for everyday matters, and every group had representation in the Ottoman Court with high officials that represented them specifically.
Individuals might own houses, livestock, and other property, but the clans owned the communal resources like wells and pastures. That's the kernel at the base of Loren's claims that the majority of the property Israelis stole was 'government owned'. The grazing land was owned by the clans and managed for the benefit of the entire community.
Individual members of the various clans largely lived peaceably with their neighbors but there were occasional disputes. In the rural areas those disputes would be settled by clan elders. In the cities there was a more formal process involving clan representatives and Ottoman officials. That system of social organization was ill suited to fend off the advances of the European powers who were quite adept at playing one group against another. The Palestinian clans needed a unifying national identity the same way and for the same reason that the Arab tribes in what is now Saudi Arabia did. Yemen would probably be better off today with less tribal autonomy and a stronger central authority, but for better or for worse they held on to the old way of doing things.
It was the same for Jews in Israel, you know. They needed to adopt a unifying national identity in the early 20th century, not remain divided into Mizrahi, Samaritan, and Ashkenazi immigrant communities. That's why Yiddish was suppressed and Israeli civil servants had to adopt Hebrew surnames if they didn't already have one.
The abrupt transition from tribal/clan identity to nationalism in the Middle East at the beginning of the 20th century is a fascinating historic period and I'd be happy to discuss it with you if you're interested. Lawrence of Arabia figures into it, and how cool is that?
That, by the way, is in my opinion the chief obstacle to solving this problem. Since Palestinian identity was invented by the PLO terrorists for the express purpose to facilitate their fight against Israel, "resistance" has become an indispensable aspect of the Palestinian identity. Palestinians do not want to give up hatred against Israel, because, without it, what do they have that makes them "Palestinian"?
They have their roots in Palestine.
They have their olive orchards with trees hundreds of years old that were planted by their great-great-grandfathers. They have their cemeteries near Rachel's Tomb and Joseph's Tomb, the Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Temple Mount and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Bethlehem and Nazareth and the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, and all that means to them. They have their pastures and farms and houses that have been in the family for centuries. They have oral histories and church records and municipal files and maps and pictures and newspapers that document their lives and that of their ancestors.
It's their homeland. They don't need more of a connection than that.
There were real differences between the Bedouin of the Negev, the Samaritans and Muslims of the Jordan River Valley, and the Christian Palestinians who mostly lived in the urban areas and what is now Lebanon, but one thing they agreed on was that they were not Egyptians.
Funny, given that Yasser Arafat was an Egyptian.
He was born in Cairo to a Palestinian merchant family of the Gaza branch of the al Husseini clan.
What racism? Palestinians are hardly an ethnicity, much less a race. Did you know there are ginger Palestinians?
The issue is culture, not race.
It's an appeal to prejudice, religious bigotry, and racial/ethnic supremacism with a heaping helping of fatuousity. Also, it's anti-Semitic.
Before the 20th century, most farmland was less productive, most resources were less exploited, most towns and cities were less sanitary, and most people were less educated and well traveled. So what?
So what indeed. I am not talking about before the 20th century. Of course technology was different. But Israel found a desert and pretty quickly built a modern state there. Even today, you see Hamas not invest in how to better Gaza, but in terror tunnels, rockets from Iran and other means to inflict terror on Israel.
Israel did not find a desert. Israel was built upon the existing infrastructure of a Palestinian society that had developed under centuries of largely peaceful Ottoman rule into what was then a modern, if somewhat small and only moderately wealthy region.
Read some history. Read what Ben Gurion, Dayan, Sharett, Weitz, and their contemporaries wrote about seizing land and manufacturing facilities. And get rid of that silly 'magical Jews' thinking. They didn't make the desert bloom, they stole productive agricultural land and seized the ports so they could sell the crops in European markets for the cash they needed to fund their war. It was all very practical.
If Israel was so wonderfully secular
Relatively secular.
Secular in some ways, religiously oppressive in others. Religious laws are foundational, and religious bigotry is integral to it's functioning.
citizens would be allowed to identify as Israeli on their national IDs, not forced to identify themselves by their religious affiliation or ethnicity. But Israel's highest court has ruled that the government needs to know who gets preferential treatment and who is discriminated against by law, because not being allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion and ancestry would thwart the purpose of the Jewish State. Bigotry and bias are baked into Israel's foundation. All your hand waving can't obscure that truth, either.
Israel is founded as a homeland for Jewish people, justified by the long history of oppression. Why is it that Arabs can have over dozen Arab states, but Jews can't have one Jewish state?
Ye gods, not this stupid appeal to emotion again.
Jews can have a Jewish State where everybody wants a Jewish State and everybody agrees what it means to be Jewish and how one's Jewishness is measured or determined or recognized if they want. But they're not allowed to make one by stealing other people's stuff and driving non-Jews out of their homes. And they're not allowed to cry about how mean everyone is for saying they're being assholes when they really are being assholes.