Subject: Re: Hmmmm
So, where did the Palestinians come from?

Well, when a mommy Palestinian and a daddy Palestinian love each other very much.....


But more seriously, the Palestinians come from the same place that Jordanians and Syrians and Lebanese (or, say, the Portugese and the Spanish in Iberia or the Flemish and Wallons in Belgium) and other "peoples" come from that aren't genetically distinct from each other. Self-identification as a separate "people" is based on a host of factors: language, culture, heritage, customs and tradition, and (yes) religion as well. The Catalan separatist movement isn't based on the Catalans self-identifying as a separate people as a racial or genetic matter, for example. Any "people" comes from a set of common community identifiers that distinguish them in a material way from other peoples of the world. We're all genetically similar (race is a social construct, not a biological attribute) - different Peoples come from the evolution of different communities and cultures, not from genetic speciation.

Anyway, Palestinians and Jews aren't genetically "indistinguishable" from each other. We're not genetically far from each other, as far as human groups go - we both come from the same part of the world, so that's not surprising. That lends a certain irony to the conflict, a sort of metaphorical "brother against brother" color to it. But that happens all the time with conflicts between different peoples from the same general part of the world - the Pakistanis and Indians aren't especially genetically distinct from each other, nor the Hutsi and the Tutu.

The set of linguistic, cultural, traditional, religious, and social attributes that make the Jewish people distinct from other peoples first developed around 800 BCE, and those distinctors crystallized during the exile through about 550 BCE. Non-Jewish peoples in the area prior to the seventh century were mostly the Phoenicians and the Zoroastrian Persians. They were all subjugated during the Arab conquest of the region in the mid-600's, with the expansion of the Rashidum Caliphate.