On the supposed indigenousness of the Palestinian Arabs

A journey to the depths of agitprop's weaponisation of population genetics

If you spend more time than you should on the internet as of late, scrutinising social media for reactions, posts, tweets, comments, threads and the like focusing on the Arab-Israeli conflict since it entered its latest phase following the Palestinian Arabs’ unprovoked massacres on Oct. 7 2023 in Israel, then the odds of your being aware of what I’m about to discuss are stacked quite high indeed.

In retrospect, it was naive not to expect the proponents of a cause that inaugurated the era of aircraft hijacking in the 1960s to hijack population genetics in order to satisfy their narrowest needs, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

While the “Native Palestinians vs Jewish coloniser” dichotomy has existed since the conflict’s very inception and took on the mantle of peer-reviewed science on several occasions, the virulence and sheer frequency of those arguments are unprecedented in scale and recently characterised by their unanimous misuse of genetic data.

Palestinian Arabs are now increasingly depicted as wholly unadulterated Canaanites without a drop of Arabian blood, who just so happen to be completely Arabised in a very unlucky twist of fate all the while their Israeli opponents are cast as the proverbial “settler colonialists” with no biological ties whatsoever to their namesake. Using Global 25 distance tables and IllustrativeDNA models as visual aids, we are also told that the Palestinian Arabs are “genetically closer” to the Israelites/Hebrews/Judeans/Jesus/etc than present-day Jews could ever hope to be…

All hail the Palestinian master race?

For fairness’ sake, such arguments are not always used in “gotcha” moments and you can still find a more evenhanded approach that does not necessarily resort to this kind of Blut & Boden racial chauvinism, Razib Khan's recent post on this platform comes to mind, but even such treatments of the topic referring to common descent between a set of antagonists (which should not come as a surprise to any of us) remain irredeemably superficial and do beg the question:

How pertinent is all this talk about the Palestinian Arabs’ supposed indigeneity? Or, to quote one of my mentors in linguistics, how wrong is it?

Now resorting to genetic arguments can get tricky fairly quickly, population genetics having been a hobby of mine since the late 2000s I am well aware of this having witnessed numerous shifts in what was the consensus view on a number of topics. Things change in that field, and fast, think every five to seven years. In this case however, we’re dealing with a simple appeal to genetic purity.

Two things strike me as peculiar looking at this appeal to genetic purity:

1. The complete focus on autosomal DNA, to the exclusion of other forms of genetic data which are just as informative if not more so.

2. The heavy reliance on Illustrative DNA’s models.

Regarding the first point, and coming back to the inherent trickiness of such genetic arguments, while it is ultimately true that Palestinian Arabs are “genetically closer” to the Ancient Israelites than, say, your average Ashkenazi Jew, the latter is invariably “genetically closer” to the Iron I Philistines than pretty much all Palestinian Arabs put together (including the Christian minority, which has surplus Aegean ancestry)…

And so perhaps we ought to start thinking of the Jews as the real Philistines or, dare I say, the real Palestinians?

I jest of course, but this is quite literally the same sophistry at play here, just turned on its head (notice how easily this can be done). And if you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed the tremendous amount of genetic distance on that Philistine reference between the Christian average (Palestinian_Beit_Sahour) and the Muslim ones (Palestinian and BedouinB which is Negev Bedouin). Which brings us to another crucial point: What is known as the “Palestinian people” is no genetic monolith.

The PCA above alone should make it clear that there is more going on here in terms of Peninsular Arab drift than a simple "Palestinian = Arabised Canaanite” model would allow for. Notice especially how firmly Negev Bedouins cluster within the Arabian Peninsula while the Palestinian Muslim (and Jordanian) reference is very clearly pulled in the direction of the Arabian and Egyptian populations. The only population here that can really be said to be a living relic would be the Samaritans who are by and large identical to the Iron Age samples we’ve seen from Israel, the Palestinian Christians come fairly close but they too are bound to harbour some degree of exogenous admixture including Arabian ancestry (and this is even true of Ashkenazi Jews for that matter, something I might talk about in a future post). Considering how Samaritans tend to be fiery Zionists, the anti-Israel crowd’s deafening silence on this issue is understandable.

In truth, those appeals to genetic purity rely very much on popular ignorance of the genetic data and the methods in use. And to be perfectly fair, I knew things would come to this one day, and so some years back I started keeping track of uniparental frequencies among Palestinian Arabs, Y-DNA data in particular.

