I suppose if not 100% arabs then mixture of arabs and hebrews.
wikipedia, Palestinian people/Politicized lineages:
Salim Tamari notes the paradoxes produced by the search for "nativist" roots among Zionist figures and the so-called
Canaanite (
anti-Zionist) followers of
Yonatan Ratosh. For example,
Ber Borochov, one of the key ideological architects of Socialist Zionism, claimed as early as 1905 that, "The
Fellahin in
Eretz-Israel are the descendants of remnants of the Hebrew agricultural community," believing them to be descendants of the ancient Hebrew and Canaanite residents 'together with a small admixture of Arab blood'". He further believed that the Palestinian peasantry would embrace Zionism and that the lack of a crystallized national consciousness among Palestinian Arabs would result in their likely assimilation into the new Hebrew nationalism. Other founding fathers of Zionism believed that the Palestinian people were descended from the biblical ancient Hebrews.
David Ben-Gurion and
Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later becoming Israel's first Prime Minister and second President, respectively, tried to establish in a 1918 paper written in
Yiddish that Palestinian peasants and their mode of life were living historical testimonies to
Israelite practices in the biblical period. Tamari notes that "the ideological implications of this claim became very problematic and were soon withdrawn from circulation."
Ahad Ha'am believed that, "the Moslems [of Palestine] are the ancient residents of the land ... who became Christians on the rise of Christianity and became Moslems on the arrival of Islam."
Israel Belkind, the founder of the
Bilu movement also asserted that the Palestinian Arabs were the blood brothers of the Jews. In his book on the Palestinians, "The Arabs in Eretz-Israel", Belkind advanced the idea that the complete
dispersion of Jews out of the Land of Israel after the destruction of the
Second Temple by the
Roman emperor
Titus is a "historic error" that must be corrected. While it dispersed much of the land's Jewish community around the world, those "workers of the land that remained attached to their land," stayed behind and were eventually converted to Christianity and then Islam. He therefore, proposed that this historical wrong be corrected, by embracing the Palestinians as their own and proposed the opening of Hebrew schools for Palestinian
Arab Muslims to teach them Arabic, Hebrew and universal culture.
Tsvi Misinai, an Israeli researcher, entrepreneur and proponent of a
controversial alternative solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, asserts that nearly 90% of all Palestinians living within Israel and the
occupied territories (including the Israeli Arabs and Negev Bedouin) are descended from the Jewish Israelite peasantry that remained on the land, after the others, mostly city dwellers, were exiled or left.
Claims emanating from certain circles within Palestinian society and their supporters, proposing that Palestinians have direct ancestral connections to the ancient
Canaanites, without an intermediate Israelite link, has been an issue of contention within the context of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In discussing the root of the controversy to the claim of Canaanite lineage, many renowned scholars have hypothesised on the nature of the controversy itself, although not deliberating on the veracity of the claims, as this is a question that shall ultimately be resolved by geneticists, not by scholars in their capacity as historians.
Bernard Lewis explains that "the rewriting of the past is usually undertaken to achieve specific political aims...In bypassing the biblical Israelites and claiming kinship with the Canaanites, the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Palestine, it is possible to assert a historical claim antedating the biblical promise and possession put forward by the Jews."
Some Palestinian scholars, like Zakariyya Muhammad, have criticized pro-Palestinian arguments based on Canaanite lineage, or what he calls "Canaanite ideology". He states that it is an "intellectual fad, divorced from the concerns of ordinary people." By assigning its pursuit to the desire to predate Jewish national claims, he describes
Canaanism as a "losing ideology", whether or not it is factual, "when used to manage our conflict with the Zionist movement" since
Canaanism "concedes
a priori the central thesis of Zionism. Namely that we have been engaged in a perennial conflict with Zionismand hence with the Jewish presence in Palestinesince the Kingdom of
Solomon and before ... thus in one stroke Canaanism cancels the assumption that Zionism is a European movement, propelled by modern European contingencies..."
