Canaanwashing

An Anatomy of Genetic Palestinism (II)

This is the second part of our series exploring the genetic aspects of anti-Israel propaganda and the way in which its core claims are articulated through the misuse of genomic data, both ancient and modern.

Canaanwashing

Canaanite cosplay is such a central theme of Paliprop and the Palestinian Arabs’ historical narrative revolves around it so completely in order to project legitimacy into the past and maintain the illusion of demographic continuity over millennia that a single post such as this cannot do the topic justice, it deserves at least another in-depth post, and I shall be writing one such post soon enough.

Still, it is impossible to overlook how thoroughly canaanwashed a lot of the appeals to the Palestinian Arabs’ alleged genetic purity (always contrasted with the Jews’ genetic impurity) are becoming.

Canaanwashing the Khazar hoax

It should be obvious to all by now that beyond Vahaduo distance charts, G25 admixture graphs and (rarely) a few shoddy qpAdm models, genetic Palestinism doesn’t have much to show for when it comes to buttressing its indigeneity claims.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the kind of evidence put forth in the framework of Paliprop inevitably falls short.

Genetic Palestinism is a meme

The greater irony here is that in its relentless quest to portray the Palestinian Arabs as overwhelmingly Canaanite in origin so as to shape foreign perceptions of the conflict in a nativist framework, Paliprop has effectively created a very strong taboo over the presence of Arabian ancestry in Palestinian Arabs - clearly a substantial component among them - and this is reflected in the exclusion of specific Palestinian Arab groups that have much lower chunks of Canaanite-related ancestry (and therefore fail the canaanwashed purity test) from the models meant to demonstrate the Palestinian Arabs’ supposedly autochthonous status.

Regarding the first aspect of this taboo, this goes well beyond the autosomal data and encompasses the uniparental data where the Peninsular Arab input sticks out like the proverbially sore thumb.

I’ve spoken about this at length in my Deep Dive on J-FGC1722’s Palestinian Arab branches but it bears repeating that going off J-P58 alone at least one third of all Palestinian Arab patrilineages are certifiably of Peninsular Arab origin (the majority of which arrived with the Arab conquerors during the second half of the 1st millennium CE), adding all the other Y-Chromosomal lines brings this estimate up to about ~55% and that includes Christians (if they are removed or if Jordanians are added, the estimate increases further to about 60%).

That doesn’t look very Canaanite

In order to fully grasp what is at stake here, we must make an attempt at picturing the opposite scenario for a moment, namely Ashkenazi Jews carrying a majority of Y-lines that are of Hellenic, Italic, Slavic, Germanic, Khazarian extraction and what have you, with only a smattering of local Canaanite, Aramean, Amorite, Hurrian and other Levantine or Near Eastern lines… Would the practitioners of genetic Palestinism miss such an opportunity to spam this information all over the place?
Of course not, in fact this exactly what has happened with Costa et al.’s 2013 paper on Ashkenazi Jewish mtDNA haplogroups (an outdated study that was clearly flawed from the moment it got through peer review), a paper that is still making the rounds from time to time.

This is why you’re unlikely to ever see Paliprop using Y-Chromosomal data to make a point. All the more so because Palestinian Arab society is a tribal society, a patriarchal environment where patrilineal descent does matter quite a bit and clans that are keenly aware of their genealogy pride themselves in being descended from famous figures in Arab and/or Islamic history.

The few times when you do see such arguments, they run the risk of being counterproductive and harming the credibility of the narrative they are peddling.
An excellent example of this would be the use of Netanyahu’s Y-DNA results (obtained via his brother Iddo, and his son Yair’s FTDNA profiles, I should know since both of them show up in my matches).

Is Netanyahu a Slav? Let’s find out!

Netanyahu’s terminal clade has been public knowledge for quite some time, I remember discussing it as early as 2018, and yet all we’re left with here is a shadowy reference to R-M198 (AKA R1a1a), a lineage that arose in Eastern Europe during the Mesolithic period roughly 8500 years ago and spread out (mainly through its most successful branch, R-M417) with early Indo-European dispersals from the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

R-M198’s distribution was shaped by Core (“Late”) Indo-European migrations

That in itself does not tell us much beyond the fact that Netanyahu’s paternal ancestors were living in Eastern Europe in remote prehistoric times. Luckily, because of R-M417’s involvement in Indo-European dispersals since their earliest stages, the haplogroup’s phylogeny mirrors the Indo-European language tree to a great extent (though as with other haplogroups where the phylogeny mirrors linguistic trees, the correlation is never 1:1), allowing us to pinpoint with relative accuracy the origin of major branches and sub-branches in time and space.

