There is a convincing argument that the great majority of Palestinians are descended from the Jews—that they’re kinfolk.
I’m not talking about the biblical tale that Abraham sired both the Jews and the Arabs. I’m talking about modern research.
Before you stop reading in disbelief, check out two researchers who made that claim: David Ben-Gurion, the First Prime Minister of the State of Israel, and Itzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second and longest-serving President. If their conclusion is valid, it paints the horrific killing going on in Gaza—and the Occupied Territories-- in an even more ghastly light.
Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi made that argument in a study written in 1918 entitled “Eretz Yisrael in the Past and the Present.” The second chapter, which dealt with the history and present situation of the fellahin (Arab farmers and peasant laborers) was composed by Ben-Gurion in complete agreement with Ben-Zvi:
“The fellahin,’ he wrote, “are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming … They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious, and material: to rule, to propagate Islam, and to collect taxes.
“Historical reason indicates that the population that has survived since the seventh century originated from the Judean farming class that the Muslim conquerors found when they reached the country.
“To argue that after the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus and the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt Jews altogether ceased to cultivate the land of Eretz Israel is to demonstrate complete ignorance in the history and the contemporary literature of Israel … The Jewish farmer, like any other farmer, was not easily torn from his soil, which had been watered with his sweat and the sweat of his forebears … Despite the repression and suffering, the rural population remained unchanged.”(bold font, my emphasis)
In other words, though the ancient Jewish peasants stayed to work their land, many converted to Islam. They did so not because of any threat to their lives but mainly to pay lower taxes. Infidels, like the Jews, were taxed at a higher rate than Muslims.
Discussing Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi’s conclusions, Israeli historian Schlomo Sand wrote (in “The Invention of the Jewish People”): “Although the ancient Judean peasants converted to Islam, they had done so for material reasons—chiefly to avoid taxation—which were in no way treasonous. Indeed, by clinging to their soil, they remained loyal to their homeland. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi saw Islam, unlike Christianity, as a democratic religion that not only embraced all converts to Islam as brothers but genuinely revoked the political and civil restrictions and sought to erase social distinctions.
“The authors underlined that the Jewish origin of the fellahin could be revealed using a philological study of the local Arabic language and linguistic geography. They went even further …. stressing that a study of ten thousand names of ‘all the villages, streams, springs, mountains, ruins, valleys and hills ‘from Dan to Beersheba’ … confirm[s] that the entire biblical terminology of Eretz Israel remains alive, as it had been, in the speech of the fellah population.’ Some 210 villages still bore clear Hebrew names. In addition to the Muslim law, there was, for a long time, a code of “fellahin laws, or unwritten customary judgments, known as Shariat al-Khalil—the laws of the patriarch Abraham.”
Many Palestinians had long accepted the biological ties between Jews and Palestinians.
"We are of the same race and blood, and cooperation will bring great prosperity to the land," wrote Emir Faisal to Felix Frankfurter in 1917. Faisal was known for his sympathy for the Zionists who had begun streaming into the Holy Land. In 1919, he signed a cooperation agreement with Chaim Weizmann, to whom he wrote that he was "mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people."
In August 2009, the Jerusalem Post published a lengthy article on that subject. “There are large Arab clans throughout this country that know of their Jewish heritage; some carry Hebrew or Jewish family names. They have ancient family trees that document their roots. Not only that; many of them have specifically Jewish customs, like sitting shiva with the dead for seven days, circumcising infant boys on the eighth day, and lighting candles on Shabbat. Much of the legal code of the Bedouin is remarkably similar to many laws in the Torah and the Mishna.”
The article continued, " Not only that; many of them have specifically Jewish customs, and their neighbors would call them 'the Jews,' even though they were technically as Muslim as anyone else."
Much of the research The Post article quoted came from Tsvi Misinai--a historian and pioneer of Israel’s software industry. “He is not a nut.” The Post wrote, “He is a hi-tech entrepreneur, perhaps the first in Israel's history.”
Misinai estimated that almost 90% of Palestinians in the Land of Israel have Jewish roots. The percentage in Gaza was even higher.
“It's not just place names,” he said.”Many Palestinians have Hebrew-derived family names as well, reflecting their origins. The Palestinian dialect of Arabic contains many terms and words not found in ‘standard" Arabic - the result of the integration of Hebrew and Aramaic into the Arabic they were forced to learn after the various Arab and Turkish conquests.
“Food, too, is high on the agenda of these lost Jews. Many Bedouins refrain from eating camel and other nonkosher animals, and around Pessah time, many Palestinians find themselves with a yen for matza.”
In 1918, Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi couldn’t avail themselves of modern research techniques, but many recent medical studies seem to back up their conclusions. One paper, for instance, cited by Misinai in the Post article, “showed that the immune systems of the Jews and the Palestinians are extremely close to one another in a way that almost absolutely demonstrates a similar genetic identity.”
“Other studies, including a 2002 test by Tel Aviv University researchers, determined that only two groups in the world - Ashkenazi Jews and Palestinians - were genetically susceptible to an inherited deafness syndrome.”
“All the studies he claimed show that ‘the Palestinians are genetically much closer to Ashkenazi Jews than they are to the Arabs.’ "
Back in 1918, Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi were buoyed by their conclusions. The Palestinians and Jews, being kinfolk, should be able to work together to build a new Zionist state.
It didn’t work out that way.
Thirty years later, in 1948, Ben-Gurion declared the new State of Israel. It was based on the triumphant claim that, centuries after the Jews had all been expelled from Palestine, they were finally returning to their homeland.
But, if Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi’s earlier conclusions—as well as the research of many other scholars since—are correct, and all the Jews weren’t exiled, but a large number remained—albeit converted to Islam—then there’s a daunting question.
Who did the Jews expel in 1948? And who have they been engaged in bloody conflict with ever since?
And this is super confirmed today thanks to genetic testing.