Who are the Indigenous people of Palestine?

by kingkupal

I've looked at the FAQ but I'm still not satisfied with the answer. This question is mostly back in the Ancient times. According to the bible, Israelis were the original inhabitants of the land and even the place Jerusalem is included in the bible but since most of them were expelled, the land has been conquered by different empires and after that Palestinians inhabited quite a large portion of the land. I'm not sure if my information is correct or not but I want an unbiased answer of which group has the right of ownership of the land? I want an answer that related back in Ancient times not during the partition. I hope my question makes sense.

BardsSword

I want an unbiased answer of which group has the right of ownership of the land?

I feel this is your real question, the heart of the matter, and that's something no one in this subreddit can answer. Who can say that people even have the rights to the land? Who's to say the original inhabitants deserve the rights? The question is such a political one, and not historical, that it can't be answered historically.

As for who the indigenous people are, well, its akin to asking a question like "are modern Welsh directly descended from the Celts?" We know that there was in history a state in historical Palestine called Judea, and a large portion of Jews from around the world (Ashkenazi and Sephardi) can be genetically traced back to this area. When the original Judea (or Yehuda, to use the Hebrew) was founded, how the Jews arrived in Palestine, if they were immigrants as the Bible says or indigenous people or both, is a mater of scholarly debate. We also know that the Palestinian Arabs have lived in historic Palestine since the Arab conquests and before.

So who has the right to the land of historic Palestine, or Israel and Judea, or Canaan? I don't think its for historians, at least in our capacity as historians, to say. Both Jews and Arabs can trace their history on that land since before the concept of nationalism, or the idea that indigenous peoples have a right to self-determine on "their" land. So I'm afraid you'll have to answer that political question for yourself.

idio3

According to the bible, Israelis were the original inhabitants of the land

Umm... No! According to the Bible, Israelites were not the original inhabitants of the land. In fact, according to the Bible, they were lead onto the "promised land" by a prophet and conquered it from the autochthonous peoples before dividing it among its various tribes. These ideas, of course, do not have any basis in genetics (Jews are native Canaanites), history (there was no mention of a conquering nomads from Sinai anywhere outside of the Bible), or even religion (pre-Judaic Yahwism was an offshoot of a typical Canaanite religion of, for example, Phoenicians).

But, to answer your question - as far as historical times are concerned, original inhabitants of modern-day Israel would be Israelites/Jews. Not that it matters in any real way - historical inhabitants of modern-day England were Celts most closely related to the modern-day Welsh, while historical inhabitants of modern-day Crimea were, first, Iranian tribes, then Greeks.

There is no such thing as "right of ownership of the land" based on its possession thousands of years ago. Vast majority of ancestors of what we know as "Western Civilisation" was herding sheep in the modern-day Russian steppe just a few thousand years ago, while Europe was in control of people like modern-day Basques. Should we all just go back to the steppes? :)

nicklaz0001

I'm going to talk about the time period far before what the FAQ covers, just to not step on any toes.

Before I begin, I'd like to echo the other people answering this question:

As far as if this has any bearing as to which group somehow right to any part of the Levant, it doesn't. The issue between Palestine and Israel is a modern one, and has very little to do with the people who would be considered indigenous or which one of them arrived there first. That being said...

As far as the indigenous people of the section of the Levant we know today as Israel/Palestine, that answer appears lost to history. Considering that the earlier people in the region also are the inhabitants of one of the oldest towns, Jericho, I would think that, if you were using the Bible as a completely trustworthy historical source, which you shouldn't with anything, then the question would be settled, and the answer would be the Canaanites, who likely are not the anscestors of the Palestinians. As we progress further back to the first habitation level of Jericho, the type of population changes, and it appears that we won't have an answer to this. However, let's look at some of the earliest records of people that appear to be native to the region.

For this, we will first have to head North, to modern day Syria and Lebanon. Let's start this discussion around 2500 BCE, as speakign any earlier has been shown moot here. Looking first at the city of Ebla, we have a group of people writing in Sumerian cuneiform, but in Amorite, which is a Semitic language most closely related to Canaanite, Phoenician, and Hebrew. Strictly speaking, I think it may be related to Aramaic. They are living in the northern half of the Levant, and represent the earliest confirmed Semitic speakers after the Akkadians. Some argue, though I am not convinced, that a tablet here is the first reference to Canaan. For our purposes, it doesn't matter, as you'll soon see. At this point, major population centers in the Southern Levant tell us that there is quite a bit of socio-political integration, but the identity of the peoples here appear no more than proto-Canaanite. Canaan is a geographic region, and doesn't represent a single people.

