Palestinians
The Palestinian people are the modern descendants of the peoples who have lived in Palestine continuously over the centuries. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one half of the world’s Palestinian population continues to reside in historic Palestine. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip and about 750,000 in the West Bank.
About Palestinians in brief
The Palestinian people are the modern descendants of the peoples who have lived in Palestine continuously over the centuries. They are largely culturally and linguistically Arab; including those ethnic Jews and Samaritans who fit this definition. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one half of the world’s Palestinian population continues to reside in historic Palestine. Many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip and about 750,000 in the West Bank. Palestinian identity encompasses the heritage of all ages from biblical times up to the Ottoman period. Founded in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization is an umbrella organization for groups that represent the Palestinian people before international states. The Palestinian National Authority, officially established in 1994 as a result of the Oslo Accords, is an interim administrative body nominally responsible for governance in Palestinian population centers. Since 1978, the United Nations has observed an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The Greek toponym Palaistínē first occurs in the work of the 5th century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, where it denotes generally the coastal land from Phoenicia down to Egypt. The word reflects an ancient Eastern Mediterranean-Near Eastern word which was used either as a toponym or ethnonym. In Ancient Egyptian PelesetPurusati has been conjectured to refer to the \”Sea Peoples\”, particularly the Philistines. In the 2nd century CE, the term came into widespread use, printed on coins and even in rabbinic texts.
It appears to have been used as an Arabic adjectival noun in the medieval Arab period since the early medieval period. During the Mandatory period, readers addressed its readers as ‘Palestinians’ and ‘Palestinian-Issa’ The word came into its modern meaning in the 7th century CE when the newspaper Falastin published its first issue. The term was used as the official name for the region in the late 19th century, as a stand-alone term. After the Second World War, it was adopted as the name of the administrative region in which the Palestinian state was to be established. It is estimated that half of Palestinian population in the Palestinian territories are refugees and that they have collectively suffered approximately US$300 billion in property losses due to Israeli confiscations, at 2008–09 prices. Between 2.1 and 3.million of the diaspora population live as refugees in neighboring Jordan, over 1 million live between Syria and Lebanon and about750,000 live in Saudi Arabia, with Chile’s half a million representing the largest concentration outside the Middle East. In 2005, Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants, encompassing the entire population of Gaza Strip, the majority of the population of West Bank and almost 21% of Israel proper as Arab citizens of Israel. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and creation of Mandatory Palestine replaced Ottoman citizen with Palestinian citizenship, solidifying a national identity. The term evolved into a sense of a shared future in the form of a significantly-reduced Palestinian state after the exodus of 1967.
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This page is based on the article Palestinians published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
