By Sally Dugman

Concerning many Israelites and Palestinians, the two groups are pretty much one and the same except, apparently, the Jews broke off from their genetically close kin, the Palestinians, and formed a separate worship group thousands of years ago while most Palestinians had many ancestors who were Jews and who, later-on, converted to Islam.

In fact according to Josie Glausiusz in this Haaretz article, Blood Brothers: Palestinians and Jews Share Genetic Roots - Science & Health, “The closest genetic relatives of the Middle Eastern Jews are Druze, Bedouin and Palestinians. The closest genetic relatives of the European group of Jews are Northern Italians, followed by Sardinians and French.”

A third group of (ancient) Jews were also discovered. It was composed primarily of northern Africans. And perhaps most startling of all is that many of the current Muslim Palestinians truly are descended largely from Jewish ancestry who became converts afterwards to Arab Islam. So in light of this being so and that for many, their Jewish forebears lived for a very long time in Palestine — who has rights to the land — descendants of Palestinian Jews or should it be largely European and others who have literally probably no or relatively little history connected to Palestine? …. or is the main issue here not about who claims the land based on a long history of ownership, but whether it should be largely controlled by and be a part of Jewish Israel or not? If so, under what justification?

Furthermore and while all of the genetically related groups were studied in terms of their connections to each other, so were painstakingly the distinctive splits between various genetically clustered sets of Jews. Then the whole bunch’s of them were compared and contracted to ancient nonJewish populations to further distinguish about exactly what is Jewishness and not, as well the ways that they, too, are connected.

However, there is some obvious clusters of early Jewish men who married nonJewish women for centuries early-on and vise versa, although less frequently did Jewish women marry nonJewish men. So in the end, some of the Jewish genetic mixes are, certainly, complicated.

In addition, the early studies (more than twenty-five years ago) on this topic was largely rejected by many powerful Jews and Jewish groups. Therefore, the main researcher of the matter, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, of Complutense University in Madrid, was castigated, stigmatized, reviled and punished by losing a prestigious academic position at the Journal of Human Immunology and the related society on account. (In relation, one can easily find herself speculating about his standing in the Jewish community if he had found, instead, that Jewish were a separate, special community chosen by God according to religious dogma rather than strongly connected not distantly at all from a genomic standard to especially the Palestinians. In other words, there is a huge, substantial overlap in their gene pool.)

To learn more about this particular issue and to learn about the related controversy, etc., please feel free to go to Journal axes gene research on Jews and Palestinians. It is loaded with lots of salient, absorbing facts!

In addition, author Johnathan Kohan in The Blogs: Dammi Israeli: The Genetic Origins of the Palestinians, a scientifically chock full “Times of Israel” article, writes “The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is being approached incorrectly. This is because Palestinians are not Arab. They are culturally arabized Jews/Israelites.” So can some Zionist please tell me that they can’t claim their ancestors’ land and somehow don’t deserve it?

Further according to an AI overview that one can look up online: “Palestinians and Israelis are genetically quite similar, sharing a substantial amount of Y chromosome overlap, suggesting a common origin and a high degree of genetic continuity. Studies indicate that a significant portion of the Y chromosomes in both populations, Jewish and Palestinian Muslim Arabs, belong to the same genetic pool.”

This whole set of information is certainly a hot topic! Even the National Institute of Health (NIH) has at least seven articles (and probably more) on the subject. In consideration, this replete one by NM Kopelman is elucidating as it examined lots of samples of genetic structures spanning a huge historical range of Jewish populations in many locations across Europe, Northern Africa, the Middle East and more. It is titled High-resolution inference of genetic relationships among Jewish populations - PMC

I personally think that some minority of people (mostly Jews probably) think that because a great number of Jews lived in Palestine during a way earlier time period (as has other dominant social kinship groups at other and sometimes in the same concurrent times … and with Palestinians having Jews as ancestors and Jews pretty much genetically much indistinguishable from each other) that somehow it should be currently Israel owned. Simultaneously, they want their close genetic Palestinian sisters and brothers to be forced to leave.