Without complicating the matter too much, from observing the different Palestinian Arab results available online the portion of Peninsular Arab lines (Christians are included in the estimate, Non-Arab lines of foreign extraction are not set apart either) stands at about 55.38%, if Jordanians are added this rises to 60.74%. In simpler terms, there is a +50% chance for any given Palestinian Arab of carrying a line that is of Peninsular Arab origin in the clinical sense.

The largest Y-Chromosomal haplogroup among Palestinian Arabs should suffice to illustrate this, namely J-P58 which accounts for around ~40% of the paternal lines (and luckily, one of the haplogroups I know best, being J-P58 myself). 80% of those lines fall under two major branches of J-YSC0000080 (=Z1884), namely J-FGC1723 (accounts for 65% of the lines under J1) and J-ZS1585 (the main branch among Negev Bedouins) both of which are diagnostic Proto-Arab markers that are bound to track Arab dispersals since Old Arabic was a spoken language in the late 2nd millennium BCE.

Now you could come and say that this too is bound to have originated some time in the MBA-LBA Levant, and you’d be right. But that wouldn’t make any of it Canaanite either, what is telling is that the vast majority of Palestinian Arab lines are nestled under narrower pan-Arab subclades which have MRCA estimates going back to the mid-1st millenium CE circa 1400 yBP which corresponds very neatly with the waves of Arabian invasion and settlement, replete with the associated tribal pedigrees. So we know for a fact when and how roughly 1/3rd, at the very least, of Palestinian Arab paternal lines arrived in the Levant and this is just by looking at one haplogroup (albeit the most prominent one numerically-speaking). So much for the Palestinian Arabs being merely “Arabised”!

No one is going to make me believe that the savvy folks engaging in the kind of genetic sophistry mentioned above are somehow unaware of the fact that Palestinian Arabs are overwhelmingly of Peninsular Arab descent when one looks at their paternal (and even maternal) lines. This is detrimental to the narrative of racial purity they are peddling, and so they prefer not to talk about Y-DNA and mtDNA lineages at all so as not to mitigate their chances of promoting the myth of a completely autochthonous Palestinian people that was merely “Arabised”.

The fact of the matter is that the Palestinian Arabs are “Arabised Canaanites” in the same sense the English are “Anglicised Celts”, that is to say not at all. Like the Levant, Britain was subjected to waves of invading settlers from an area that had remained untamed by the Romans, these waves of Germanic invaders would become a constant fixture throughout Anglo-Saxon and Norse times all the way to the Norman period. The English too have a +50% chance on average of carrying a line of Germanic origin (such as branches of R-U106, I-M253, R-Z284, R-L664, R-DF99, etc), we’ve seen shifts in how the autosomal makeup was understood, some years back it was posited that only 30% of the English genome was Germanic with the rest being Brythonic, since the Anglo-Saxon study that came out in 2022 things have shifted towards an overwhelmingly AS contribution of over +60% with the rest being “French” leaving virtually no Brythonic ancestry among the English, the studies have been going from one extreme to the next in their conclusions and the truth is probably somewhere in-between. Yet another cautionary tale when it comes to such estimates, all the more so because the situation in Britain should be fairly straightforward. There is much to bet the same is true for Palestinian Arabs.

This parallel is not a personal preference, but one which is based on numerous elements. Much like the Britons in what would later become England, the Canaanites have left very little in terms of cultural, linguistic and religious material to the local Levantine Arabs (and no, dabkeh is not a Canaanite war dance). Much like Brittonic’s descendants (Welsh, Cornish and Breton) weathered out the Celts’ displacement and marginalisation on Britain’s periphery and even outside its homeland in Armorica where it was brought by British refugees in the aftermath of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the only Canaanite language that survived throughout millennia would be Hebrew in its two standardised forms (Tiberian and Samaritan). Were the English to claim a closer relationship to the Celts than the Welsh or the Irish, they would be laughed at, all the more so if they did so while engaging in Nordicist discourse and attempted to portray the Iron Age Celts as a set of lost German tribes that came straight out of Scandinavia. And yet, the Palestinian Arabs do just that and are taken seriously, in case you weren’t aware they are taught at school that the Canaanites and the Jebusites were Arab tribes, they go even further in fact and claim that the Arameans, the Akkadians, the Phoenicians and so on also happened to be Arab tribes.

Another possible parallel would be with the North Macedonians in the southern Balkans who claim that the Macedonian Greeks were in fact of Slavic descent. Here too, we are dealing with a set of tribes, the Slavs, that migrated in Late Antiquity from beyond the area which was under Roman control and settled deep within former Roman territory. Palestinian Arabs are “Arabised Canaanites” in the same sense North Macedonians are “Slavicised Macedonians”.

