Are Palestinians part of the Arab people?

We keep hearing that Palestinians are Arabs and the Palestinians do claim to be Arabs. If so, then why are their Arab brethren not accepting them into their fold but leaving them as refugees across Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon? They are living in tents across the region including in the so-called West Bank and Gaza.

If the Palestinians are Arabs, then their Arab brethren are doing them a disservice by leaving them in the cold and preserving the reason for a claim of territory for over 60 years. Why must the Palestinians suffer being stateless while their Arab brethren cheer them on?



All of the suffering Palestinians are collateral damage to an Islamic cause of wiping out Israel. As the late Yasser Araffat and now the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared "Israel must be wiped off the map". In the Palestinian map of the region, there is no Israel. This has continued for over 60 years now and is not likely to see a resolution anytime soon.

Historically, Palestinians may be referred to the people who lived in the Province of Judea during the Roman rule. They comprise largely of Jews and the Hasmoneans who are Idumeans. In 70 AD, the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and stopped the Jewish rebellion. Idumea (which is southern Judea) ceased to exist shortly thereafter.

After the revolt of Bar Kokhba in 135 AD, the Romans renamed the region to the Province of Syria Palaestina. The term Palaestina (derived from the word Philistia) was chosen as an insult to the Jews and to suppress any further nationalistic feelings.

Even during the era of the Ottoman Empire, there was no attempt to form a Palestinian State because there was previously no such entity. The Arabic transliterated names of Falastin or Filistin or Filastin were retained to refer to this geography.

It was after World War I upon the fall of the Ottoman Empire that the British called this geography The British Mandate. In 1922, the Emirate of Transjordan was formed under the British Mandate. This was occupied by the same peoples who are now called Palestinians but since they are in Jordan, they are known as Jordanians.

In 1947 when the British announced an end to the mandate, the United Nations declared the provisions to set up not one but two states from this piece of land. Israel was re-established as a nation on 14 May 1948 but the Arab Higher Committee refused and war broke out the very next day.

As far as history goes, there has never been a Palestinian State until 1988 when the PLO made a Declaration of Independence and Yasser Araffat assumed the title of "President of Palestine".

We can only conclude that the peoples who lived in this land from ancient times were Jews and then came the Idumeans and Hasmoeans and eventually the ones who became Muslims were called Arabs in the broader sense of the word.

Hence, although the peoples who are in this so-called Palestine geography were not Arabs, today they are called Arabs in the broadest sense of the application of the word. Events has overtaken the truth of history in the attempt to link this group of people to the greater Arab world and make it an Arab cause.