Talk:Origin of the Palestinians

Deletion or merge?

@JJNito197: I have thought for a while that the “Origins” section of the Palestinians article is far too long – rather than deleting this article, perhaps we bring all that text into here and replace it with a short single paragraph summary? Onceinawhile (talk) 09:07, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

You are right it would be better to merge the Palestinians article. I too found it to be excessive in terms of readability taking up far more space than what is neccessary, especially if we compare it to neighbouring ethnic group articles like Syrians, Lebanese etc. JJNito197 (talk) 09:22, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

The only way I can see valid reasons for keeping this article would be, as you say, reformatting the "Origins" section of the Palestinain article to cater for this new article. However this shouldn't be confined to "Origins" if content on this new article includes further related information that has been added to bolster the validity of the article. JJNito197 (talk) 09:37, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. Onceinawhile (talk) 09:39, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

How much of this just came up by expanding sources already used in our articles on the history of Palestine and the Palestinian people? A lot is just tendentious simpleton history.Nishidani (talk) 14:42, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Examples of writing off the top of one's head composition, each illustrating a Zionist message.

• (1) The Palestinian population, despite being predominantly Arab and Muslim, is not a homogeneous entity, and there is diversity within the population in terms of religious, linguistic, and cultural practices.

The Jewish population of Israel, despite being Jewish, is not a(n) homogeneous entity' (European Ashkenazi (with their distinct branches, western and eastern), Mizrachi Arab-Jews, Beta Israel Ethiopians, hundreds of thousands of Slavic immigrants with neither Judaism as their religion and only the most tenuous link to major Jewish descent lines, Inca converts, Calabrian converted communities etc.etc .etc. but we do not write that in the relevant articles. There is, arguably, again, more diversity in religious, linguistic and cultural practices' among israeli Jews than is the suggested case of Palestinians. The Palestinians are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims. Their 'dialect' intonations are as various as those you get in England among English speakers, and exhibit little of the marked differences one gets among Hebrew speakers there.

In other words, the message is, given that the editor keeps insisting jews are all genetically related to an originative Israelite 'ethnoreligious people, that Palestinians (95% of the population in 1900), unlike the modern Jewish immigrant population, are a mixed assortment of different peoples. Pure POV pushing of an ideological theorum.

(2)The demographic history of Palestine is complex and has been shaped by various historical events and migrations. Throughout history, the region has been subject to the influence and control of various imperial powers, leading to political, social, and economic changes that have affected the demographic composition of the region. Wars, revolts and religious developments have also played a significant demographic role in encouraging immigration, emigration and conversion.

The demographic history of Palestine is no more complex than most other West Asian nations, all of which have been subject to migrations, political, social and economic changes. Conversion has nothing to do with demographics. The author of this pastiche is writing the following message:

the demographic composition of Palestinians is uniquely influenced by constant immigration, emigration and conversion, as if it were a fluctuating diaspora mix (no different from Jews, who constantly immigrated and emigrated throughout the world). Where is the evidence for this?

(3) Muslim settlement. This ultimately led to the creation of an Arab Muslim population, which, despite being considerably smaller than the area's population in late antiquity,

As phrase 'this' in 'this ultimately' refer ambiguously also to suggesting the 'Muslim settlement' immediately precdeding it 'led to an Arab Muslim population. It is completely obscure as to what 'considerably smaller than the area's population in late antiquity' means or is intended to convey. All I can guess is that in classical times, Palestine had 1.5-2 million Jews, Samaritans and mixed Phoenician, Greek and Egyptian populations, and then when Muslims invaded, there was a big drop in numbers. Is that what is intended?

(4)the Israelites emerged as a separate ethnoreligious group in the region, forming the two related kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The fall of those kingdoms toAssyrian and Babylonian conquests was accompanied by forced exile

We've often disputed recently the simplification in retrojecting to 1,000 BCE the concept of an 'ethno-religious' group. The Bible insists that Israelites throve in a very complex mix, with scores of tribal and clan distinctions, and that their distinctiveness was in diet, architecture and cultic practices. But the most misleading thing here is that (a) the article is about Palestinians, not every other group, and (b) of an estimated 500,000 residents of Palestine in Iron Age11, a relatively small number were hauled off into exile eastwards. The majority, what the Bible calls the 'people of the land', stayed put and on the return of the sacerdotal elite families from Babylon were spoken off with horrified contempt. The message appears to be that authentic Israeli/Jews were expelled, deprived off their right to live in their homeland. Dumbing down to a rhetorical exercise where again Palestinian origins are not the point, but the history of the Jews sets the measure for assessing who belongs and who is a blow-in. Nishidani (talk) 15:21, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

