Strangelove wrote:damonberryman wrote:
Palestine was primarily Arab for a long time. So was Jeruselam (SP) and yet the Israelis refer to it as given to them by God. I wish they would come up with another argument as this one is suspect.
The Israelites took
Jerusalem from the
non-arabic Jebusites circa 1000 BC
(before "arab" became a classification of peoples).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebusites
Many Palestinian Arabs, including such prominent figures as Yasir Arafat and Faisal Husseini, have claimed that Palestinians descended from the Jebusites. This modern claim has appeared in the Palestinian Encyclopedia and in Palestinian Authority school textbooks but
lacks support in the scholarly community.
It is unknown what ultimately became of these Jebusites, but it seems logical that they were assimilated by the Israelites.
BTW Islam was founded in 622 AD... 1622 years after the Israelites took
Jerusalem.
"Palestinians" is not really an ethnic group, but a collective name for the people living in Palestine prior to the creation of Israel in 1948.
I'm sure some Palestinians may have traces of Jebusite blood in their veins, as well as Philistine, Samarian, Hettite, Assyrian, Sumerian, Nabatean, Roman, Greek, Aramaic, Kaananite, Bedouine, Arab, etc, but my guess is that they're mostly of Jewish descent.
I mean, really, wars tend to create a lot of refugees, but when did you ever hear of a war resulting that the entire population left the area? The Roman destruction of Jerusalem led to the Diaspora, with scores of people from Judea, Samaria and Israel settling throughout Europe and the Middle East. But I'm certain that at least as many must have stayed put and survived by being submissive to their rulers. They became Romanised, forcibly baptised by Crusaders, and eventually Islamified. And during the long Muslim rule of the region, they switched from speaking Aramaic (a Semitic language closely related to both Hebrew and Arabic, the dominant language in the area in Roman times, and the maternal tongue of Jesus) to it’s cousin Arabic. And Abraham ben Moshe became Ibrahim bin Moussad and started greeting his neighbours with a friendly “saalam aleikum” instead of the equally friendly “shalom aleichim”. Same same but different.
Genetic studies do in fact confirm this very logical assumption:
In recent years, many genetic surveys have suggested that, at least paternally, most of the various Jewish ethnic divisions and the Palestinians – and in some cases other Levantines – are genetically closer to each other than the Palestinians or European Jews to non-Jewish Europeans.[114]
One DNA study by Nebel found genetic evidence in support of historical records that "part, or perhaps the majority" of Muslim Palestinians descend from "local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century AD".[115] They also found substantial genetic overlap between Muslim Palestinians and Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, though with some significant differences that might be explainable by the geographical isolation of the Jews or by immigration of Arab tribes in the first millennium.[115]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinia ... ic_studies
But just like Oedipus didn’t recognise his parents and ended up slaying his father, the Jews returning to the region in the 19th-21th century and the Islamified Jews left behind, have not recognised their long lost cousins when they’ve met again.