A radical fault line under R-M417 is to be found between Z283 and Z93 (both immediately downstream from R-Z645):

R-Z283 & R-Z93

The former comprises the absolute majority of the European branches of R1a, which are further subdivided into clades that are circumscribed to certain branches of the Indo-European family (R-Y2395 is very likely tied to the development of the Germanic languages, Proto-Slavic likely has its roots in a group that was rich in R-M458 lines, R-Z92 seems to be more broadly Balto-Slavic, and so on), however there are always exceptions, R-YP4858 for instance is an example of a Z283 branch that was ostensibly involved in Indo-Iranian dispersals.

The main correlate for the Indo-Iranian branch however is clearly Z93, which was found in samples from archeological horizons normally attributed to the Proto-Indo-Iranians such as the Fatyanovo, Abashevo, Srubnaya and Sintashta cultures.

If Y-DNA phylogenies can help refine linguistic subgrouping, “Indo-Slavic” might indeed be a plausible node or at the very least a sprachbund

Here too, one can find European samples thanks to the historical migrations of East Iranian-speaking nomads such as the Scythians and the Alans. Some sub-branches (R-FGC56408) also comprise clusters that were swept up in later Turkic dispersals, to say nothing of R-L657 which is the primary Indo-Aryan marker.

It is under that same Indo-Iranian branch that the Ashkenazi Levites, whose Y-DNA signature Netanyahu carries, are nestled. Those insinuating otherwise could have saved themselves the embarrassment by simply looking up Behar et al.’s 2017 study on Ashkenazi Levites. The Ashkenazi Levite line is R-Y2619, a subclade of CTS6, a seemingly Western Iranian sub-branch found in Yazidis, Zaza Kurds, Iranian Azeris and Iranians from Kerman province (I am also aware of at least one Bukharan Jewish Levite under CTS6, and potentially an individual of Palestinian Christian descent on the paternal side as well).

R-F1345 (YFull)

CTS6 in turn is a sub-branch of F1345, which comprises a cluster of Palestinian Arabs (Sunni Muslims) from the Galilee, which has at least one individual with a tradition of Mamluk descent (with the paper trail and family name to support this claim).
It could be that the line has an older presence, F1345 however does seem to be more tied to Iranian groups including Eastern Iranian ones and so the scenario of a Mamluk origin for the Palestinian Arab cluster is still very much on the table.

Coming back to the Ashkenazi Levites, while their lineage does not seem particularly likely to have been present in the Levant in First Temple times (Iron IIB-C) - despite one low coverage sample from LBA Megiddo (that city-state had a class of rulers bearing Old Indic names) being R-M417* - it is almost certain to have been present in Judea by the Second Temple period (roughly the second half of the 1st millennium BCE), and was probably picked up in Achaemenid times among Babylonian exiles (the branch could be tied to the Medes), it is even possible that its bearers might have been Magi because its distribution and association with Levitical status otherwise becomes hard to explain. Of course one could propose more exotic scenarios, but these remain unconvincing for the time being.

“Eastern European”, “Polish” or “Slavic” just isn’t going to cut it, and for the record R-Y2619 isn’t the only case of a major Ashkenazi line that is bound to be of Iron Age Iranian provenance (there are at least two other candidates for such an association). And so once more, genetic Palestinism works wonders only as long as you do not delve too deeply into the data and don’t start asking too many questions, a skeptical mind is all it takes to infirm most of its asinine claims.

G25 heatmap for Gazans (notice the higher similarity to Egyptians)

As for the second aspect of the taboo mentionned above, Negev Bedouins being wholly of Peninsular Arab descent makes them unfit for canaanwashing, hence they are quite often nowhere to be found in most of the Vahaduo charts and graphs churned out by Paliprop.
Gazans too tend to be excluded as they carry a lot of Egyptian admixture (most of it being recent), this can be extended to many Palestinian Arabs from the coastal plain as well as to Afro-Palestinians. This is despite all of those groups otherwise featuring quite prominently in Paliprop’s indigenist narrative (think of all the talk about the “Naqab”).

Some of the shoddier models remedy this by using EMBA Levantine samples as a Canaanite proxy, so as to canaanwash as much of the Peninsular Arab and Egyptian components as possible, which should also be kept in mind.

Much like Semitewashing, canaanwashed claims are deliberately meant to mislead, genetic Palestinism’s tactics and arguments are almost always fallacious and presuppose intimate knowledge of the data that disprove those claims (which are therefore discarded). More than anything, much of this sophistry relies on popular ignorance of the data and methods in use.