The article is an inept quickie pastiche of stuff lifted from elsewhere and should be deleted. Whatever is new to our articles elsewhere can be edited in to the existing pages. Nishidani (talk) 15:25, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Edit conflicts in merge

I was merging the sections but I see Tombah has beaten me to it. I will leave it to Tombah to avoid any confusion. Onceinawhile (talk) 09:35, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. Done. Tombah (talk) 10:14, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

Muṣṭafá Murād Dabbāgh, 1965

What is "Muṣṭafá Murād Dabbāgh, 1965"? Of course one can guess that this is a reference to the Arabic work that Dabbagh published in that year, but that has multiple volumes. Without a title, volume number, and page numbers, this is not a citation at all. Moreover, we need an editor who has personally checked that the source supports the text it is applied to. I believe this is most likely a WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT violation and the citation should be changed to indicate where the information actually comes from. At the moment deletion is the only option available. Zero^talk 01:30, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Tamari misquotes

There are multiple citations to Salim Tamari, Lepers, Lunatics and Saints, Jerusalem Quarterly File, Iss. 20 (Jan 2004). They all need checking. Here are three examples of misquotes:

• "Ben Zvi stated in a later writing that "Obviously, it would be incorrect to claim that all fellahin are descended from the ancient Jews; rather, we are discussing their majority or their foundation", and that "The vast majority of the fellahin are not descended from Arab conquerors but rather from the Jewish peasants who made up the majority in the region before the Islamic conquest". Tamari notes that "the ideological implications of this claim became very problematic and were soon withdrawn from circulation." — That sentence does appear in Tamari but not in the context of descent from Jews.
• "Salim Tamari notes the paradoxes produced by the search for "nativist" roots among these Zionist figures, particularly the Canaanist followers of Yonatan Ratosh,..." — Actually Tamari distinguishes the Zionists from the Canaanites: "both among the Zionists and the so-called Canaanite (anti-Zionist) followers of Yonatan Ratosh".
• "[Borochov] further believed that the Palestinian peasantry would embrace Zionism and that the lack of a crystallized national consciousness among Palestinian Arabs would result in their likely assimilation into the new Hebrew nationalism, and that Arabs and Jews would unite in class struggle." — This is cited to Tamari, which doesn't have it, and the Marxist Internet Archive, which is dubious wrt RS. It is also off-topic for this page.

Zero^talk 11:46, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Pov in last paragraph of lead

I know articles related to Palestinian topics are accused of POV on this website a lot but the sentences "In order to strengthen Palestinian historical claims to the territory and counter Israeli-Zionist arguments, the Palestinian discourse attempts to employ origin ideas as a weapon in the ongoing conflict with Israel. Academic standards for the use of historical evidence are rarely followed in the Palestinian historical discourse, and evidence that is antagonistic to the national cause is either disregarded or dismissed as false or hostile." do not seem like a summary of the articles text and strongly implies that Palestinians are not a valid ethnicity. It feels a bit like Israeli nationalist POV, implying that Palestinians do not have historical ties to the area, which would be a claim the article doesn't substantiate. The term "Employ origin ideas as a weapon" particularly egregious. Instead of accusing Palestinians of weaponizing dubious origin stories, the article should mention that the topic Palestinian origin is used politically by both Israeli nationalists and Palestinian nationalists, which is what the article says. So I think the sentences should either be cut, moved to the "in zionist thinking" section or edited to add that Zionists also use dubious theories of Palestinian origin to justify political views. Always beleive in hope (talk) 20:11, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for highlighting this. It does not appear to be supported by the cited source, and even it was, it is not what the article is about. I have removed it. Onceinawhile (talk) 20:23, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

It's still there (or has been edited back in). Zddbdd (talk) 03:46, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Reference No 84

Nowhere in this reference article says that Turks have Sub-Saharan genes. Who is writing such BS here really? Zartus (talk) 15:16, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Verification tag

The sources are overwhelming in the article so why the tag? Makeandtoss (talk) 11:28, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps @Daniel Quinlan is able to elaborate on this particular point? Iskandar323 (talk) 12:29, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the number of sources is overwhelming at all. It's a fairly long article so there should be many citations.

