Palestinians () are an Arab national group native to the region of Palestine, descended from those who have inhabited the area over the millennia.: "Palestine was part of the first wave of conquest following Muhammad's death in 632 CE; Jerusalem fell to the Caliph Umar in 638. The indigenous population, descended from Jews, other Semitic groups, and non-Semitic groups such as the Philistines, had been mostly Christianized. Over succeeding centuries it was Islamicized, and Arabic replaced Aramaic (a Semitic tongue closely related to Hebrew) as the dominant language" : "Palestinians are the descendants of all the indigenous peoples who lived in Palestine over the centuries; since the seventh century, they have been predominantly Muslim in religion and almost completely Arab in language and culture." : "Furthermore, Zionism itself was also defined by its opposition to the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of the region. Both the 'conquest of land' and the 'conquest of labor' slogans that became central to the dominant strain of Zionism in the Yishuv originated as a result of the Zionist confrontation with the Palestinian 'other'." : "The origin of the term Palestinian is uncertain. Some historians connect it to the Philistines, a biblical people that resided on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea as early as the twelfth century B.C.E. Thus, Palestinians are considered by some to be the indigenous people of present-day Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Other scholars dispute this view, asserting that Jews and others resided in Palestine—usually defined as the narrow strip of land bordered by the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—long before these Arabs arrived in the seventh century." : "Although their leaders welcomed the Jews as refugees, many Palestinians (the indigenous Arab population of Palestine) viewed the arrival of Jewish settlers as a threat to their security and to their land." : "Although at the beginning of the twentieth century a considerable proportion of the Palestinian Arabs were evidently immigrants from adjacent countries, some may be the descendents of the ancient inhabitants of the country. Thus, some Palestinian Arabs, like the Jews, may claim a genetic relationship to the ancient inhabitants of the country."; "Even though not a race in a biological sense, political Zionism, after a century of attempts to prove contemporary Jews' material, biological relationships – not merely their spiritual, cultural ones – to the ancient people of the biblical stories, in spite of widespread interspersing with local communities, finally has succeeded. It is tragic that Zionism, as well as Arab Nationalism, have failed to recognize the Palestinians, many of whom similarly appear to share phylogenetic relations to the historic inhabitants of the country, as equal partners." : "The emergence of Palestinians as a national group [...] cannot be solely based on biological roots or continuous habitation of their homeland, but primarily on when, and how they began to imagine and articulate themselves as belonging to a national group. At the same time, such imagination ought to be considered within the historical context in which it developed. In other words, the fact that the people whom we call Palestinians today are the descendants of the various groups that inhabited Palestine throughout its history is not enough to unpack the history of their national identity." : "This blurring has led to a situation in which characteristics of the State of Israel are presented as characteristics of a nation-state, even though (de facto) it is a binational state, and Palestinian citizens are presented as an ethnic minority group although they are a homeland majority." : "The Palestinians...are an ethnic minority in their country of residence." : "What is noteworthy here is the use of a general category 'Arabs', instead of a more specific one of 'Palestinians.' By turning to a general category, the particularity of Palestinians, among other ethnic and national groups, is erased and in its place Jordanian identity is implanted." : "...throughout the 1990s and 2000s a growing number of PAI political organizations have been increasingly promoting Palestinian consciousness, advancing ethnonationalist objectives, and demanding recognition of collective group rights."
: "The Palestinians are an Arab people, largely Moslem but with important numbers of Christians, who live in, once lived in, or trace their descent through parents or grandparents to the land once known as Palestine, which came under a British mandate in 1922 and now is the land of Israel, the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza Strip." : "Of course, the notion that the Palestinians are an Arab people, an integral part of the Arab world ('the Arab nation'), is wholly legitimate and natural, given the history and culture of the people in question." : "People know who they are, where they live, and where their families have lived for centuries or millennia." : "Palestinians are an indigenous people who either live in, or originate from, historical Palestine.... Although the Muslims guaranteed security and allowed religious freedom to all inhabitants of the region, the majority converted to Islam and adopted Arab culture." : "The process of Arabization and Islamization was gaining momentum there. It was one of the mainstays of Umayyad power and was important in their struggle against both Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula.... Conversions arising from convenience as well as conviction then increased. These conversions to Islam, together with a steady tribal inflow from the desert, changed the religious character of Palestine's inhabitants. The predominantly Christian population gradually became predominantly Muslim and Arabic-speaking. At the same time, during the early years of Muslim control of the city, a small permanent Jewish population returned to Jerusalem after a 500-year absence."