This brings us to the meat of the discussion, the first section in which we have solid written records about the political state of the region. the Late Bronze Age. Important players here are the Hittites and the Egyptians, both at the height of their power, each owning about half of the Levant. Egypt owned the Southern half. During this time, northern and southern Levantine cities prospered. However, it is during this time that we see good distinction between Canaanites and non- Canaanites. The North Levantine city of Ugarit has an impressive number of tablets, and when speaking about Canaan, they speak as though they are separated from it. It is here, then, that we have a distinction. We also have fairly frequent references to the land of Canaan as an important Egyptian owned area in the Amarna letters, alongside a reference in a Hittite treaty with Egypt. This brings us to the end of the Bronze Age, and the reason for much of this confusion. We have a stele of the pharaoh Merneptah. He proclaimed wictory over various groups of people, one of which is the Canaanites; another is the people of Israel. There is much linguistic debate over exactly what the connotation of the way it is written, but unless it is asked for, I will leave it for now. This is, to my knowledge, the first reference to Israelites.

This reference happened in the context of the Bronze Age collapse ca 1200 BCE, and it is unclear whether the Israelites were a nomadic group, or a settled one in Canaan. In any case, the Bronze Age collapse was a time of great upheaval of peoples, and saw the collapse of every major power in the region. During this time, we also see the first reference to a group called the Pelset. They are mentioned by the Egyptians as well, and are believed to be the first reference to the Philistines. They are supposedly part of the larger group called Sea Peoples who settled in various places along the coast of the Levant and Turkey. During this time, many populations moved throughout the region, and who was where before this comes a bit muddled. It is in the time period just after the collapse that the first widely accepted to be historical part of the Bible takes place. The conquest, while unattested by written records, does fall in line with what we see happen in the Levant during this time. cities fall and population centers move. it is unlikely that the was due completely or in majority to the Israelites, but it would be surprising if they played no part in it. In fact, it is almost certain that they did, because after this point we do have an Israelite kingdom, then two, which are well attested by archaeological and textual evidence. It is at this point that people the would become the Palestinians and the people the Israelis of today call their ancestors were living together for certain. Between 1000-900 BCE.

However, if we look at the cultural touchstones of each, they are likely derived from the same or very similar peoples throughout the bronze age, with much intermarriage for much of their history until the diaspora, and evidence suggests that for much of their history, the Israelites may have been polytheistic, worshiping the same gods as the other Canaanite groups, perhaps with a later emphasis on Yahweh. The whole thing is rather muddled, but it is worthwhile to understand it.

oudysseos

The question of 'who has the right to own the land' is not properly satisfied by an appeal to history, although it's a common enough mistake.

TooMuchOnMyMind

I don't know enough about history of the Palestinian people to comment on their claim to indigenous status. However, I just took a class based off of Karen Armstrong's Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, which begins with an explanation of the Jewish history of the land of Israel. I can offer an extremely condensed summary.

Israelites, who were ancestors of the people who we now think of as Jews, controlled large areas of the central mountains of what is now called Israel as early as 1300 BCE. By around 1000, they had conquered Jerusalem and established a semi-centralized monarchy in the region of Judea, which is in the center of modern-day Israel. Another Israelite kingdom to the north was called Israel. The northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by Assyria in 740, and some of its population was deported. The southern kingdom of Judah was independent for a few hundred years and then became a vassal state of first Assyria, then Egypt, and then Babylon.

After a series of Israelite revolts against Babylon, the emperor Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple on the Temple Mount, and deported a significant portion of the Israelite population, especially the elite, to Babylon, where they developed/absorbed ideas such as monotheism and the afterlife. It's around this point where historians start to refer to them as Jews.

When Cyrus the Great, emperor of Persia, conquered the Babylonian Empire, he allowed the Jews to return to Israel, where they were given some local autonomy. His son, Darius, allowed the Jews to begin rebuilding the Temple. The region was conquered by Alexander the Great in the 3rd century BCE and then transferred to the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, who lost it to the Seleucid rulers of Syria. Throughout this time, Jews lived in and 'owned' the land, although they didn't truly rule it.

In the 160s BCE, the Maccabean revolt took place. Jews rebelled against aggressive Seleucid Hellenization (imposition of Hellenistic culture), and taxation may have played a role as well. They defeated the Seleucids in a long and bloody war and established an independent Jewish state in the region of Judea.

In 63 BCE, a Roman army under Pompei conquered Jerusalem. The Jews lived variously as vassals of Rome or under direct rule until the first Jewish revolt, in the 60s and 70s CE. They were independent for a short time but the Romans crushed the uprising and destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount. From 132-135 the Jews revolted again, in the Bar Kochba revolt. They attacked Roman soldiers and forced them out of the country, and remained independent for a few years. It took 12 out of the 25 Roman legions to eventually suppress the revolt. After this, many Jews were massacred and the Jewish population of Israel was drastically reduced. Jewish population centers shifted to the Galilee in what is now northern Israel.