However, some of the sources are highly questionable and I tagged those in the same edit where I added the article tag. Surely you saw the rest of the edit and the edit summary? In addition, several passages lack citations and read like drive-by edits.

Regardless, I don't think the article tag is absolutely required so I just made an edit to switch to more specific citation needed tags. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 14:09, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

@Daniel Quinlan: That's very reasonable of you and fairer I think. Iskandar323 (talk) 16:22, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

The Torah or Old Testament

The story of Abraham and Sarah includes a part about GOD or Yahweh (YHWH) coming and speaking to Abraham about his family's future and says something like "Your descendants shall inherit the land of Israel". The story tells of how his wife Sarah gave her maidservant, Hagar, to Abraham to have children with because she feared she was too old. After Hagar has children for Abraham Sarah becomes pregnant and exiles Hagar and her children for her own reasons. Is it not probable that Hagar's children are the ancestors of todays' Palestinians? Gods' will cannot be forced and never includes or needs any peoples will or effort to come to light and real Jews know this. The thing confusing so many for so long is simply that Zionists are NOT Jews. A person is as they live and a person acts according to their thoughts made primarily of their selfish desires unless truly Loving and All Inclusive, as He wants Csaw7 (talk) 03:53, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 19 October 2023

63.249.60.155 (talk) 16:21, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Citation 106 is questionable. Consider known cartographic place names. When did Israel fall of the maps. Palestine was there hundreds of years back.

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Cannolis (talk) 16:36, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

A forced POV in Genetics .

1) "Haber et al.'s 2013 study's PCA map with Palestinians clustering with Saudis and other Arabian defined populations"

Yet : the shaded area is defined as "core Levantine area" , and the study did not state that Palestinians are Arabians (actually classified them as "Levantine" ) , rather than a portion of thier genomes coming from the Arabian Peninsula  ; just like it didn't say Egyptians are sub-Saharan people due to admixture from Africa proper .

2)"Principal Components Analysis of ancient and modern populations, with Palestinians clustering with Arabian populations."

The graph actually shows the closest samples to Palestinians are Yementine and Libyan Jews , Syrians , and Jordanians (whom many of them are actually Palestinian ..sadly the study didn't state the sources of its samples ) , with a minority of Lebanese and Bedouin A being close to the Palestinian samples .

The one who wrote that line either confused Bedouin A (the red dots . ) , with Palestinian samples (The red diamonds ♦ ) , or deliberately distorted it due to politically charged bias .

The captions below the two images should ideally be the same as the file name . ( PCA map of ancient and modern populations for 1) , and "Main plot shows global diversity using 50 populations . The Levantine core cluster is shaded in pink." for 2)).

..I don't know if this is allowed in Wikipedia , but it would be sweet if it mentions the forth-coming study which will analyze Ancient Israelite DNA (Ha-Aretz source)

Hope editors quickly respond . 188.48.96.198 (talk) 15:10, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Incorrect reference

In the section about jewish and Palestinians genetic relations the following sentence is present: “Genetic studies on Jews have shown that Jews and Palestinians are closer to each other than the Jews are to their host countries.“ The two references provided 96,97 do not mention anything to suggest it. The first study didn’t compare Jewish populations to their host countries, while the second study didn’t include Palestinians. HarelTau (talk) 14:05, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Bogus use of questionable citation

There is a claim in the article as follows;

"Much of the local Palestinian population in the area of Nablus is believed to be descended from Samaritans who converted to Islam."

The citation only says Ireton, 2003. Initially I couldn't find any such book. With some more digging I discovered it is an unpublished MA dissertation from the University of Kent. Having done a history masters at Cambridge myself, I can tell you with certainty this would struggle to even get a passing grade.

The origin of the claim (because the wiki article source provides no page numbers, because there are no page numbers, and no page number, or a direct quote), is this;

"Much of the local Palestinian population is believed to be descended from Samaritans who converted to Islam. Certain Nabulsi family names are associated with Samaritan ancestry - Muslimani, Yaish, and Shakshir among others."

