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See Palestinian refugees for more detail.
4,082,300 Palestinians are registered as refugees with UNRWA; this number includes the descendants of refugees from the 1948 war, but excludes those who have emigrated to areas outside of the UNRWA's remit. Thus, if the estimates above are correct, 46% of all Palestinians are registered refugees.
The British census of 1922 counted 752,048 in the British Mandate of Palestine, comprising 589,177 Muslims, 83,790 Jews, 71,464 Christians and 7,617 persons belonging to other groups. If we exclude the Jewish population (although at the time a significant proportion of them would have been considered Palestinian), this implies 88% Muslim, 11% Christian, and 1% other. However, the British censuses are believed by some to have significantly undercounted the Bedouin.
Currently, no reliable data is available for the worldwide Palestinian population; Bernard Sabella of Bethlehem University estimates it as 6% Christian[2]. However, within the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, the Palestinian population is 97% Muslim and 3% Christian; there are also about 300 Samaritans and a few thousand Jews from the Neturei Karta group who consider themselves Palestinian. Within Israel, 68% of the non-Jewish population is Muslim, 9% Christian, 7% Druze, and 15% "other".
It is still a matter of some debate to what extent Arabs replaced previous populations in the Middle East, and to what extent those populations merely adopted the Arabic language. However, the prevailing view of historians is that most of the population remained the same; the significant number of loanwords from earlier languages ( Aramaic in the Fertile Crescent, Coptic in Egypt, Berber in the Maghreb), the retention of earlier cultural customs (especially well-documented for Egypt among the fellahin, but notably including sizable Christian communities throughout the area), and the relatively small population of Arabia all point to a continuity with the earlier population. The medieval North African sociologist Ibn Khaldun strongly argued for continuity, considering the Arabization of these populations to be a result of their imitating their rulers. Interestingly, in his time, the word "Arab" referred only to Bedouin and their direct descendants, and was not applied to city dwellers and farmers even if they had come to speak Arabic.
The Palestinian Bedouin, however, are much more securely known to be Arab by ancestry as well as by culture; their distinctively conservative dialects and pronunciation of qaaf as gaaf group them with other Bedouin across the Arab world and confirm their separate history. Their arrival in the Negev predates Islam by a considerable period; specifically Arabic onomastic elements began to appear in Edomite inscriptions starting in the 6th century BC, and are nearly universal in the inscriptions of the Nabataeans, who arrived there in the 4th-3rd centuries BC[3]. A few Bedouin are found as far north as Galilee; however, these seem to be much later arrivals (although Sargon II settled Arabs in Samaria as early as 720 BC.)
As genetic techniques have advanced, it has become possible to look directly into the question of the ancestry of the Palestinians. In recent years, many genetic surveys have suggested that Jews and Palestinians (and in some cases other Levantines) are genetically closer to each other than either is to the Arabs of Arabia or to Europeans [4] [5] [6] [7]. (this collection contains more links to genetic studies of Jewish and middle eastern populations.) These studies look at the prevalence of specific inherited genetic differences ( polymorphism) among populations, which then allow the relatedness of these populations to be determined, and their ancestry to be traced back (see population genetics). These differences can be the cause of genetic disease or be completely neutral (see Single nucleotide polymorphism) ; they can be inherited maternally ( mitochondrial DNA), paternally ( Y chromosome), or as a mixture from both parents ; the results obtained may vary from polymorphism to polymorphism. One study [8]on congenital deafness identified an allele only found in Palestinian and Ashkenazi communities, suggesting a common origin ; an investigation [9] of a Y-chromosome polymorphism found Lebanese, Palestinian, and Sephardic populations to be particularly closely related ; a third study [10], looking at Human leukocyte antigen differences among a broad range of populations, found Palestinians to be particularly closely related to Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews, as well as Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean populations. (The latter study by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena has been the subject of intense controversy, it was retracted by the journal and removed from its website, leading to further controversy; the main accusations made were that the authors used their scientific findings to justify making one-sided political proclamations in the paper; that the retraction followed lobbyist pressure because the results contradicted certain political beliefs; some suggested that the broad scientific interpretation was based on too narrow data [11], whereas others support the scientific content as valid - for more information on the controversy : [12], [13], [14], [15].) If this close relatedness is true, it would confirm both Jews' and Palestinians' historical claims, suggesting a common Northwest Semitic ancestry. However, the results are complex, much work remains to be carried out, and partial results can be interpreted to suit diverse political agendas.
One point in which the two populations appear to contrast is in the proportion of sub-Saharan African genes which have entered their gene pools. One study found that Middle Eastern Arabs (specifically Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, and Bedouin), unlike other Middle Eastern populations (specifically Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, and Near Eastern Jews), had what appears to be a substantial gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa (amounting to 10-15% of lineages) within the past three millennia, possibly due to the slave trade[16].
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