By token of that sort of unsubstantial argument (since the genetic sameness strongly exists) to provide justification for the act of mandatory removal of those whose ancestors were early settlers, many countries could be stuck in a huge human removal process, including the USA, Canada and much of the rest of the Americas since the Native Americans lived here for millennia way before the largely brutal invaders took over most of the land, waterways and resources, while also directly and indirectly killing off millions of natives that preceded them. In fact, it was approximately 56 million Native Americans who prematurely died with around 6 million survivors.

In fact, the decimation was so large that it altered the global climate as is discussed herein 'Great Dying' in Americas disturbed Earth's climate

In the end, we can’t have it both ways and be “right” in our choice about whose land, water, other resources and more each parcel is. In fact at some point, natives had an encampment on my property since when the basement dirt floor was prepped for concrete, lots of mussel shells, animal bones that looked as if they had been cooked on a fire, arrow heads and more artifacts were found … Does this being the case, then, give the Nipmuc natives, who largely live not far from me on a relatively small reservation, a right to my home and property? (I supposedly likely have one native ancestor long ago, but that person is from a Pennsylvania tribe. So I have no native claim to my property.)

Similarly: Now do families of converted European Jews with no Jewish genes base — like the blondes that looked close to Hitler’s imaginary Aryan ideal, who were from Holland and who were rounded up by Nazis and sent to interment camps, and not spared — somehow deserve Palestinian land rather than Palestinians with their clearer Jewish ancestry with a history of living there for thousands of years? How about someone who is only half or less Jewish by genetics? Maybe recent converts to Judaism? Maybe they deserve the land instead.

Maybe the branch of Orthodox Jews living across the world, who are protesting with Palestinians against the genocidal Israeli government, could be induced to steal Palestine. -Naw, I doubt it!

Meanwhile and back to the land on which I dwell:

The Nipmuc, whose name means “freshwater fishing place”, are Native Americans whose abundant ancestors lived amply throughout New England and were named the “fresh water people” after the fact that they lived close to fresh water sources. There they hunted, fished and cultivated crops such as beans, corn and squash.

In fact, I live within walking distance of three bodies of (currently polluted) water. So surely all of the Native items found in my basement pretty well indicates that there, indeed, was a Nipmuc encampment on the land where my home was built in the 1800’s. So am I obligated to hand my property back to that tribe of whom many members are financially poor and who live on a small reservation in my town, as well as elsewhere in New England and Canada? In addition, New England governments have for many years been in dispute with the tribe over several parcels of land as the tribe at odds with the government decisions about whose land it is.

So in the final reckoning, an impartial court of law must, I would think, have to decide about whom owns what land instead any country with disputes and if anyone is kicked off land such as Palistinians or me, they or I would need compensation, I would think.

Yet certainly if your ancestors owned the land as in the case of the Palestinians whose forebears were Jews, it would seem that they shouldn’t be deliberately murdered, rounded up, starved and in other ways removed from that which IS rightfully theirs.

In a partial (partial because the subject is so big) type of summary of sorts, Michael Korn wrote to a friend of his and me this comment: “According to Israeli researcher Tsvi Misinai 80% of Palestinians are descended from the ancient Judeans at the time of Christ: https://www.youtube.com/live/8DANY4XIdSU?si=yJKvhjALMvXDzfwr

“According to Ron Unz most of the Jews in the Roman Empire were Carthaginian or Phoenician converts. Meaning that today's Jews share genetic identity with the Lebanese and other Mediterranean Arabs: https://www.unz.com/article/religious-implications-of-the-carthaginian-theory/ | https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-true-origin-of-the-jews-as-khazars-israelites-or-canaanites/“

Sally Dugman lives in and writes from Massachusetts, USA in a town incorporated in 1735 whose beginnings were well established before that point. Further, she has no idea as to whether the retired sea captain, who built her house in the mid-1800’s, paid the Natives or the town for the property, nor whether the town paid the natives for the land of her neighborhood.

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How Can Anyone Tell Palestinians and Jews Apart and Who Should Own Palestine?
https://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2025/05/20/how-can-anyone-tell-palestinians