So the core of this claim above is based on an MA dissertation that was never considered good enough to be published, let alone become a more substantial standalone book (which the best masters dissert. are, a friend of mine had hers published to great acclaim), and the nature of the assertion is "X is believed". Believed by who? What proportion is "much" when you've found three family names that may or not point to such a conclusion (we don't have any anthropological linguist providing support for it in the MA).

I do not believe this source is consistent with Wikipedia rules, nor is it properly cited, nor does the citation allow you to find the work (or disclose it's only an MA thesis), nor when checked does the Wikipedia article claim that "Much of the local Palestinian population..." track with 'There are three families with names that a masters student who doesn't speak Arabic or Hebrew fluently believes indicates that they may have Samaritan origins".

This is simply not good enough for Wikipedia. 2A02:6B6D:10A3:0:B89E:E8D4:1683:90DA (talk) 15:32, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Origin of the Palestinians

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Origin of the Palestinians's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Masalha":

• From Gaza City: Masalha, Nur (2018). Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History. Zed Books Ltd. p. 81. ISBN 9781786992758.
• From Demographic history of Palestine (region): Masalha, Nur (2016). "THE CONCEPT OF PALESTINE: THE CONCEPTION OF PALESTINE FROM THE LATE BRONZE AGE TO THE MODERN PERIOD" (PDF). Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies. Edinburgh University Press: 143–202. doi:10.3366/hlps.2016.0140.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. Feel free to remove this comment after fixing the refs. AnomieBOT⚡ 13:11, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Removal of sentence and mass sources from lede

What's the reason for deleting all this following info Today?[1]

"Historical records as well as genetic studies indicate that modern Palestinians mostly descend from local ancient levantines who converted from judaism and other levantine mythologies to christianity and later to islam.[1][2][3][4][5]" 49.186.90.214 (talk) 20:58, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Source 114 Unavailable/Unreliable

Under the "In Zionist Thinking" section, source 114 is repeatedly used, but the links attached are broken. I can't edit it to add the source, though, and making such claims should involve deeper digging into the attached paper. 212.199.108.186 (talk) 08:35, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Local anecdotes

Anecdotes about individual villages don't belong here, especially when no indication is given the significance of migration. These things will in time be removed from the article, so putting in more of them is a waste of time. Zero^talk 13:26, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

"Israeli statements" ?

With all due respect  : what exactly is the point of the "Israeli-statements" section ? . Many Israeli-Jews don't even recognize Palestinians as a nation , let alone dabble in their history (or even recognize such ) . These notions belong to their relevant article ("Palestinian Identity" , "Denial of Palestinian identity" section ) .

Here is a brief break down of the sources used :

1)A reflection on the 2015 study on the Philistine cemetery in Ashkelon. This should instead be used in either the Philistines article , or the Canaan article in the Legacy section . Netanyahu's whining and snotting don't belong here .

2)Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs : Essentially a think-tank on Netenyahu's payrolls . Obviously not an RS on almost most claims and charges against Israeli Public-relations , let alone anything regarding the Palestinians' history. Besides : this is Original content : an editor summarized the article , rather than directly quoting from it . The vast majority of its points don't deal with the ethnographical or ancestral origins of Palestinians .

It simply parrots the talking point of "They are vanilla Arabush" , "Their nationalism is "rootless" , "No Filastin before 19XX"  ; with the usual cherry-picking of evidence , and inflation of the significance of the Nasserist-Baathist "artificial Middle East" narratives .

3)An article by Jonathan S. Tobin . A Journalist , who is the Editor of the Jewish News Syndicate . Even a superficial look at their so-called "articles" shows they are petty-scribbles . Of course he will offer the Apologia for a discredited fraud that refuses to die for Ideological reasons rather than evidence . Like his beloved author : he is lying to people's faces by claiming that the work was originally Palestinian-biased (1977 Congressional Record) . The rest simply quotes a 1980s article by a fellow apologist , trying to defend the discredited thesis by making a casual and numerical false equivalence between Jewish and Foreign Muslim migration to Palestine in the late 19th-early 20th centuries , and make it seem Yehoshua Porath was silent on the predominance of natural increase (Which he actually affirmed , in the first volume of The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab national Movement (1) , as well as his review on the work , implicitly reject migration of mass-levels , rather than individual cases . ) , or things alongside the lines of "Nobody listens to us : let Peters be an example for "rejected" Truth-seekers" .