I could go on and on in this way, another topic of interest might be the amount of Egyptian, Kurdish and Turkmen ancestry among Palestinian Arabs, which tends to follow a specific set of social and geographic boundaries. Likewise, Arabian ancestry among the Palestinian Muslims is usually highest among nomads (the bedouin), then urbanites and finally in the rural population, tribal pedigree also plays a prominent role here (Palestinian Arab society is a tribal one) something which is plainly obvious when looking at haplogroup J-P58’s Palestinian Arab lines for instance.

Long story short, there is much more than meets the eye here in terms of data than the simple distance tables and models used by anti-Israel propagandists online would have you believe. What these propagandists say isn’t as interesting as what they’re purposefully omitting, such as the inconvenient fact that 1 out of 2 Palestinian Arabs is a lineal descendant of the Arab-Muslim conquerors (something the Palestinian Arabs take great pride in, it is no happy coincidence if Hamas’ spokesman borrowed his nom de guerre from one such conqueror, their cultural references certainly aren’t Canaanite kings and seers).

Finally, as far as Illustrative DNA is of concern, this is a vast topic which would probably require a post of its own. This website is affiliated to the Turkish DNA Project, calling it biased when it comes to such matters would be quite the understatement. A recent example that comes to mind is how quickly people tied to both Illustrative DNA and the Turkish DNA Project rushed to extract a very shoddy model from the supplement of Olalde et al.’s last paper on the Balkans in order to promote the fallacy that present-day Greeks are about as Hellenic as the Turks are Turkic (or even less so in fact).

The people who went to such lengths in order to promote this qpAdm model as the final say on the matter of Hellenic admixture (in blue above) among present-day Greeks conveniently forgot to mention that the model itself is designed to gauge the amount of Eastern European admixture in the study’s framework, not Hellenic ancestry. Aegean Greeks, namely Cycladic, Cretan and Dodecanese Greeks, deriving no ancestry whatsoever from the Ancient Greeks is a laughable claim considering that they happen to be amongst the populations that resemble the Ancient Greeks the most (and we’re not just talking about autosomal DNA here). It’s also unclear what’s going on with the Ottoman-era Turkish sample, as Aegean Greeks have minimal Turkic ancestry at best.

This is sadly typical of the behaviour one might expect from Illustrative DNA and its affiliates. I could also go on to show how, in their models, Turks magically lack any Armenian input, even though we know that there’s quite a bit of that just by looking at the uniparental markers extant among present-day Turks. But that’ll be for another post, depending on how well this one is received. The fact of the matter is that we’re not dealing with an impartial website here, there apparently is an agenda to amplify the amount of Turkic ancestry (not a bad thing in and of itself, as many people have completely denied the existence of Turkic ancestry among present-day Turks, another untenable claim) and minimise undesirable components. In the same way, their models tend to be designed to downplay Germanic ancestry among the English and funnily enough among the French as well (they seem to be under the impression French identity relates to the Franks in much the same way Turkish identity relates to the Oghuz tribes for some reason). So the next time you see an 80% Canaanite Palestinian Arab on an Illustrative DNA model, remember that there is more than meets the eye here and that caution is of the essence.

The Palestinian Arabs’ claim to indigineity is hands down one of the lousiest out there, I won’t even bother pointing out how they and their supporters cynically and systematically deny or erase Jewish and Israelite history while robbing the Jews of that same identity and history, that deserves another post in and of its own. This attempt at portraying them as the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Navajo (while you’ve got serious contenders in the form of the Samaritans, the Assyrians or the Mandaeans, to say nothing of the Jews) is made even more preposterous by the fact that they are living in a part of the world which saw the invention of imperialism, colonisation, deportation, forced resettlement and all the jolly stuff usually associated with the predatory West, all concepts that were mastered by the successive caliphates and proved pivotal in turning the Fertile Crescent into a majority Arab-Muslim area. In other words, the Palestinian Arabs are the end result of centuries of Arab-Muslim imperialism, as opposed to some sort of local “Arabised” ethnic minority which is what they’d have naive Westerners believe, and in turn this is why their politics are entirely geared either towards the re-establishment of the Caliphate (the former muslim empire) with Jerusalem as its capital (despite this town never having been the capital of a caliphate or indeed the regional capital of the province when it was under Muslim rule) or towards the creation of a vast pan-Arab empire. There is no “Republic of Canaan” with Jebus as its capital on the menu, and that’s because they simply aren’t Canaanite to begin with.