: "the word 'Arab' needs to be used with care. It is applicable to the Bedouin and to a section of the urban and effendi classes; it is inappropriate as a description of the rural mass of the population, the fellaheen. The whole population spoke Arabic, usually corrupted by dialects bearing traces of words of other origin, but it was only the Bedouin who habitually thought of themselves as Arabs. Western travelers from the sixteenth century onwards make the same distinction, and the word 'Arab' almost always refers to them exclusively.... Gradually it was realized that there remained a substantial stratum of the pre-Israelite peasantry, and that the oldest element among the peasants were not 'Arabs' in the sense of having entered the country with or after the conquerors of the seventh century, had been there already when the Arabs came." They represent a highly homogenized community who share a cultural and ethnic identity, and close linguistic and cultural ties with other Levantine Arabs.
In 1919, Palestinian Muslims and Christians constituted 90 percent of the population of Palestine, just before the third wave of Jewish immigration and the setting up of British Mandatory Palestine after World War I. Opposition to Jewish immigration spurred the consolidation of a unified national identity, though Palestinian society was still fragmented by regional, class, religious, and family differences. The history of the Palestinian national identity is a disputed issue amongst scholars. For some, the term "Palestinian" is used to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by Palestinian Arabs from the late 19th century and in the pre–World War I period, while others assert the Palestinian identity encompasses the heritage of all eras from pre-biblical times up to the Ottoman period. After the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the 1948 Palestinian expulsion, and more so after the 1967 Palestinian exodus, the term "Palestinian" evolved into a sense of a shared future in the form of aspirations for a Palestinian state.: "The Arabs of Palestine began widely using the term Palestinian starting in the pre–World War I period to indicate the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people. But after 1948—and even more so after 1967—for Palestinians themselves the term came to signify not only a place of origin but also, more importantly, a sense of a shared past and future in the form of a Palestinian state." Though the concept of Palestinian citizenship for the purpose of international law has been revived, the pending realization of self-determination is still insufficient, thus Palestinians remain over the threshold of eligibility to receive international protection as refugees and stateless persons.
Founded in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization is an umbrella organization for groups that represent the Palestinian people before international states. The Palestinian National Authority, officially established in 1994 as a result of the Oslo Accords, is an interim administrative body nominally responsible for governance in Palestinian population centres in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Since 1978, the United Nations has observed an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, now encompassing Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In Israel proper, Palestinians constitute almost 21 percent of the population as part of its Arab citizens. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including over 1.4 million in the Gaza Strip, over 870,000 in the West Bank, and around 250,000 in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half are stateless, lacking legal citizenship in any country. Of the diaspora population, 2.3 million are registered as refugees in neighboring Jordan, most of whom hold Jordanian citizenship; over 1 million live between Syria and Lebanon, and about 750,000 live in Saudi Arabia, with Chile holding the largest Palestinian diaspora concentration (around half a million) outside of the Arab world.
Etymology
The Greek toponym Palaistínē (Παλαιστίνη), which is the origin of the Arabic Filasṭīn (فلسطين), first occurs in the work of the 5th century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, where it denotes generallyWith the exception of Bks. 1, 105; 3.91.1, and 4.39, 2. the coastal land from Phoenicia down to Egypt.Herodotus describes its scope in the Fifth Satrapy of the Persians as follows: "From the town of Posidium, [...] on the border between Cilicia and Syria, as far as Egypt – omitting Arabian territory, which was free of tax, came 350 talents. This province contains the whole of Phoenicia and that part of Syria which is called Palestine, and Cyprus. This is the fifth Satrapy." (from ). Herodotus also employs the term as an ethnonym, as when he speaks of the "Syrians of Palestine" or "Palestinian-Syrians", an ethnically amorphous group he distinguishes from the Phoenicians. Herodotus makes no distinction between the inhabitants of Palestine.