4)Blaming the Victims . More Ink on the Peter scam .

5)Jerusalem Post . JP is famously "Biased" against Palestinian topics , but it's an RS as to dismiss it immediately . Still : the author is no Historian and Demographer to even warrant having his opinion in an article . He merely replicates the Peter method of selective data and evidence to turn the 19th century into a graveyard on a deserted island , and give a "WTF" vibe of an enormous increase in Ottoman period , using the same source as Peters , Ernst Frankenstein's 1942 Polemic , quoting dubious figures from an early 19th Travel book.

..I am going to suggest either of two things  :

A) The section is to be completely removed , as it is irrelevant , and out of place for this article .

B) The section is to be greatly expanded , with some sources replaced . It would be retitled "Denial of Palestinian Antiquity on the land" . This can also be linked with the new Palestinian Genocide Accusation and Nakba Denial articles to reinforce this phenomena of the "Illegitimate nation" within Israeli society .

Readers want balanced ,on-topic , Non-POV historical articles , especially regarding a people in which many act in bad faith either for or against them , prejudicing impartiality for partisan reasons .

A part of that involves separating contemporary politics from History-studies  ; there is no need to add 'contrary opinions' section just for the sake of it , especially when they are often Politically-charged rather than out of good-will and the sake of discourse and academic integrity .

Hope editors respond . 2.88.143.222 (talk) 00:32, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Jews and Samaritans were a majority of the population up to the 7th century.

For the historical analysis section, please consider including this: Moshe Gil argues that even after suppression by Heraclius, Jews and Samaritans were still the majority in Palestine by the time of the Islamic Conquest (638 CE)

"We may reasonably state that at the time of the Muslim conquest, a large Jewish population still lived in Palestine. We do not know whether they formed the majority but we may assume with some certainty that they did so when grouped together with the Samaritans. An important source regarding Palestine's demographic structure during Byzantine rule are the stories of the Christian monk Bar-Sawma. In the biography of this fighting monk, who was born in Samosata in Asia Minor and active in Palestine in the fifth century AD, it is told that the Jews, together with the heathens, constituted the majority in Palestine, Phoenicia and Arabia (which included the south ofPalestine). There were as yet few Christians. The Jews and the Samaritans virtually governed the land and were persecuting the Christians."

This is a recent historical analysis, as compared to other sources which posit that Jews and Samaritans were around a quarter of the population.

Source: Gil, Moshe. "A History of Palestine", p. 3 Gamalny (talk) 04:53, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Questionable Source

One of the sources here is from ted.com, which is not a reliable source. Suggest either that a better source be added or that the section be deleted HonestEditor51 (talk) 04:03, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

It should be replaced by a reliable written source. Zero^talk 07:48, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Source 17 is a TedX talk. While it is unreliable as it is a talk, it is also misrepresented in the footnotes (it appears twice) as an article. And in the 2nd appearance it is also falsely claimed to base the text in the page at that point. Sections refering to this source 17 should be deleted. 147.235.192.176 (talk) 21:55, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Source 19 does not support the text

Source 19 is an article about dna origin of ancient people, not modern one. In fact this source doesn't even even include the word Palestinians. It does not support the text in the section refering to source 19. It seems there is no correlation between source 19 and the section. The correct source should be mentioned or the section should be deleted. 147.235.192.176 (talk) 22:05, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Actually it does cover Palestinians. Look at the figures. Zero^talk 22:57, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Failed to locate the claim that Palestinians "were found to derive 81–87% of their ancestry from Bronze age Levantines" in Source 20.

Palestinians, among other Levantine groups, were found to derive 81–87% of their ancestry from Bronze age Levantines, relating to Canaanites as well as Kura–Araxes culture impact from before 2400 BCE (4400 years before present); 8–12% from an East African source and 5–10% from Bronze age Europeans. 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 ~31–42% European-related ancestry, both populations having a history in Europe.

I attempted to find this 81-87% figure in Source 20, but failed to do so. Is it actually in the source? 2600:1700:4002:1C10:84A5:AA65:2C59:6522 (talk) 09:20, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

See this diff if that helps. @Yezhi283825:? Selfstudier (talk) 09:53, 8 May 2024 (UTC)